Trump and Kamala are competing over who’s more online

The messaging in the 2024 election has devolved into a contest to determine which campaign is more online, to their detriment.

In 2019 (she never made it to 2020), the first Kamala Harris presidential campaign infamously imploded because, among other reasons, her staff and communications strategy were “way too online” — obsessed with the constant progressive social media flashpoints above and beyond the issues fundamental to the primary electorate. Instead of talking to voters about their priorities, Harris’s campaign was too focused on trending topics, memes and crafting the best clips of their candidate for the online audience. To render this the sole reason for her downfall is a bit of an exaggeration, but only slightly — and ever since she ascended to the presidential nomination on the backs of millions of verified accounts, she’s been running the same playbook. Even her campaign’s press release over the weekend was titled “Trump’s Bad Week (Taylor’s Version).”

The problem for the Donald Trump campaign is that as much as Kamala is driven by TikTok, it seems to be driven not by voter concerns, but by Facebook and X. The “eating cats and dogs” memes blaming Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, for disappearing pets predated Trump bringing it up, but they exploded afterwards in a hyper-online conversation J.D. Vance took pride in helping “create” this weekend. Vance’s rationale, expressed in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, was another example of a politician reading the stage directions out loud. A word of advice: a true Straussian dies with the (noble?) lie. 

Yet this is hardly the only area where Trump’s 2024 effort has turned from a focus on the fundamentals — on display to good effect in his debate with Joe Biden — to getting dragged into the too-online tropes. No voter really cares if Donald Trump hates Taylor Swift, but he needed to make sure everyone knew, in all caps. No one in the real world knows who Laura Loomer is, but she has 1.3 million followers and apparently a degree of the former president’s attention sufficient to feed him very online conspiracies. And nobody thinks that the criminal migrant element imported into our nation under the Biden-Harris regime is full of actual cannibals like Shia LaBeouf, but rather than focusing on the actual crimes they’ve committed, why not instead use Hannibal Lecter references to offend Anthony Hopkins?

The fundamentals of this race continue to favor Trump, and Kamala Harris’s lagging ability to bring black and Hispanic voters into her fold to the same degree they supported Joe Biden in 2020 could still be her undoing. When Tim Walz goes on stage to insist that supporters confront their neighbors at the grocery store, it’s a golden opportunity for the Trump-Vance campaign to talk about the 25 percent price spike in groceries under Harris’s administration. But instead, thanks to their own 4D chess strategery, they’re stuck defending rumors about foreigners killing geese. And unlike Barack Obama’s insistence that Mitt Romney wanted to kill off Big Bird, this one doesn’t have the advantage of a subservient press spinning for your off-topic claims.

At this moment, neither campaign seems to be talking to the American people about what they keep telling us they care about. Instead, they’re competing over vibes. And that’s a battle on Kamala’s turf; it’s a mistake for Trump to fight her there. He should stick to hammering her on all the obvious failures she has — failures that actually matter to Americans, not stray voltage designed to distract. That path leads to losing.