Kamala Harris can beat Donald Trump. But how would she govern?

A few weeks ago the Democratic convention looked as if it would be a wake. Instead it has been a love-in. Delegates’ ebullience has been spiced with relief that their nominee has saved the party from almost-certain defeat.

Kamala Harris has accomplished this less because of who she is than who she is not. For a start she is not Joe Biden, who showed in a valedictory speech in Chicago that age has turned him into a scold. And neither is she Donald Trump. Now that President Biden is out of the race, the Republican nominee is the old man on the ballot, and he drives voters away with his petty insults and his dark obsessions.

However, Ms Harris needs more. Our forecast model has the race tied. In a bid to make her someone people actually want to vote for, the convention was all about her character and her life-story. Americans now know she worked at McDonald’s and that every year she teases her husband by playing the rambling voicemail he left asking her for a first date.

Unfortunately, how that would translate into a Harris presidency remains disconcertingly vague. She has reasons for building her campaign around personality: policy can be a liability, Mr Trump is no wonk and, with him as an opponent, character matters. Yet, worryingly, her tactics may also signal something more fundamental.

Politically, Ms Harris is still an unknown quantity—and she is partly responsible for keeping it that way. In the Biden administration she was overshadowed, as vice-presidents usually are. She became the nominee without being tested in a primary. Since Mr Biden’s withdrawal, she has not given interviews and she has taken few questions from reporters. Her policy platform was mostly inherited from her boss, and it is even sparser than Mr Trump’s. When she takes positions—such as vowing to deal with corporate price-gouging—they may not be expressions of her political beliefs so much as campaign manoeuvres designed to placate voters worried about the cost of living.

Our briefing this week sets out to make sense of all this—and Ms Harris’s record in the Senate and as a politician in California. She is not one of those whose career reveals a set of deep convictions or an inner core of beliefs. Instead, like Mr Biden, she positions herself slightly to the left of centre of her party and adjusts as it evolves. Worse than him, her policies on the economy and in foreign affairs seem to be unanchored.

Pragmatism has its virtues in a politician. Mr Trump may call Ms Harris a communist, but she is no ideologue. Her positions as a primary candidate in 2019 included single-payer health care, outlawing fracking and decriminalising crossing the border illegally. Yet the way Ms Harris has abandoned all that in 2024 suggests it was never serious. Her recent anti-price-gouging proposal would be hard to enact. She is probably not about to launch a crusade against corporate America. Pragmatism also means that Ms Harris is open to other people’s ideas. There is every reason to think that in foreign policy and the environment she will set out to create continuity.

But when pragmatism signals a lack of thought-through principles, it can spell danger. Every day the president has to handle politically charged problems that have no simple solution. In this Ms Harris’s weakness for bad ideas and political gimmicks threatens to be a liability. The claim of price-gouging is simply not supported by the evidence, but it nonetheless erodes the faith in open markets that makes America prosperous. Promising $25,000 grants is supposed to help first-time homebuyers afford a property. Yet unless she also succeeds in her plan to increase the supply of housing—a tall order—subsidies will raise house prices instead. Her proposals to increase child tax credits, to $6,000 during the first year from $2,000 now, would indeed reduce child poverty. But when America’s budget deficit is 7% of gdp, her failure to finance it through taxes would be rash and inflationary (we would choose it only as an alternative to Mr Trump’s even wilder profligacy).

Likewise, without strong fundamental beliefs and a set of guiding priorities, a president can easily be blown off-course by events. When presidents are reactive or indecisive, they may be challenged abroad. If Ms Harris struggles to knit together her biography, her principles and her policies, she will also struggle in a president’s crucial role: explaining to the nation how it should meet adversity.

It may seem unfair to criticise Ms Harris for being sparing about her policies. Her overriding task is to defeat Mr Trump, and it is a vital one in which guile and cunning are permitted. For good or ill, political campaigning is often about finding wedge issues to stir up your base. If wonkery and reams of policy papers were the secret to electoral success, Hillary Clinton would not have lost in 2016.

But there are reasons to press Ms Harris for more. One is that to do so could soon be in her political interest. Should personality lose its power to propel her campaign forward, policy could be one way to revive it. Imagine if her whole platform were like her position on women’s reproductive rights, where her policy is clearly derived from principles drawn out of her own experience. When, in the debate due on September 10th, Mr Trump attacks her for being too weak to stand up to Russia and China, or too much of a radical socialist to deal with immigration or create a healthy economy, she will need more than platitudes to rebut him. If it is the first time she tries to unspool a single thread running through her life, her principles and her policies, she is unlikely to do her best.

The other, more important reason to press Ms Harris is that being a politician is about more than campaigning. Governing matters, too. And, for a party that wants to strengthen democracy, governing is better if its winning mandate contains a programme. You can be desperate for Ms Harris to defeat Mr Trump and still wonder how good she will be in office. As the vice-president in a one-term administration, she might be tempted to govern with victory in 2028 as a focus. Unless she is clearer about what she wants to do with power, her term will be dominated by campaigning—with all its vices.