Joseph Simonson of the Washington Free Beacon reports on one significant challenge for volunteers supporting Kamala Harris’ presidential bid.
What should volunteers for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign tell voters about her policy positions? It’s hard to say.
Over the course of the Democratic National Convention, Harris’s staff held several messaging sessions for supporters of her presidential run. There, attendees were given a crash course on how to convince their friends and family to vote for Harris this November.But several of them left those sessions, which the Washington Free Beacon attended, a bit befuddled. There was no clear policy outline for campaign volunteers to bring home, nor would any staff members commit to a position on a variety of contentious issues.
The meetings provided a glimpse into how Harris’s staff seek to position their candidate for November, although the risks were glaring. With newly energized Democratic voters excited to spread the good word about her campaign, many were not sure how they should counter former president Donald Trump’s protectionist pitch for the Rust Belt.
When asked by the Free Beacon, for example, about how voters should square the Harris campaign’s repeated criticism, and sometimes mockery, of Trump’s tariff proposals when the White House has made many of its predecessor’s tariffs permanent, deputy communications director Brooke Goren said, “I’m not going to get into proposals about what the vice president might roll out in the future.”
“There’s a difference between targeted trade proposals that they believe are smart and targeted,” she said.
One attendee—who declined to be named, but was interested in volunteering for Harris in his home state of Wisconsin—told Harris’s deputy communications director that he had received “no literature” to distribute to curious voters at a Harris field office. How, that person asked, can they tell people to vote for Harris when the campaign is so light on policy details?
