Messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio on five dos (and don’ts) for the Harris-Walz campaign’s critical final sprint
By Anat Shenker-Osorio | The Ink
Kamala Harris’s candidacy reinvigorated not just the Democratic Party, but the hopes of every American concerned about the future of democracy. The vibes were undeniable, from the early phase of the campaign through the nomination of Tim Walz, and on up to Harris’s command performance at the debate in September.
But since then a lot of the joy of the Harris-Walz campaign has evaporated as Trump and his team regained their grip on the national political conversation. And with less than two weeks remaining, Harris needs to take hold of that conversation again. That will take big, bold moves, unburdened by what’s come before. Time is short, but there is time to change, and if anyone can do it, Kamala Harris can.
What follows are a few of our go-to messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio’s hopes for how Harris can still change the game in the closing days of the campaign, recapture the imaginations of voters still unsure as to why their votes matter, and help save democracy.
Do: Run like you’re leading the winning team
Turning out the vote is all about social proof, Anat says. Winning means getting voters to see that they’re part of the team too.
The campaign can’t just be saying, “Harris is going to win,” as if the win fairy was going to come down from the heavens and bestow wins upon her because that is not how it works.
What we need to be saying — as individuals who care about the future of this country — is that voters are turning out in record numbers to swear in Kamala Harris. Notice, what did I say? I didn’t say, “Harris is going to win.” I didn’t say “Elect Kamala Harris.” I said, “Voters are turning out in record numbers to swear in Kamala Harris.”
So why do we say it that way? We say it that way because it creates social proof. People do the thing they think people like them do. People want to be on the winning team, be part of those record numbers, not on the losing team. We say “swear in” and not “elect” because we gotta get this ball all the way down the field. And we already know that that is not just a matter of what happens on November 5th or the week of counting. It is what happens through certification, through January 6th, and all of the rest of it.
Don’t: Act like underdogs
While Donald Trump has been running as if he’s already won, too often Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have positioned themselves as underdogs. This just lets Trump build his claim to contest the results should he lose. That, Anat tells us, has to stop.
Right now, the Harris-Walz campaign self-identifies as underdogs. And Trump and Team MAGA talk about themselves as the winning team. They’re winning, and they’re going to win, and you know the biggest crowds ever, everybody loves him, and — you know, had the election been properly administered and counted, he actually won California in 2020, according to him.
That narrative — that we’re the underdogs — is the first thing that has to change. Trump is doing this because he has to cement the idea that he is winning. It is from that basis that he will claim that any results to the contrary are suspicious.
Do: Call out what you’re against
Harris told the rally crowd in Clarkston, Georgia to “imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” and the campaign has been honing its message about the fascist threat MAGA poses. But the campaign can do more, Anat says, to show how that threat stands in the way of the future they are fighting for:
What Harris could do is take all of these attacks against her and use them as proof that MAGA are fascists, that they intend a fascist agenda because they are pursuing a fascist strategy right now. She can say, “Hey, you know how I’ve been warning you? You know how Trump’s very own generals and his staff, his ex-staff, have been warning you that what’s to come is what they say is to come in their Project 2025 agenda.”
We have recent testing that we talked about in a Rolling Stone piece, that shows that after respondents watch what we call the “turducken of hate” ad — this is about the immigrant prisoners using tax dollars to get gender-affirming treatment accusations — it’s very efficient. It knocks down every single talking point.
The response is to say, “No matter our colors, our origins, our genders, most of us want to shine bright and be able to be our authentic selves. But these MAGA Republicans, same as it ever was, they’re a bunch of bullies. They want to send us into the shadows. They want to take away our freedoms. They want to control our families, and they want to decide our futures for us. They want to pass off the wealth our work creates to hand it to their billionaire buddies and tell us what we can do, who we can love, what we can wear.
We say no. We call BS on them. We’re choosing each other. We know that this is what fascists do. They try to turn us against each other and have us pointing our fingers in the wrong direction.”
Don’t: Feed what you’re fighting
Democrats might be trying to meet voters where they think they are, but letting Republicans set the agenda in framing America’s problems, Anat tells us, is a mistake right from the start.
To motivate, mobilize, and ensure the participation of the 2020 electorate plus new people who’ve aged in or naturalized into voting this year, the Democrats have to get them to recognize that the danger comes from MAGA and not from migrants. From Trump, and not from trans people. From fascism, and not from feminism.
