Harris v Trump: election campaigns pit the traditionalist against the troll

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are making their last-ditch pitches to voters, both criss-crossing the swing states furiously enough to rack up millions of airline points if they were flying commercial – but in other respects running two very different styles of campaign.

On Monday last week, Harris was in three battleground states hoping to win over moderate Republicans with a series of traditional campaign events. On the same day, Trump dressed up as a McDonald’s worker to serve French fries in suburban Philadelphia, trolling Harris’s own experience working at McDonald’s franchise in the early 1980s.

“Hello, everybody. It’s my first day at McDonald’s, I’m looking for a job,” Trump said as he entered the restaurant, which had been closed for the purposes of the stunt and where the customers driving up to the drive-thru window were carefully vetted.

A week later, with the White House as a backdrop, Harris gave a forceful closing argument about turning the page on the Trump era, standing at a podium in Washington DC where her opponent held the 6 January 2021 rally that ended with his supporters storming the US Capitol to overthrow the democratic results of the election.

Trump, meanwhile, responded to the outcry about his rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden where a comedian called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage” by rolling up to a Wisconsin rally in a white garbage truck, in dark orange makeup and wearing a bright orange safety vest.

“How do you like my garbage truck?” he asked reporters. “This truck is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden.”

The two approaches could not be more different.

One candidate – Harris – is running a largely traditional political campaign hoping to persuade undecided college-educated suburbanites and women of all races and education that Trump is set on taking away their rights. Unlike Hillary Clinton in her failed election bid in 2016, Harris has barely mentioned the potential significance of the US electing its first female president, let alone its first Black female president.

The other candidate – Trump – hopes to energize his white working-class base and to reach politically unengaged young men of all ethnic backgrounds who may feel left behind or disparaged by the cultural upheavals of the social justice and racial equality movements. To reach them, Trump has looked to viral stunts and podcasts – such as his three-hour sit-down with Joe Rogan, which 36 million people listened to on YouTube alone. While Harris has so far declined to also sit down with Rogan, she has been on other large podcasts, though the tactic feels less central to her campaign.

Fundamentally, the two campaigns reflect their candidates and their supporters. Harris wants to appeal to Democrat loyalists and moderate Republicans, Trump to parts of the working class who may feel Democrats condescend to them.

“It’s a traditional Democratic problem,” says the Democrat strategist Hank Sheinkopf. “She’s acting as the president, he’s acting as the populist.”

Trump has attended mixed-martial arts fights and football games, while relying on personal outreach at mass rallies across the country – particularly in districts such as Butler, Pennsylvania (where he came close to being assassinated in July), that are on the cusp of turning from rural to suburban.

Those rallies are often seen as a form of community bonding for his followers, with tailgate parties and bake-offs.

Some attendees at the Butler rally told the Guardian they were shocked by the attempted assassination but also disappointed that they had missed the opportunity to hear Trump, with his lengthy, freewheeling stories about electrocution and sharks, peppered with ominous talk of “enemies within” and personal insults.

Meanwhile, Trump has largely rejected interviews with traditional media outlets, in which he would probably face an intense grilling that he rarely receives from the more friendly exposure he otherwise courts. For example, Trump turned down an interview with CBS’s popular 60 Minutes; Harris accepted. Harris has been interviewed on CNN, Trump has not.

Trump also refused to do a second TV debate with Harris, after she was widely seen to have won the first one, unless it was moderated by the hard right-leaning Fox News.

It remains to be seen which tactic will work on the US’s 2024 electorate – the populist trying to shatter America’s political norms or the traditionalist warning against the explicit dangers and threats that Trump represents.

At the moment the polls have the pair virtually neck and neck both across the country as a whole and in the crucial swing states that are the key to winning the White House. With just a few days until election day, almost all pollsters agree that either Harris or Trump could win and that at the moment the election promises to he historically close.

In that way, the different tactics of the two candidates perhaps represent simply a divided nation that each is trying to appeal to.

“She’s traditional, he is not,” says Sheinkopf. “She’s acting as the president, he’s acting as the populist. The French fries were a populist thing to do. You can’t manage Kamala Harris doing that … It’s a divided country, nothing is in the middle.”