Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t win Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada or Arizona. But her party still did: Democratic Senate candidates in each of those battlegrounds emerged victorious, even as voters rejected Harris.
Long before Election Day, the winning candidates’ messages diverged from that of the top of the ticket.
In more than a half-billion dollars in ad spending over just three months, Harris painted a picture of what she would do as president, but she spent little airtime selling what she and the Biden administration achieved. That dynamic was core to the paid media strategy of both the official Harris campaign and the main super PAC supporting her, which sought to make a subtle break with President Joe Biden and offer voters two competing economic visions for the future, between her and former President Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, the senators and senators-elect who ran ahead of her made tangible, bipartisan accomplishments on prices and other core economic issues central pieces of their campaigns, often taking the impact of the legislation out of Washington to connect it to local effects.
That avenue may not have been as readily available to Harris, largely because of the different challenge she faced taking over the top of the ticket from a politically diminished president saddled with low approval ratings, as well as the need to repair her relatively low favorability ratings.
But the fact remains: The messages and the results split. The battleground senators won in part with heavy emphases on their legislative achievements in their television advertising, while Harris lost while she focused largely on promises for the future instead of a full-throated defense of the current administration.
“What people expect from a president and what people expect from a senator are fundamentally different, even if they’re low-information, low-interest voters,” said a Democratic strategist who worked on a battleground Senate race, who was granted anonymity to speak freely about the messaging strategies in key races.
“We always knew as an incumbent Senate race that the Republicans were going to run on change and ‘you haven’t done anything.’ And if we come right out of the gate and say: ‘We work and we deliver,’ [voters] don’t expect senators to change the world, they expect them to show up, have their interests at heart and get tangible stuff done,” the source said.
Those tangible achievements were a significant share of the paid messaging of Democratic senators who won battleground states where Harris lost. The Senate campaigns used legislation they supported to defend against criticism on issues like immigration or China and go on the attack on issues like health care.
In Michigan, more than a third of Democratic Sen.-elect Elissa Slotkin’s TV ads mentioned specific pieces of legislation she backed in the House or helped get signed into law. One of
her most-run ads
said she had “introduced more border security legislation than any congressman from Michigan.”
A health care ad touted
that Slotkin “wrote a law signed by President Trump forcing drug companies to show their actual prices,” while another featured Slotkin saying she has “written bills blocking the Chinese government from buying Michigan farmland.”
In an early spot, Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., cited her work on legislation on health care and to “protect Nevada veterans exposed to toxic burn pits.” Listing different bills she helped get signed into law was
a fixture of Rosen’s early advertising
, including
a heavy emphasis
on legislation to cap the cost of insulin for people on Medicare and to allow Medicare to negotiate lower prices on certain medicines.
Similar themes ran through the ads of Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., too. In one spot, she
spoke directly to the camera to say
she “wrote a law to require American infrastructure projects use American iron and steel,” before a factory worker chimed in that Trump signed it. In another, a woman whose son died because of fentanyl said Baldwin has “
been with us every step of the way
” and got a “major bill passed to really crack down on fentanyl.”
In Arizona, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego’s television messaging leaned heavily on his biography, similar to Slotkin, as he successfully sought a promotion to the Senate. But while his ads included less about his accomplishments in the House, a handful of them said he “delivered critical funding for our law enforcement community” amid the push to shore up border security, as well as the Medicare insulin cap.
It’s an approach not dissimilar from that of some of the Democrats’ biggest 2022 successes, as when Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona
highlighted his work
“delivering critical infrastructure upgrades for Arizona,” like money to widen Interstate 10, or when Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada pointed to legislation
providing relief for hospitality workers
.
A different tack at the presidential level
Harris’ television advertising was far more focused on her promises for the future, while her biography leaned heavily on her past in California politics instead of in Washington.
Future Forward, the flagship pro-Harris super PAC, put more than $200 million behind ads that highlighted “competing economic visions for the future,” according to a source familiar with the secretive group’s thinking, who said the group chose to steer away from “re-litigating the past or the present.”
That approach took root against the backdrop of an unprecedented, shortened campaign, clear polling showing Americans souring on the Biden administration and the need to re-introduce Harris to voters in a different way from how she presented herself when she was moving to the left during the Democratic presidential primaries in 2019.
That dynamic made championing the White House’s achievements more challenging, especially compared with the task of senators who had the space to tell their full stories to voters over a two-year campaign while having the space to try to define their opponents early.
