Last Thursday, standing on the tarmac in Michigan in front of Air Force Two, Kamala Harris took some questions from reporters. This was the first time she’d been in an unscripted situation since becoming the presumptive (and now official) Democratic nominee for the presidency, so it was a big deal—and one of the first questions she took was about whether she’d be taking more questions soon, in a more formal setting. (She said she’d try to set something up this month.)

What Harris is being hounded about—and not just by reporters on tarmacs, but by the Washington Post editorial page and the Trump campaign—is ultimately about more than whether she’ll answer questions live in public per se. It’s that she hasn’t committed herself in detailed terms to specific plans for her hypothetical presidency. As has been noted in more than one forum, there’s no policy section on her website; Politico’s Playbook complains that she has not released a “100-day agenda,” let alone a “detailed tax policy white paper.” The gripe is that her campaign has been all “vibe” and not enough “substance,” to use the Post’s formulation.

On one level, this is fair enough. It’s reasonable to ask someone who wants to be put in charge of the country’s most urgent life-and-death decisions to demonstrate that she can handle a few pointed inquiries about immigration from an irritating, 42-year-old Ivy League alumnus wearing a blue button-down shirt. It’s fair, too, for people who will be affected by the policy-setting power of the presidency to wonder what she might do with it. And she probably owes the public an explanation of why she’s backed off leftist-friendly positions from 2019 on issues including Medicare for All, although the explanation that is likely to be given—that voters have different priorities now, and therefore she does too—is unlikely to influence the race that much.

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But the fixation on putting details in writing and answering hypothetical questions is a bit beside the point as well. It ignores what we already know about how a Harris administration would look, and it isn’t actually likely to reveal much about how she’d change the country. It’s also definitely making Joe Biden want to choke every member of the Beltway media into unconsciousness, one by one.

Consider that should she win the election, and should Biden serve the rest of his term, Harris is not going to become president for nearly six months—in late January of 2025, a year that to this writer sounds fanciful and imaginary. Democrats may or may not hold the House or the Senate at that time, and if they do, the number of votes they’ll have to spare is TBD. There’s no telling what issues voters will consider most important by then either. Inflation might still be a concern, and the wars in Gaza and Ukraine could be ongoing. Or maybe those wars will have ended and voters will be angry that their eggs don’t cost enough. “Tax these eggs,” they might demand angrily. We just don’t know!

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These factors will have more of an impact on the details of the Harris presidential agenda than what she puts on her website in August 2024. The Washington Post says it wants to know, for instance, whether she would impose “higher taxes on corporations and those at the very top of the income scale” in order to avoid raising them on the middle class, but that depends on who’s chairing the relevant committees and how much money needs to be raised, which depends on what the spending side of a hypothetical package looks like, which might be affected by the outcome of Senate races in Montana and Ohio, and on and on.

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But there is also a fair amount of information about Harris that’s already known. In her stump speech, she lists issues that she says would be priorities for her, including “affordable child care,” “paid leave,” taking on “corporate landlords that unfairly raise rents on working families,” and passing border security legislation.

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Given that she’s already part of an administration that has put months or years of work into these issues, these are more than just generalities. There was initially a recommendation for large-scale child care subsidies in the bill that eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act, for example, and Biden recently outlined a proposal that would limit rent increases to 5 percent annually by landlords that own more than 50 units. On Tuesday morning, the White House announced several initiatives that would eliminate regulations (including legally mandated environmental-impact reviews that certain federal-loan programs currently require, which even many on the left believe are too bureaucratic and burdensome) that limit the speed with which new housing can be built. (Politico Playbook hasn’t yet covered these potentially game-changing NEPA/TIFIA/RRIF tweaks, but we’ll keep an eye out.) The border security bill thatHarris has been discussing on the trail already exists. Further clues about how she would guide legislation can also be provided by the types of advisers she’s hiring and the existing positions of the different Democratic groups in her coalition.

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Put all that together, and you can probably make a good guess as to where Harris would start as president if her term began today and Democrats controlled Congress: by trying to pass the border bill while putting together legislation that would extend family-leave guarantees and make housing and child care more affordable, via some combination of subsidies and regulation. There’s much to dig into here for anyone who cares to, and Harris isn’t hiding any of it.

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Granted, it would be interestingif she went into further detail about any number of other subjects, and it would potentially create delicious gaffes, intraparty conflict, “flip-flops,” and other dramatic things the campaign-trail press could cover. But it wouldn’t reveal much more than it’s currently possible toknow about what January 2025 of the Harris administration would actuallylook like—and it wouldn’t tell voters anything they need to know in order to make the choice available to them in three months. That choice isn’t between Harris and other Democrats who might prioritize different issues or rely on advisers with different ideological backgrounds; it’s not even between Harris and a moderate Republican who might try to, let’s say, attack the housing crisis in a different way. The choice is rather between Harris and Trump, the latter of whose policy views are a self-contradicting mishmash undergirded by an unpopular outside plan (that he has disavowed) whose headline item is firing every employee in the federal government and replacing them with individuals who are personally loyal to the president.

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In other words, undecided and otherwise persuadable voters are not going to sit down at the kitchen table, eyeglasses perched on the ends of their noses, to compare the Harris and Trump plans for America. It would be like comparing apples to a goldfish. The “Trump plan” does not really exist, and to the extent it does, it’s so wildly different from what anyDemocrat would do as to make the details of Harris’ ideas immaterial.

What swing voters arelooking for—going by the 7-point polling shift that has occurred since Harris replaced Biden—is the projection of confidence, energy, and capability. They are looking for a vibe, if you will. (This is also fair, because a country’s leader is not just its chief legislator.)

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The political press understood this, until recently. Prior to Biden’s dropping out, he was always being asked, in essence, Sir, why are you so elderly and unpopular?This was despite his having passed a significant portion of his own detailed policy agenda into law via legislation that, on its own, was generally considered successful (and which polled pretty well). Biden had plans for days. He had turned many of them into real laws made out of enormous blocks of text! But that didn’t come through in the polls as much as his evident oldness did, and members of the press pointed this out to him whenever they had the chance, which was rarely, because he grew to despise them.

This is how we got presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who doesn’t needthe press. This is too bad for them—for us, rather, although to be honest the click rate on Kamalamentum stories is not bad. But if there’s any group that should have known how little the details of things like the pass-through deduction matter to the voters who matter in the U.S., it’s the people who have spent nine years and counting covering Donald Trump.

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• Donald Trump
• Journalism
• Kamala Harris
• 2024 Campaign
• Tim Walz

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