One of the central characteristics of the 2024 presidential election is its steadiness. That’s counterintuitive, certainly; rarely has any contest seen as much tumult as we’ve seen in the past several months. Attempts on Donald Trump’s life, President Joe Biden’s withdrawal, Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascent. And the result is an election in which it’s impossible to predict who might prevail.
A central reason for this is the deep polarization in American politics, particularly around Trump himself. In 2016 and 2020, he earned a bit under 50 percent of the vote, about where he is in most recent polls. The shift from Biden to Harris helped firm up the Democratic electorate, which may be crucially important in who actually turns out to vote — but the race generally went from a narrow national Trump lead to a narrow Harris one. The 2024 race continues to be largely a referendum on Trump, much as the 2020 race was.
There has been one notable difference this year, though. While Trump’s 2016 campaign was unabashedly indifferent to policy specifics and his 2020 campaign centered on his incumbency, his 2024 effort has often — largely through the energies of his boosters — been presented as a campaign centered on the policies he seeks to implement.
It’s an unexpected argument, but a common one. You will often hear that Trump has an advantage on policy; that, if the campaign set aside all of the fluff of personal emotion, Trump would prevail simply by virtue of the popularity of his positions. That his support is rooted in what he stands for, not who he is.
This is not true.
First of all, efforts to present Trump’s campaign as centered on policy are derailed more than a little by the paucity of policy proposals he’s offered. He had something he called “Agenda 47” that was the policy arm of his primary campaign, but it was mostly videotaped riffs about whatever furies were animating the right at any given moment.
This is why the effort to tie Trump to the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” has been so successful. Here was an actual outline of policy proposals, written by people close to Trump and/or who’d served with him. Trump’s ability to dismiss the outline as nonrepresentative is weakened by the lack of a campaign counterweight. (Polling released over the weekend by NBC News shows that most Americans have heard of “Project 2025” — and don’t like it.)
What Trump supporters mean when they say that he wins in a campaign focused on policy is that they think an election centered only on specific policy issues — the economy, inflation, immigration — is one that favors Trump. It’s not that Trump has a detailed paper explaining how he plans to steward the economy; his agenda can be summarized as “lots of tariffs” and “wasn’t 2019 cool?” The argument is instead that focusing on those things positions Trump more favorably than focusing on other stuff — like abortion or the stability of American democracy.
Another factor here is that many of Trump’s allies use “policy” as a way to minimize his toxic or bizarre rhetoric. We can see that in polling conducted by YouGov for CBS News that was released over the weekend.
About 9 in 10 Americans said that the candidate’s policies were important to their vote when asked, including 84 percent of Democrats, 86 percent of independents and 89 percent of Republicans. When asked whether personal qualities were important, a bit over half said they were — with a wide partisan gap. About 7 in 10 Democrats said personal qualities were important to the their vote; only 4 in 10 Republicans did. Because, you know, Trump supporters are simply focused on policy.
That same poll also asked Americans why they thought Trump amplified false claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio. Six in 10 Americans think the desired outcome was to make immigrants feel uncomfortable, though only 3 in 10 Republicans agreed. About two-thirds think the intent was to make people fearful of immigrants, with 4 in 10 Republicans agreeing. About 6 in 10 Americans also thought the goal was to “raise awareness about larger issues of immigration” — with 9 in 10 Republicans agreeing.
It’s an elegant summary of what’s happening. Trump’s dishonest demagoguery about immigrants, aimed obviously at stoking people’s fears about immigrants coming to the United States, is polished up by Republicans until it shines with the glow of public policy. Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), didn’t talk about Springfield, Ohio, until the right-wing conversational bubble started lighting up with baseless allegations about pets. That’s when Trump and Vance saw a political opportunity. The result in Springfield was threats against community leaders and the migrants — but Trump gets a pass on that, too. Nearly 6 in 10 Republicans think the threats were probably unrelated to the claims Trump and Vance amplified.
In fairness, immigration is one place where Trump has a stated policy position: Deport people in the country illegally. But there’s no detail beyond that, even as Vance argues that “illegal” is subject to interpretation. Trump’s campaign wants people to vote on the “policy” of immigration, by which he means that he wants people to center fear of immigrants (a subset of the broader fear of change around which his politics orbit) when they’re casting a ballot.
The great irony of the YouGov question about whether “personal qualities” should drive votes is that Trump’s politics have always centered primarily around his personality. He is angry at the people his supporters dislike and pledges to lash out against them, traditions and institutional checks be damned. But most people understand that you shouldn’t say you like Trump’s toxic rhetoric and perpetual punching down. So they say they’re voting on policy … which means the mechanisms by which Trump punches down.
We cannot conclude this assessment without offering a word about the undecided voters who insist that they need to hear more about policy from the candidates before making up their minds. Maybe this is true for many of them, waiting until closer to Election Day to figure out what Donald Trump and Kamala Harris plan to do. Many of them, though — and probably most — use questions about “policy” as a fig leaf for their indifference about politics.
The idea that the people who pay the least attention to politics are those most closely attuned to the specifics of public policy is as hard to accept as the idea that the central motivation for Trump voters is his policy portfolio. It’s just that “policy” sounds better than “I don’t know” or “I am scared of immigrants.” Shorter, too.