Watch Your Tone!

The Harris campaign is pitching liberal family policies in conservative terms. Will it work? Long term?

I’m sorry for describing a meme, but I’m going to do that now.

Last month, Bloomberg journalist Joe Weisenthal tweeted a remix of the “hello, human resources?!” image macro, which is used to illustrate two very similar messages receiving starkly different reactions, based on the person delivering the message. In one panel, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren gets an appreciative response by suggesting tax credits for families. In the other panel, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance elicits alarm by suggesting that childless people should pay more taxes. Look, I’m just going to post the meme, one sec:

It’s a good commentary on Vance’s ability to make reasonably popular sentiments sound like the ramblings of an incel forum. Tone matters, especially when Vance tries courting liberals with more conventionally Democratic policies like child tax credits (he suggested a $5,000 credit earlier this month, but has also suggested that childless people shouldn’t hold office). Strategically, Vance is probably correct to hitch his wagon to proposals like child tax credits, which poll very well across party lines. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris is waging a corresponding campaign to sell similar legislation (including a newly proposed $6,000 tax credit for families with newborns) to voters who might otherwise regard her as too liberal.

While Vance sometimes dresses up his right-wing populism with left-sounding terms, Harris and running mate Tim Walz have spent recent weeks rebranding liberal policies with traditionally conservative language. That’s especially true when the Harris campaign talks about family. When Harris unveiled a series of populist economic proposals on Friday, she described them not as combatting income inequality or leveling the economic playing field, but as giving Americans “an opportunity to build wealth for themselves and their children.”

The question is whether this rhetorical reframing works—and whether it risks ceding argumentative ground in races to come.

In Vox this week, writer Eric Levitz highlights Harris’s careful wording.

“[S]he has made the case for liberal issue positions in philosophically conservative terms — framing her social policies as attempts to safeguard individual freedom from government overreach and her fiscal agenda as, among other things, a plan for helping strivers ‘build intergenerational wealth,’” Levitz writes.

This tactic is not limited to Harris, or even her campaign’s economic platform. Walz has achieved some of his most viral sound bites by defending reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ children with language that one might expect from a get-off-my-lawn libertarian. “Mind your own damn business” is a headtrip of a Democratic slogan, but it’s been one of Walz’s most consistent applause lines on the campaign trail. (The New York Times also pointed to the tonal shift last week, writing that “Democrats are making an aggressive new effort to challenge Republican claims to the language and symbolism of liberty.”)

Democrats have reason to believe this approach might win over center-right voters. As Levitz notes, a 2019 Stanford University study found conservatives to be more accepting of progressive policies if framed in the language of “concerns like patriotism, family, and respect for tradition—as opposed to more liberal value concerns like equality and social justice.”

The Stanford researchers found conservatives to be highly reactive to this superficial reframing—liberals, not so much.

“Among conservative participants, a conservative value framing – as opposed to a liberal value framing – resulted in a 13-point increase in candidate support on a 100-point scale in the first experiment and a 10-point increase in the second. Among moderate participants, the conservative value framing resulted in a 5-point increase in candidate support on a scale from zero to 100 in the first study, and a 4-point increase in the second experiment,” the researchers found.

“There was no significant backlash among liberal participants when a progressive candidate framed their policies conservatively compared with when the policies were framed liberally.”

And okay, lol, sure! Someone please revive the Medicare for All campaign; I think we can make headway by renaming it the “Founding Fathers’ Freedom Eagle Traditionally Healthy Act.” Though I think the left should push Harris on specific policies on the campaign trail (her so-far insufficient stance on a Gaza ceasefire, for example), I’m broadly of a “fuck it, do what works” mindset when it comes to Harris pulling off an unprecedented blitz of a campaign.

But this tactic comes with obvious hazards. Adopting conservative framing, even for liberal proposals, can risk ceding arguments to the right, either in this election or in the future. To take an unlikely hypothetical, if Harris was to propose $10,000-per-child tax credits, explicitly so that mothers could focus on stay-at-home parenting, I would appreciate the cash but argue vehemently against a framework that encouraged women to leave the workforce.

Conservative messaging also risks selling short the people who are routinely demonized on the right. “Mind your own damn business” is an effective refrain against zealots who want to police which books children can check out from the library, but it’s less scalable to instances that require government action, like passing anti-discrimination laws or requiring doctors to provide emergency abortions. 

With some center-left figures already dismissing issues like LGBTQ+ rights as boutique grievances that supposedly distract from populist economic fights, a victorious Harris/Walz campaign would do well to recalibrate its message after Election Day, not let performative populism guide its policy. 

Because the reality is that a $6,000 tax credit isn’t really an adequately liberal proposal at all. It’s a modest measure, the best proposal on offer in this race, but still one acceptable to conservatives like Vance. Democrats are already, out of necessity, playing by some of the right’s rules. They’re just lucky Vance and Trump sound so damn weird.