Instead, Harris’ late entry into the race triggered
a massive effort to define her
. The only tangible Biden administration accomplishment regularly featured in Harris’ ads was the insulin price cap for Medicare. Instead, her positive spots leaned heavily on the future tense, not a discussion about what the administration was doing in the present to help voters. (One of Harris’ major negative attacks was similar to the Senate candidates’ strategy: using her opponent’s own words on abortion to accuse him of supporting restrictions if he were elected.)
“This election is a choice between two very different visions for America. I will take on price gouging to bring down grocery prices. I will lower the cost of health care insurance,” Harris
said in one of her closing ads
. “I will cut taxes for the middle class. … You may not always agree with me, but I promise I will do everything I can to lift up the middle class and be a president for all Americans.”
Another used video from a Harris rally to
highlight tackling costs as a top priority
. But while she pointed to the pain being felt in the present tense, her solutions were set in the future.
“Every day across our nation, families talk about their plans for the future, and they talk about how they’re going to achieve them financially. And prices are still too high,” she said. “When I am elected president, I will make it a top priority to bring down costs.”
And to push back against Trump’s immigration attacks, Harris’ ads leaned primarily on two points — a recitation of her record in law enforcement in California, in posts she hadn’t held in almost eight years, and her support as vice president for a border bill that collapsed.
“As a border state prosecutor, she took on drug cartels and jailed gang members for smuggling weapons and drugs across the border,”
a narrator said in one of Harris’ opening ads
.
“As vice president, she backed the toughest border control bill in decades, and as president, she will hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.”
The emphasis on the future, not the present, was a deliberate choice, Harris allies told NBC News, a perspective shared across both the campaign and outside groups.
At the moment Biden stepped aside, the team knew his
numbers on the economy and the direction of the country
were staggeringly low. That was after months of his attempts to highlight his pro-labor record or the new jobs and construction sparked by landmark legislation related to infrastructure, semiconductors and a signature spending bill.
A senior Harris campaign official said voters were signaling they wanted someone who represented change and who offered vision. Harris’ “New Way Forward” messaging emerged as she tried to position herself as a change agent while she was still serving in Biden’s administration.
The Harris campaign focused on re-introducing her to Americans as a next-generation leader, subtly separating her from Biden. That even included shooting her ads with different lenses and camera angles to play up her visual contrast with Biden, but above all it meant emphasizing her own new policy ideas, like taking on alleged corporate price gouging, rather than touting the work of the Biden-Harris administration.
With a polarized electorate cynical about any promises from politicians, the campaign focused on selling relatively small economic policies that it hoped Americans would actually believe were realistic, instead of the FDR-sized agenda Biden talked up when he entered the White House.
“We wanted things to be better for people in a way that people will actually believe,” said a source familiar with the campaign’s paid media program. “What are the things you can do to make it seem like she will make my life a little bit better on the margins?”
National Democrats believed the message was working, with multiple polls, including NBC News’ final survey, showing Harris shrinking the massive lead Trump once held over Biden on economic issues, even if she couldn’t fight the issue to a draw.
But amid the subtle attempts to distance herself from Biden by focusing on the future, not the present, Harris gave a high-profile answer in an interview with “The View” in which she said she couldn’t think of anything she would have done differently from Biden. To
some within the campaign
, the answer was a product of Harris’ being managed by principals who were still loyal to Biden.
At the end, Harris lost where the senators all won, as Trump made inroads with various groups — including
Latinos
,
men and people without college degrees
— on his way to a significant Electoral College victory. With Democrats now picking up the pieces of their party, some are pointing to downballot wins like the Senate races as evidence that many Democrats still had a winning message, even if the top of the ticket didn’t.
Pete Giangreco, a veteran Democratic strategist, maintained that once all the number crunching is through, Democrats won’t see this election as a major voter realignment. Rather, voters “voted against Biden” but still had enough reservations about Republicans not to jump on board with their Senate candidates, too.
“They are driven by the economy, and the economy doesn’t work for a lot of people. It doesn’t work for them, or they worry about what the economy is going to do for their kids,” he said. “Jacky Rosen did fine with Hispanics. Tammy Baldwin, [North Carolina Gov.-elect ] Josh Stein, Slotkin, they got where they needed to be in the Black community. This is ‘we’re unhappy with the economy.’ This wasn’t ‘I really want Donald Trump back.’”
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