The Punditry and the Policy Detail Fetish
The narrative around Harris not fleshing out her policy plans reflects a poor understanding of how policy in made.
A few weeks after Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president, a narrative emerged, seemingly driven by a media committed to worshipping at the altar of false equivalencies, that Harris had not sufficiently explained the details of her policy proposals. Demanding that candidates for president have detailed policy plans is one of those things that reveals the yawning gap between the punditry and the voters
Perhaps pundits believe it makes them seem smarter or more earnest when they demand policy specifics from candidates, but the reality is this has never been how the policy making process works. Any policy passed by a president is a compromise between what the president wants and what they can get congress to agree to. Therefore, real skill involved in passing meaningful policy is not crafting detailed plans during the campaign, but the ability to work with Congress once in office-and these are two very different skill sets.
Accordingly Kamala Harris, Donald Trump or any other presidential candidate’s detailed policy plans matter a lot less than their big picture views, legislative skills and, yes, the vibes voters get from them.
More troublingly, this narrative about Harris not having sufficiently fleshed out policy plans has given a permission structure for people to withhold support for Harris, in many cases for reasons that have very little to do with policy. At this point, any voter who is paying attention should have a pretty good sense of what Harris wants to do on a range of issues, certainly compared to Trump whose to any policy question is to rant about tariffs and immigrants.
Similarly, any voter who does not know that Harris was a district attorney, Attorney General and then a US senator before becoing vice president, and that she comes out of the center of the Democratic Party despite being a woman of color from the Bay Area has chosen not to know those things.
Unfortunately, the truth remains that there is a segment of the electorate that simply is not comfortable voting for woman of color for president, but in most circles, it is far more acceptable to say that you don’t support a candidate because of her lack of policy specifics, or because you don’t know enough about her, than because of race or gender.
There is also another misconception at the heart of this critique of Harris for lacking policy specifics that suggests that undecided voters simply need to hear more about Harris.
Most recent polls show that about 10 to 15% of the electorate is undecided. These undecided voters fall into one of four categories. A small fraction simply don’t want to tell pollsters who they are supporting. Another group may have conflicting positions on the issues, for example a voter who is strongly pro-choice but also strongly pro-gun may be legitimately torn between the two candidates. A far larger group simply aren’t going to vote, but don’t want to reveal that. The last group are the genuinely undecided, but despite what the media would like to tell you, these are not people who are deeply looking at the issues and have made up their mind.
In fact, the truly undecided voters are mostly the least engaged voters, who are paying very little attention to politics and are most definitely not the kinds of people likely to study competing policy proposals.
It is often suggested, frequently with a disdainful tone, that voters vote on vibes or feelings. Punditry notwithstanding, this is indeed the right criteria for voting in a presidential election. It is important to have an overall sense of where the candidate stands on the major issues, a threshold that both Harris and Trump have clearly met. However, getting a sense of who the candidate is and learning about their character and judgment is essential because ultimately the presidency is a job that requires both proactive and reactive thinking and policy making.
Donald Trump’s presidency was defined by Covid, Biden’s by wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and George W. Bush’s by the attacks September 11th, 2001. None of these issues that were discussed in the campaigns because they didn’t seem likely to occur. However, anybody paying attention to both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump could have surmised that Clinton was more capable than Trump of heeding scientific advice and using sound judgment in the face of a public health crisis. Similarly, it didn't require tremendous policy study to realize in 2020 that Biden would be much more likely than Trump to stand up to Russian aggression.
There is no way of knowing for certain what events will define the next presidency. Climate change, a global economic downturn, domestic instability, another war or the expansion of the current ones are just some of the crises the next president may face.
No well-crafted policy can fully prepare a president for any of those things, so rather than fetishize policy details there is another question the media might raise, or that voters might ask themselves-who seems best suited to respond to an unknown problem or crisis. Another way to think about that is that when that crisis occurs, is the country better served by a smart, measured, experienced and serious woman, or a petulant, unstable man-child who sees the world through the lens of mostly imaginary personal grievances.