Harris Has Skewered Trump’s Election Denialism—Just Not on the Airwaves
Her campaign’s TV ad strategy gives us insights into the audiences they’re trying to reach and how they’re trying to reach them.
SHORTLY AFTER THE VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE ENDED last Tuesday, Kamala Harris’s campaign released a memo pinpointing what it saw as the night’s most consequential exchange.
JD Vance’s refusal to acknowledge that Donald Trump had lost the 2020 election produced “the biggest gap all night” among a focus group of voters, the memo read. Underscoring the moment’s benefits, the campaign said it was “already cutting this final exchange into a new ad.”
The next day, Harris’s team put out a video titled “JD Vance’s Damning Non-Answer” that was set to dramatic music and cut to a precise 30 seconds, the standard length of a TV ad.
What the Harris campaign didn’t do was pay to run it in any TV market, according to an official at the ad-tracking firm Ad Impact. Instead, the campaign ran the video digitally, mainly on YouTube, in the seven major swing states, plus a few other markets.
In modern campaigns, the distinction between a television ad and a digital one is increasingly insignificant. And Democrats feel strongly that the issue of democracy and election denialism has the ability to organically break through with the electorate without much of a push from the campaign. To that end, Harris’s team put barely any money behind pushing the Vance video online: a maximum of about $3,000, according to an analysis by Andrew Arenge, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies.
“I wouldn’t say this is a major ad buy,” Arenge said. But, he added, individual digital ad buys don’t have to be big if they’re part of a larger ad campaign, and Harris’s team is far outspending Trump’s on YouTube, Facebook, and traditional TV.
The decision by Harris HQ fits into a larger trend with regard to messaging strategy. When it comes to television, the campaign is largely focused on abortion, taxes, housing, and healthcare, according to a CNN breakdown of the spending. The topic of the 2020 election—Trump’s attempt to overturn the result, the events of January 6th, and what all this means for the future of American democracy—has been largely reserved for online political warfare and earned media mentions to juice the political press into reporting on the issue.
That decision doesn’t mean that Harris’s team is simply ignoring election denialism or threats to democracy, just that it’s emphasizing those themes online instead of on TV. In addition to the JD Vance video, the campaign put out a new video over the weekend noting that Trump, like Vance, refuses to admit he lost in 2020 and (in the words of the accompanying tweet) “sent an armed mob to the U.S. Capitol, and threatened the life of his own vice president.”
NO FINAL DECISIONS HAVE BEEN MADE about using the Vance spot in paid TV ads, according to a Harris campaign source who spoke on condition of anonymity to share its thinking. The source said that the ad supplements the campaign’s broader message—itself enforced by internal data and public polling— that voters have questions about Trump’s fitness to lead.
“Reminding Americans that the people that know Trump best don’t trust him, that his behavior in office was disqualifying, and that many of those same voices are supporting Vice President Harris as the qualified, steady leader the country needs is a strong and motivating message to undecided voters,” said Harris campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz.
To that end, the campaign released a one-minute TV ad last week called “Unstable Threat” that features former Vice President Mike Pence, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley calling Trump unfit. Pence plays a starring role in the ad because he sets up a contrast with Vance’s downplaying of Trump’s instability, the Harris source said.
“People want democracy. They don’t want a king,” the source said. “This [Vance digital ad] makes it more real. Here we show it.”
Just how hard to emphasize Trump’s threats to democracy has been a persistent debate among Democrats for years. As a candidate, Joe Biden explicitly and aggressively leaned into the issue, making it the focus of his first re-election ad (aired on television and digitally) and delivering an early re-election speech at Valley Forge.
Harris has also talked about the 2020 election results and threats to democracy in the time since she has been atop the ticket. But she has tended to focus on those themes in more targeted ways and settings.
“With the linear TV stuff you are painting with a very broad brush. You are hitting everyone who is watching a football game or The Bachelor premier,” said Dan Pfeiffer, Barack Obama’s longtime senior adviser. “With the digital stuff you can target voters on specific issues.”
Republicans, including those allied with the Trump campaign, argue that the 2020 election and January 6th are non-salient issues for voters, and it’s not worth relitigating them. The Trump campaign declined comment, but a Vance adviser who declined to comment on the record said the team was unfazed by the “Damning Non-Answer” spot and dismissed it as “elite Acela chatter.”
“We welcome them to spend as much money on this as they can because this isn’t the top issue for voters and anyone who is moved by this is already voting for Harris anyway,” the adviser said. “Are they telling us they have a base problem?”
But Pfeiffer made the opposite case. He noted that those topics help signify Trump’s extremism to voters—and that criticism that focusing on the last election is too backwards-looking actually works against the ex-president, since he’s the one who remains fixated on 2020. But, beyond that, Pfeiffer says there is empirical evidence that it works.
A study from two Stanford professors found that of the hundreds of Republican candidates who ran in statewide elections across the United States in 2022, those who denied the 2020 election results “underperformed non-deniers by more than two percentage points.”
Still, there are yet other data points that illustrate reasons why these topics may not be the primary focus for the campaign—primarily, because it is already heavily baked into voters’ perceptions of Trump.
This past May, the Democratic polling outfit Blueprint tested a variety of controversial statements with young voters. It found that 72 percent had heard Trump claim the 2020 election was rigged—the highest of all claims tested. And while 50 percent said they were bothered by it, that figure was among the lowest for the Trump statements tested.