Elections are like word association games or the conditioning scientists use to make dogs salivate at the sound of a bell.
Voters have immediate emotional responses to candidates based on how they feel about events involving those candidates.
That works to Harris’ advantage: Like most vice presidents, she keeps a low profile and has barely more of a presence in the vice presidency than she did before President Joe Biden picked her as his running mate four years ago.
Her record as the nation’s most left-wing senator and an extremely authoritarian attorney general of California may be unsettling to voters if they knew about it.
But knowledge alone is not enough: imagery and emotional resonance are far more powerful.
Trump supporters know this.
They feel a surge of pride every time they remember Trump standing up, raising his fist in defiance after an assassin’s bullet nearly took his life.
But Trump has been a fixture on presidential elections for nine years, both in office and running for office, and voters had long-standing associations with his name long before the assassination attempt.
For grassroots Republicans, this Pavlovian similarity is overwhelmingly positive, which is why so few were prepared to listen to intelligent debate about the policies and electability of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or his other primary opponents.
Ordinary Americans have fond memories of President Trump’s years in the White House, but they also remember the endless drama of the media’s obsession with Russia collusion, Trump’s firing of the FBI director and the subsequent independent counsel investigation, two impeachment trials, and a never-ending stream of petty squabbles.
The Trump administration was peaceful and prosperous, but ended with COVID-19 and violence, including the riots at the Capitol in the summer of 2020 and on January 6, 2021.
This mix of good and bad associations worked well compared with the emotions Biden evoked: shame over the fiasco of withdrawing from Afghanistan, embarrassment at the president’s apparent weakened state, anger over out-of-control inflation and illegal immigration, and anxiety over wars in Europe and the Holy Land that Biden is not qualified to tackle.
Harris, on the other hand, is a blank canvas.
And Trump, for all his baggage – his emotional baggage with voters – stands out in stark contrast.
Everyone, even Trump’s supporters, has things from the Trump administration they would like to forget.
Harris sells herself as a way to erase painful memories and replace them with media-generated good feelings: a sugar pill.
How will Trump respond to that?
Not to reignite his feud with Brian Kemp, the popular Republican governor of battleground state Georgia. But that’s exactly what Trump did at a rally in Atlanta last Saturday.
Georgia is the only one of five states that switched control from Trump to Democrats between 2016 and 2020 that currently has a Republican governor.
When Trump won the key Rust Belt states of Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016, they were both run by Republican governors, as was the most battleground Sun Belt state, Arizona.
Currently, Democrats hold the top jobs in all of these key parts of the electoral map, so it would be unjust to risk it all the way to Georgia.
Pro-lifers and conservative activists have long felt conflicted about Trump, saying his actions and stated positions often do not align with their own principles, even as his policies as president have greatly helped their causes.
The Trump campaign responded to their fears by eviscerating the GOP’s pro-life policies at the Republican National Convention and by denounced the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 in the weeks that followed.
While Harris’ friends in the media have backed her, generating not just a sense of Democratic unity but widespread enthusiasm for the blank-slate running mate, Trump’s advisers have waged a battle to weaken morale on the right.
Harris may never be able to fully escape the gravitational pull of the Biden-Harris administration’s record.
And even if Harris replaces Biden as the nominee, the stock market turmoil will be detrimental to the current administration in the White House.
An effective attack would also connect Harris in voters’ minds with feelings about California, once the promised land of America’s postwar prosperity but now a shrinking state as Democrat-run cities succumb to homelessness and crime and the middle class flees the one-party state’s high cost of living.
Make America Great Again or Make America California Now?
Trump can regain the momentum he has lost since the convention, but only if he can define Harris in voters’ minds and go head-to-head with her, not his party, his allies or himself.
Daniel McCarthy is editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more of Daniel McCarthy’s work, visit www.creators.com.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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