Because their whole story is, “Hey, you think your life is bad. Hey, you think things are hard. Hey, you feel confused. Hey, you feel resentful. Hey, you feel like you don’t even know how you’re supposed to wander through the world and where you belong. You know why? It’s because of those people. And you know what else? We’re going to protect you from those people. And those terrible Democrats are going to aid, abet, enable those people, that other they’re going to make it possible for them to keep doing all this terrible stuff to you, real American.”
As soon as Democrats and this happens all of the time go partly in on those attacks and say, “Yeah, no, it is actually true. We do have a migrant problem. Oh, no, it is actually true. Trans people are kind of threatening. Oh, it is actually true. Crime is an issue, and here’s what we’re going to do about it. I’m going to be President Glock,” then you’re feeding the right-wing story.
You have to run against your opposition and not against the people that your opposition reviles.
Do: Tell the bigger story on gender
To really get at what gender issues mean to voters, Anat says, we need to ask what Republicans hope to gain by attacking transgender Americans — to the tune of $60 million in spending.
Republicans know women are pissed. They’re all kinds of pissed about abortion. They’re all kinds of pissed about childless cat ladies. They’re all kinds of pissed about all sorts of things that Trump and Vance seem congenitally incapable of not doing, like saying deeply misogynistic things any time their vocal folds rub together. So why are they going with the anti-trans thing right now when, you know, 1% of the population is transgender? Why is this really even a thing?
This is clearly their attempt to own a thing that backs up their claim that, “We’re going to protect women.”
So we say, “Look, no matter what you look like, what’s in your wallet, or what your gender is, I think most of us want pretty similar things. We want to hang out with our friends when we have a minute. We want to earn a good living and have a nice life. We want to be there for our families.
But today, there’s a handful of people, of MAGA Republicans, who are hell-bent on stoking our anger, on making us feel resentful and alienated because they know that if they can get us pointing at women or at newcomers or at people who don’t look like us or live like us or love like us, then they can keep picking their pockets with the other hand.
But you know what? We are here for our families. We are here for ourselves. We are here to create a better future. And we know that a better future requires knowing exactly who stands to harm us and the people we love and who is nothing but a distraction or used in order to distract us.
What I have seen Anand say about how strong men, good men, righteous men, upright men, real men oppose fascism — that’s what we do. It’s the same thing we need to do when we talk to white people about race and multiracial democracy. Really all there is to do is to tell people the truth.
Don’t: Accept received wisdom on male voters
Commentators are obsessed with a gender gap in voting, they make a lot of Trump’s polling ahead with male voters — but they ignore Harris’s lead among women, who are more likely to vote. Anat thinks they’re asking the wrong question.
I think I had five different reporters call me this week for a quote on a story about the gender gap — their question was always a variation on, “Democrats have a problem with men, talk to me about the gender gap.”
And I said, “Well, let me first ask you about the framing of your question because actually, Republicans are more underwater with women than Democrats are with men. As a whole, women vote more than men. So they’re farther underwater among a larger group of people than Democrats with a smaller group of people, So can you explain to me why this gender gap problem, according to you, is in one direction?”
It’s infuriating because in reality, even though men are paid more than women, a vote is still a vote. You don’t get extra points because the person used to vote Republican, because he’s a white dude, because he’s not in college, because he ate at a diner before he went to the ballot. No extra points. A vote is a vote.
People are extraordinarily susceptible to trying to figure out what their category is meant to believe and meant to do and act like. And so it just becomes a form of self-fulfilling prophecy where we are telling young men that this is what young men believe and do, which makes more young men believe and do it.
Do: Sell the brownie, not the recipe
All summer, the press demanded policy specifics from Harris. And she’s talked a lot about policy since — including a proposal to have Medicare cover long-term care that is truly transformative but hasn’t captured the attention it could. Anat suggests Harris show, not tell:
She could do a press conference from a long-term care facility. During the ACA fight under Trump, when the Republicans were desperate to repeal it, people literally put their bodies on the line. People in really, really challenging health situations, disabled folks came into congressional halls. It was news.
