Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s Very Different Campaign Strategies

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have adopted substantially different strategies in their dueling bids to win the 2024 presidential election, according to a number of prominent political scientists.
Thomas Gift, who heads up the Center on U.S. Politics at University College London, said the Republican candidate was “participating in more unscripted events” which he contrasted to Harris’ “refusing to take tough questions from the media.”
Harris replaced Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate shortly after the incumbent dropped out of the race in July amidst widespread concern over the 81-year-old’s age and mental acumen. A recent ActiVote poll gave Harris a 1.6 point lead over Trump, with 50.8 percent of the vote against his 49.2 percent, though this was within the margin of error and the Republican candidate could win with a minority of the vote thanks to the Electoral College system as he did in 2016.
Since becoming the Democrats’ White House candidate Harris has largely avoided unscripted interviews, bar a major one with CNN’s Dana Bash broadcast on August 29. The interview followed weeks of Republican attacks on Harris who claimed their Democratic rival was dodging scrutiny, and took place alongside her running mate Governor Tim Walz.
By contrast, Trump regularly partakes in unscripted interviews, though critics have suggested he strongly favors discussions with sympathetic interviewers and publications. Over the past nine days alone, interviews with Trump have been released by Phil McGraw on his Dr. Phil Primetime show, computer scientist and Elon Musk-associated Lex Friedman, and DailyMail.com, the website of a conservative British tabloid.
Speaking to Newsweek, Gift said: “Trump participating in more unscripted events makes the contrast of Harris refusing to take tough questions from the media look all the more stark. While Trump is most at home at stadium-sized events, MAGA rallies mostly only serve to galvanize the base.
“Communicating with online influencers, speaking to celebrities, and holding press conferences allows Trump to widen his circle of listeners. It’s free air time that Harris isn’t getting.”
However, James Battista, an American politics expert who teaches at the University at Buffalo, said that several of the discussions Trump had taken part in were “not real interviews.”
He said: “Dr Phil and the Daily Mail are deeply supportive of Trump’s campaign, and Fridman is broadly supportive of the kind of ‘tech bro,’ ‘anti-woke’ politics that [Senator J.D.] Vance typifies. So Trump is doing those interviews because he knows in advance that they’re very, very unlikely to be challenging, that the interviewers are likely to help him when he has a ‘senior moment,’ and that doing the interview is really not very different from releasing a very long campaign ad.”
Trump has held notably fewer public rallies during the 2024 presidential race compared to his past campaigns. An analysis by The Washington Post found that between the beginning of July and August 10, 2024, he held just seven rallies, compared to 22 during the same period in 2016. His next rally is scheduled in Mosinee, Wisconsin, on Saturday.
On July 13, Trump narrowly avoided assassination when a gunman fired at him during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, leaving him lightly wounded and killing one attendee.
Battista suggested this could be connected to the decline in Trump rallies commenting: “Presumably, part of why Trump is relying less on rallies is that at a recent rally, he would have been killed if he didn’t have the extreme luck to turn his head exactly when he did.”
Harris has held regular rallies over the past few weeks with recent events in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on September 4 and in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Labor Day when she was joined by President Biden.
Notably, Harris held a rally at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee on August 20 which her campaign claimed attracted 15,000 people at the same time the Democratic National Convention was taking place in Chicago. The Fiserv Forum was the same venue that had hosted the 2024 Republican National Convention in July.
Professor Terri Bimes, a political scientist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, told Newsweek that Harris’s well-attended rallies demonstrate “momentum,” and suggested reduced crowds could partly explain Trump holding fewer events.
She said: “One possible explanation is that Trump’s rallies have not been drawing as big of crowds as before, and rallygoers have been leaving Trump’s rallies early. This is bad optics for any presidential candidate. Crowd size doesn’t matter as much for an interview. This calculation may explain why former President Trump is doing more interviews as opposed to rallies.
“As to why Kamala Harris prefers rallies over interviews with the press, I think it is the reverse of Trump. She has momentum on her side and is attracting large crowds and receives free media coverage for her rallies. As long as the rallies are attracting large numbers of people, I don’t expect her to reach out to media outlets for interviews more frequently. Interviews have more risk, less benefit for Vice President Harris.”
Professor Paul Quirk, a U.S. politics expert at the University of British Columbia, described the Harris campaign as “completely transparent and orthodox.”
He said: “If a presidential candidate can hold public rallies with large, conspicuously enthusiastic crowds in swing states, and get favorable coverage of them in mainstream national media, there is no higher use of his or her time. Televised interviews on the major nonpartisan outlets—like CNN or ABC—reach a large national audience, but the interviewers take it as their job to make trouble for the candidate. Interviews with reliably friendly interviewers, on partisan media, only reach the already convinced.”
By contrast, Quick described the Trump campaign as “peculiar” in an interview with Newsweek, adding: “They apparently have concluded that a busy schedule of impressive rallies in swing states is not an option.”
Quick continued: “There are several possible reasons for such a conclusion: Trump’s rally-attending base is evidently somewhat worn out and depleted. Pro-Harris media have made fun of Trump by showing his rally venues with empty seats and audiences trickling out while he was still speaking…
“The campaign’s money problems—partly due to using campaign and party funds to pay Trump’s legal expenses—may be a constraint on the size, frequency, or locations of his rallies. Finally, Trump himself seems somewhat worn out and depleted. He plays a remarkable amount of golf. He sometimes appears lethargic… Trump may rebound, and the election is still close. But at this point, it is unclear whether he is still capable of mounting a competitive campaign.”
Dafydd Townley, who teaches American politics at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., also suggested low turnout and funding problems could explain Trump’s heavy reliance on interviews over high-profile rallies.
Speaking to Newsweek he said: “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have to conduct these large events rather than intimate interviews because they need to introduce themselves to the American public. While this is an opportunity to discuss policy, as much as anything else, it’s about engaging with targeted audiences in critical states.
“Trump, on the other hand, has used these interviews to try and showcase his own charisma although he recently confused Harris with Biden. He might be avoiding the big town hall events for a variety of reasons – campaign funds, security, and perhaps the low turnout. But friendly reporters on a one-on-one are less likely to challenge his statements and claims.”
Newsweek contacted the Kamala Harris and Donald Trump presidential campaigns for comment via email.