2024 campaign rolls with the changes

We don’t know the winner — the prudent won’t guess, many of the imprudent will be wrong — but already we know that the 2024 election will mark a significant departure in American history. Even if Donald Trump wins, it won’t signal a return to 2017, when he first took office. One way or the other, the United States will be set on a new course.

The surface elements of the campaign scream change. Not since 1912 has a former president sought to regain the office he once held: Theodore Roosevelt, a maverick Republican who shared some personality elements with Trump (iconoclastic outlook, congeniality to racial tropes, strong personality facing blander opponents), came in second, leaving Grover Cleveland the only president to serve nonconsecutive terms. Kamala Harris’ identity as a female with Black and Asian roots sets her apart from every other president. Regardless of the outcome, the country will face, and reflect, change.

Indeed, change is inherent in this election. What other contest has had an incumbent president withdraw mid-campaign? Not one but two efforts to assassinate one of the candidates? The emergence of a little-known, little-regarded vice president who soared in taking the presidential nomination and campaigned without emphasis on the groundbreaking demographic profile that she would carry into the White House? 

Commentators like to make comparisons with the 1932 campaign (Franklin Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover and ushered in the New Deal), or 1980 (Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter and undermined the primacy of the federal government in American life), or even 2008 (Barack Obama defeated John McCain and became the first Black president). And often the comparisons are with the 1960 campaign, when John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon on the strength of his debate performance and his plea to “get the country moving again.”

Not this time. This is a campaign without comparison.

The country has never been stronger (it remains the most powerful military force in the history of the world even as it has the globe’s most successful, most robust and most innovative economy) — and yet in some senses, the country has never been weaker, or maybe at least since the beginning of the Civil War (its people and its leaders are at odds with each other, don’t trust each other, won’t work with each other, and won’t acknowledge each other’s virtues, except maybe in the last moments of a vice-presidential debate).

The 1932 campaign brought radio and the airplane into politics. FDR was a brilliant employer of the radio arts. Though it is his campaign whistle-stops through the country that are remembered, it should not be forgotten that he took an American Airways Ford Trimotor from Albany, New York, to Chicago to address the Democratic National Convention, where he introduced the phrase “New Deal” into the American lexicon. “All parties reasoned the dramatic act of flying to Chicago would promote FDR as a daring and forceful leader,” Robert J. Serling wrote in his 1985 “Eagle: The Story of American Airlines.” (Adolf Hitler would enlist radio and the airplane in the altogether different political campaign in 1933 that brought him to power.) 

Dwight Eisenhower, awkward and somewhat resentful of television, allowed the Madison Avenue firm Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (now known simply as BBDO) to package him in an advertising campaign, a giant leap from the primitive media campaigns that were part of American presidential elections from 1840 (“Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too,” and portraying the elitist William Henry Harrison as a rusticated product of the frontier) to 1948 (when Harry Truman conducted a campaign relatively conventional for the time). Similarly, the 1960 contest represented the beginning of the influence of television, while in 2008, Barack Obama was the first candidate to make use of social media. 

The 2024 campaign has had more than its share of innovations. In a contest being conducted on the question of “change” — here Harris has captured the advantage from Trump, with the public by a small margin believing she is the more natural agent of change, according to the New York Times/Siena College Poll — there have been many changes.

Trump’s campaign, for example, has been the triumph of merchandising, beginning with sales of pictures of his mug shot. Since then, he has marketed Bibles, drinkware, a Mar-a-Lago Clubhouse quarter-zip sweatshirt, Trump45 sneakers ($225) and a pair of Trump throw pillows (list price $124, now discounted to $92). His ally, the entrepreneur Elon Musk, is offering $47 (a nod to the fact that the next president will be the 47th) to people who sign a petition with conservative memes. Latinos for Trump offered free haircuts on Sundays during Hispanic Heritage Month in Reading, Pennsylvania, a city at the heart of perhaps the most vital swing state.

Following the lead of Reagan, who pioneered the notion of speaking to local news outlets instead of the national press, both candidates are seeking new means of communicating their campaign messages. Harris appeared for 45 minutes on “Call Her Daddy,” which targets young women and was the second-most popular podcast on Spotify last year, and joined “All the Smoke,” run by former NBA players and a pipeline to Black voters. 

At the same time, Trump has mounted a podcast offensive of his own, appearing on such outlets as “Full Send,” “Impaulsive” and “Flagrant” — not the sort of forums that Adlai Stevenson (1952 and 1956) or Walter Mondale (1988) or Mitt Romney (2012) sought. Not even the kind of forums Trump entertained joining in 2016 or 2020.

“Smart campaigns will always try to find the latest way to engage and reach voters,” said Tobe Berkovitz, who has been a media consultant on presidential, senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial election campaigns. “The hot trend now are these forms of media.”

Now to what former California State Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh called the “mother’s milk of politics” — money.

The amounts are staggering. Harris, who has been a candidate for almost exactly three months, just passed the $1 billion mark. Trump has lagged behind, but is still well ahead of his earlier campaigns. For a contrast, the 1980 spending ceiling, federally mandated at the time, was $29.4 million. Harris raised about three times that much in her first 24 hours as a candidate.

Are these candidates, or the voters of this country, getting their money’s worth? Of course they’re not. 

That hasn’t changed. 

David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.