The leading super PAC supporting Vice President Kamala Harris is raising concerns that focusing too narrowly on Donald J. Trump’s character and warnings that he is a fascist is a mistake in the closing stretch of the campaign.
Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Lt. Gen. John F. Kelly, said last week that Mr. Trump “falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure,” a remarkable caution from such a top-ranking official, which Ms. Harris and her team immediately echoed and amplified.
In an email circulated to Democrats about what messages have been most effective in its internal testing, Future Forward, the leading pro-Harris super PAC, said focusing on Mr. Trump’s character and the fascist label were less persuasive than other messages.
“Attacking Trump’s Fascism Is Not That Persuasive,” read one line in bold type in the email, which is known as Doppler and sent on a regular basis. “‘Trump Is Exhausted’ Isn’t Working,” read another.
The Doppler emails have been sent weekly for months — and more frequently of late — offering Democrats guidance on messaging and on the results of Future Forward’s extensive tests of clips and social media posts. The Doppler message on Friday urged Democrats to highlight Ms. Harris’s plans, especially economic proposals and her vows to focus on reproductive rights, portraying a contrast with Mr. Trump on those topics.
“Purely negative attacks on Trump’s character are less effective than contrast messages that include positive details about Kamala Harris’s plans to address the needs of everyday Americans,” the email read.
Chauncey McLean, the president of Future Forward, issued a rare statement to The New York Times downplaying the significance of the Doppler email.
“Don’t over-read this,” he said. “This is just one of our regular emails sharing testing results from thousands of pieces of earned and social media content. It shows people that the most effective way of using Trump’s words and behavior is tying them to consequences in voters’ lives. That’s what Kamala Harris does every day by comparing her to-do list with his enemies list, for example.”
Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Ms. Harris’s campaign chair, said on Sunday on MSNBC that it has “real impact” that people close to Mr. Trump have spoken out against him.
“We know anecdotally, we know from our research, when someone like John Kelly stands up and speaks about what it was like to serve under Donald Trump, speaks about how he clearly wants unchecked power,” she said. “The American people are not comfortable with that.”
The Doppler email said Ms. Harris’s response to Mr. Kelly’s remarks during her town hall on CNN were only in “the 40th percentile on average for moving vote choice,” meaning it does less to push voters toward the vice president than other messages that scored higher. In contrast, a clip of Ms. Harris on Howard Stern’s program promising to expand Medicare to cover in-home care for the elderly tested in the 95th percentile, the email said.
Ms. Harris’s campaign did turn the audio of Mr. Kelly into a television ad but has spent relatively little on it so far.
In a public memo over the weekend, the Harris campaign signaled that her “economic message puts Trump on defense” and was likely to be a focus in the final week. “As voters make up their minds, they are getting to see a clear economic choice — hearing it directly from Vice President Harris herself, in her own words,” Ian Sams, a spokesman for Ms. Harris, wrote in the memo.
Ms. Harris is scheduled to deliver what her campaign has billed as a closing speech on Tuesday at the Ellipse in Washington — the same location where Mr. Trump rallied the crowd that eventually stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Campaigns and super PACs cannot directly coordinate strategy so sending messages via emails such as Doppler is one way they can communicate via quasi-public channels.
But the email’s warning reflects an underlying split among Democrats about what constitutes an effective line of attack against Mr. Trump, and how to persuade the small group of uncommitted voters to cast ballots against someone whose aberrant political and governing behavior has become familiar to them over nine years.
Ms. Harris’s team had made it clear immediately after the Democratic National Convention that they planned to switch from the message that President Biden had used most, that Mr. Trump is a unique threat to the country. They argued that making Mr. Trump smaller in the minds of voters was crucial. In her convention speech, she called him an “unserious man” but warned that restoring him to power would have “extremely serious” consequences.
In the last few weeks, Ms. Harris’s message on the campaign trail has been more in keeping with Mr. Biden’s earlier warnings about Mr. Trump as an unstable opponent. “Unhinged, unstable, unchecked,” all appear on the screen of one recent Harris ad.
The Dopper email warned: “Focusing on Trump’s disturbing, ludicrous and outlandish behavior can be an effective lead-in to talking about substantive policy, but is not effective at moving vote choice on its own.”
Ms. Harris’s most-broadcast ad in the last week does that, beginning with a warning of Mr. Trump “ignoring all checks that rein in a president’s power” before shifting to grocery prices, Social Security, abortion and taxes.
But her campaign has spent more than $10 million on a 30- and 60-second ad in that period also focused on Mr. Trump’s “handpicked” advisers warning about him. “Take it from the people who knew him best,” the narrator says. “Donald Trump is too big a risk for America.”
The ad fared relatively poorly in Future Forward’s ad testing, according to results obtained by The New York Times and shared with Democratic allies. After voters were shown the ad, it moved the race between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump by only 0.7 percentage points, where the most effective ads can shift the matchup by 2 percentage points.
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