And I think that appearing with people who are struggling with long-term illnesses, with you know significant physical disabilities, with older Americans, and appearing alongside them instead of Liz Cheney — she could do that and say, “When I tell you who I’m for, this is what I mean. When I tell you what I plan, this is what I mean. This is the place. This is the time.”
That would viscerally show — not tell — what the policy is because you have to make people feel that they’re in the lived experience of the policy instead of just the description, right? The way I talk about this is to sell the brownie, not the recipe. Talk about how that would actually manifest in people’s lives — don’t just talk about being able to negotiate prescription drug prices according to Medicare.
Don’t: Forget the job of campaigning
Harris took hold of the national conversation when she took over the Democratic candidacy, and did it again when Tim Walz joined the ticket. But over the last month, the Trump campaign has again dominated the conversation as the Harris campaign has courted swing voters.
The fundamental problem is that the Venn diagram of people for whom a Liz Cheney endorsement is a motivator and people who have already repudiated, hate, dislike Trump and are voting for Harris anyway, I’m going to argue, is a perfect circle. Last time I looked, Cheney’s approval rating among Republicans was like 12%.
What people seem not to have internalized is that median voter theory, which is what all of this swing stuff is built out of, is a very old political science idea, and rests on the notion of the electorate as a fixed group of people. And so someone presumably occupies the ideological center of it.
But what’s preposterous about that is that the composition of the electorate changes in every election. And it is the job of the campaign to change that composition by increasing the number of voters who have never voted before, whether they’ve just aged into the electorate, never voted before because they just became naturalized, never voted before because they didn’t feel like it, or are very unreliable voters.
And that is where the payoff is, is the reason why Biden won, is the reason why in the places we staved off the red wave, why there was what my colleague Michael Podhorzer called a “blue undertow.” It’s because of those “surge voters.” And there are just so many more surge voters than there are swing voters.
Do: Be the change candidate again
As Anat tells us, “If you want to be on the news, you have to make news.” To do that, Harris needs to surprise voters — to make it clear she’s the candidate fighting for democracy, for the freedoms of all Americans.
What Harris could do is give a very special address in the way that I think many of us remember Obama giving that very special speech on race when all of the allegations around his pastor were swirling. It’s time for a reckoning speech. She doesn’t have to abandon everything she’s been saying, but she changes it up considerably,
“Look, this is what’s happening. This is the reality. And this is what’s before us. We face a fork in the road between two vastly different futures, a future in which we protect our freedoms. And that’s a future in which your government has to listen to you because we are elected by you and we represent you.
And in the other future, it will be forbidden for you to dare to speak in the first place, let alone criticize. A future in which Donald Trump and MAGA will decide what happens to your body if they want to, a future in which they’ll decide which books your kids can read and what truths and lies your kids can learn, a future in which they take your Social Security to hand it over to Elon Musk and whoever else they appoint.
What you’ve been hearing over and again is them attacking people, attacking immigrants, attacking trans people. She needs to open an honest conversation with Americans that creates a clear differentiation between her and him and a clear differentiation between these two vastly different futures. She does it in an extraordinary historic place like the Mall, hearkening to the Women’s March and the March on Washington, surrounded by an unexpected group of people.
The other thing that she could do, and we actually just made an ad on this theme, is to just go for it, and say, “It’s time for a Gen X president.”
Harris is so much younger than both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and even though the number one reason and fear and concern that got us into this replacement scenario was Joe Biden’s age, somehow everyone kind of forgot that. But one of the very few things that American voters agree on in the abstract is that they want younger people in charge.
So she says, “We were born different. We’re latchkey kids. We came home and had to figure out our own fucking macaroni and cheese (not that she’s going to swear). We are the ones who made technology not suck. We are the ones who had to inherit a world full of problems and create novelty. We have been sidelined and silenced and made to wait our turn for far too long as people who are from a different age refuse to hand over the reins of power. And it’s our turn now.”
She needs to give us an October surprise. She can change up her song once and come in on “All I do is win, win, win no matter what.” Just bait Trump, as she did so beautifully in the debate.
Say people are uninterested in him. People are bored by him. He’s a loser. He’s a loser and he’s losing. He’s a fascist loser who loses and he’s losing. They keep trying to sabotage the election. They’ve lost, I don’t remember the exact number, but it’s like 200-plus lawsuits. All they do is lose, lose, lose no matter what.
Source: Five things Harris — and you — can do to close the deal
