Rozina Sabur
Deputy US Editor
29 September 2024 10:24pm
Kamala Harris should stop her “incessant focus” on Donald Trump and “take more risks” with her presidential campaign, a former senior aide has said.
Ashley Etienne, Ms Harris’s first White House communications director, warned her former boss she had “more work to do” if she was to win over the undecided voters who will determine the fate of the race.
Ms Etienne set out her advice in an op-ed for The New York Times, in which she said Ms Harris’s first priority should be to “cut back on the incessant focus on Mr Trump”.
“By now, almost everyone who could be persuaded by the case against him has heard it,” she wrote.
The Harris campaign has relentlessly focused on her Republican rival’s comments, frequently sharing clips of Trump speaking on social media.
In the last few days, the official social media accounts of the campaign have shared no fewer than a dozen clips of Trump, as well as a meme of him with a walking frame and the caption: “Okay grandpa let’s get you to bed.”
The warning mirrors advice from Republican strategists to Trump to avoid his personal attacks on his rival amid fears it is alienating moderate swing voters.
Trump, 78, has not heeded the advice, once again ramping up his ad-hominem attacks on Ms Harris over the weekend by calling her “mentally disabled”.
“Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way,” he told a rally in Wisconsin. “And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.”
He has previously made racially inflammatory comments about Ms Harris’s dual heritage, claiming she only recently “turned black”, as well as calling her “stupid,” “weak” and “dumb as a rock”.
It has prompted unease among Republicans, including close allies of Trump who have urged him to focus on bread and butter issues rather than hurling insults.
Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s closest allies in the Senate, said: “The better course to take is to prosecute the case that her policies are destroying the country.”
In her New York Times op-ed, Ms Etienne said her second piece of advice to Ms Harris was to swap the large-scale rallies she has been holding on the campaign trail in favour of “smaller, town-hall-style events in battleground states”.
She acknowledged the political jeopardy of taking such an approach, adding: “Town halls are a riskier format — and the campaign knows that.”
However, she said, “the town hall format plays to Ms Harris’s strengths”, describing how she had witnessed the US vice-president’s warmth and compassion first-hand.
“The intimate setting of a town hall will expose voters to those qualities and add more dimensions to what already excites them about her,” she said of the 59-year-old Ms Harris.
Unqualified praise
Ms Etienne, an experienced Democratic adviser who has previously worked for Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, served as the US vice-president’s communications director for much of her first year in office.
Her opinion piece represents a rare intervention into the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign strategy by a former senior adviser.
Most senior figures within the party have offered unqualified praise for Ms Harris’s approach to the race.
Her ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket following Joe Biden’s withdrawal on July 21 has dramatically altered the party’s fortunes. She leads Trump in most national polls and is locked in a virtual dead heat in many of the battleground states.
Ms Etienne acknowledged that it was a “remarkable” feat given her late entry into the race.
However, she warned Ms Harris needed to do more to further introduce herself to voters and explain why she was “the right leader for this moment”.
She argued Ms Harris “needs to do more interviews to close voters’ knowledge gap about her” after largely dodging the traditional stable of US media rounds to which most presidential candidates submit.
In Ms Harris’s defence, she argued that the US national media “often have a set narrative” around her former boss and “a penchant for revisiting her past missteps”, but she said evading press scrutiny had left voters with “unanswered questions about her”.
She advised Ms Harris to bypass the traditional, national media landscape in favour of conducting interviews with small, local outlets in the critical swing states.
Ms Harris should also accept invitations from “niche media that appeal to key demographics she needs to shore up, such as the dozens of podcasts targeted to suburban mothers and black men”, she wrote.
To win control of the White House, Ms Etienne concluded, the Democrat does not need to give the public a reason “to vote against the former president, but rather a reason to vote for the next one”.
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