The difference between Harris and Starmer

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Yes, both are 60-ish. And both were prosecutors. Both gave the impression of being leftwing or leftwing-adjacent before going on what I suppose we must call a “journey”. In these anti-elite times, both represent places with elitist connotations: California and that patch of London containing the Eurostar terminal, Google HQ and UCL. (That Britain is led by the MP for Bloomsbury, after all the pitchforks that were waved at intellectuals in the last decade, is one of our era’s best jokes.)

Given these parallels, it is natural to file Kamala Harris and Keir Starmer alongside Clinton-Blair, Reagan-Thatcher, even Kennedy-Wilson, as one of those symmetrical pairings of US and UK leaders. But she has to get elected first. That is less certain than it was two months ago. Part of the problem is that she is unlike Starmer in one important respect.

There is a difference between caution and ambiguity. There is a difference between a political platform that is insufficiently radical for some tastes and one that is hard to decipher in the first place. Starmer might underwhelm and even bore, but he tends not to confuse. This isn’t true of Harris, whose central defect is a fogginess of both content and expression. Of these problems — being too timid and being too opaque — hers is the much harder to sell to swing voters, as it asks them to take on trust an unknown quantity. And it asks them to do so over a candidate who is highly knowable on account of having served a White House term before.

Has there been a more mysterious major-party presidential candidate three weeks out from election day? Whatever we think of it, Joe Biden’s economic statism was set out well in advance. Likewise, if Donald Trump goes on a deportation and tariff spree, no one can claim to have been misled. If anything, US presidential candidates offer too much detail at the campaign stage, given that lots of it won’t survive contact with Congress. The point is to give voters a sense of their instincts: their likely gut responses to the unexpected events, such as Covid or the Ukraine war, that tend to determine a presidency.

What are Harris’s? Even in outline terms, does she stand for continuity — she’d better not, given Biden’s ratings — or change? Is that change less economically interventionist or more? Is she running on, or from, her prosecutorial record? The Republicans make much of her swings on immigration, but that isn’t the only subject on which she has taken various positions and none.

The problem isn’t just her “word salads”, which circulate to much amusement online. Lots of presidents with clear instincts struggled to articulate them, such as George W Bush or even his father. The difference in Harris’s case is that the outward garble seems to reflect a deeper vagueness. Swing voters are left to decide if she is empty — the classic “sphinx without a secret” — or a leftist who is hiding it. The former is more probable, preferable and electable, but the doubt can be fatal.

Starmer didn’t allow such doubt. Despite the widespread pretence that he was an enigma on the scale of Hamlet, he let us know who he was: a social democrat who was going to put taxes up a bit, offset the damage to incentives by deregulating in some areas, let the Brexit dog lie, talk a good game about public sector reform but not make it the central obsession that it has to be to get past Whitehall and the unions. Above all, his approach to the hard left has remained gratifyingly consistent for four years: he whacks them.

What is Harris’s approach? Is her priority to keep the Democratic coalition together, or to confront the strident fringe to shore up the undecided centre? California politics trains the first skill. National politics demands the second. Swing voters are people who by definition have no absolute objection to voting for Trump. She has to do more to cultivate them than not be him.

Granted, her fuzziness isn’t the only reason why the Democratic ticket has lost a bit of its late-summer momentum. Something structural in US politics seems to turn each presidential race into a toss-up. Tim Walz’s regular guy patter has become too studied, as though he has attended a course called How To Be a Regular Guy. The decision not to choose as running mate Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor who has high approval ratings in that swing state, is one of those obvious follies — like running Hillary Clinton in 2016, or pretending Biden had another term in him — that Democrats seem to just put up with, as if it were an act of God.

In fact, ambiguity can be an asset in a normal candidate, as it offends no one. But Harris is in an abnormal position. She is tied to an administration that is sensationally unpopular. If she doesn’t define herself, it is reasonable for voters to conflate her with a second Biden term. She still has three weeks to elucidate, if not her governing plans in detail, then her instincts and general direction. The question is how much she has ever had of either.

The laziest reflex in journalism, the ultimate in hack writing, is to describe someone as a man or woman “of contradictions”, as though anyone in the world isn’t. (Who have you ever met who is entirely of a piece? And why would you elect such a rigid character?) There was an uncountable number of such pronouncements about Starmer in opposition. Once in a while, though, it has to be said, the phrase fits a subject all too well.

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