What are the Secret Strengths That Will Ensure Kamala Harris and the Democrats Win in Two Weeks?

In the End, They're All About the Ability to Turn Out the Vote

There are no undecided voters anymore.

There are only Trump voters who may or may not turn out to vote for Trump and Kamala Harris voters who may or may not turn out to vote for Kamala Harris.

The core question with two weeks to go is not who you support or prefer. It is whether or not you care enough about their being elected to make time between now and Election Day as local election laws allow to actually submit a ballot.

For this reason, the campaign is no longer about the things many of the folks in the press say it is about. It is not about providing voters with more information about either candidate. It is not about making the case for one policy proposal or another more effectively. It is not about one more new program that may or may not get passed by a Congress that may or may not be willing to cooperate with the next president.

It is not about what voters think.

It is about what voters feel.

It is not so much about ideas as it is about motivation. What matters enough to voters to get them vote?

When a policy issue is involved—liked preserving democracy or protecting the reproductive rights of women—it is because those issues are profoundly emotional, meaningful to voters. As we have seen since 2022, overturning Roe v. Wade led to bigger turnout among women voters, turnout so big that it upended pollsters’ models and gave victory after victory to Democrats.

I once worked for a guy who kind of a marketing genius. He used to say all sales in the business world were driven either by fear or a by greed—fear of losing one’s job, fear of losing market share to a rival or the desire for more money. He also said that while most sales people would go in and base their pitch on why they thought their product was better or what they though the prospective client wanted to hear, almost always, the reason people would make purchase decisions was because they thought it would help them personally—help them get a raise or help them get a promotion.

He would press the sales teams that worked for him to lead not with smooth sales talk but with asking questions and listening, seeking to find out what made the prospective client tick and what their personal motivation was. Once that was established, then you could effectively make a successful sales pitch.

The worst of all salespeople, he would argue, were the bullshit artists, the ones that would go in with smooth patter and think they could con or charm a potential customer into doing what they wanted. That was their key error. It was not that they were seen as being as insincere as a used car salesman. It was that their pitches were about them, about their needs and not about the client.

Successful business people would be empathetic, they would try to be responsive to their market of prospects.

Sound familiar?