Opinion | Kamala Harris Said She Owns a Gun for a Very Strategic Reason

At the presidential debate and on the campaign trail, Kamala Harris has hardly sounded like the Marxist or the Communist that Donald Trump has accused her of being. She hasn’t even sounded particularly progressive. At various times, she has said that she backs fracking, taunted Mr. Trump for his weakness in the face of dictators and bragged about owning a gun — going so far as to tell Oprah Winfrey, “if someone breaks in my house, they’re getting shot.”

What she has been doing is a ruthlessly effective example of vice signaling from the left: deviating in memorable ways from the “virtue signaling” that has come to define Democrats in the eyes of many Americans. “Virtue” and “vice” here are not to be taken literally. Rather, they refer to the world as seen through the rigid beliefs and commitments of college-educated whites, a narrow yet influential slice of the Democratic coalition whose views of what constitutes virtue are not necessarily shared by most Americans and who police any deviations as vice. Yet it is precisely those breaks from the fold that signal something powerful to the average voter.

Vice signaling is not just a tactic, but a way to resolve a paradox that has dogged Democrats for a decade: Many Democratic policy positions are popular, but when it comes to ideology, most American voters feel closer to Republicans. President Biden pursued and enacted popular policies, yet his approval ratings have been historically low. Asked to place themselves on an ideological scale, more Americans see Mr. Biden as too liberal than see Mr. Trump as too conservative. Nor is this tendency isolated to Mr. Biden: More Americans place themselves closer to Mr. Trump than to Ms. Harris on ideology, and in 2016, voters saw Mr. Trump as more moderate than Hillary Clinton.

The reason is that despite embracing many popular policies, Democrats have fallen out of step with the American people on something larger: their approach to the world. Americans are mavericks, yet Democrats have come to be seen as rigid, a party defined by lawn signs that tell passers-by not to bother approaching unless they agree on a litany of issues — the orthodox party in a heterodox country. To win, Ms. Harris will need to ignore calls to return to the orthodox fold and continue signaling strategic breaks from it.

Vice signaling means courting healthy public controversy with the enforcers of orthodoxy — the members of interest groups who on many critical issues have let themselves off the hook for accurately representing the views and interests of those they claim to speak for. This tack is not to be confused with what is known in politics as a “Sister Souljah moment,” a repudiation of a part of one’s own coalition. Vice signaling is more flexible because the goal is not to put down any specific interest or cause but rather to show that you are someone whom people can talk to and not worry about feeling judged.

The version Ms. Harris should embrace is distinct from the one some on the right have developed, which embraces cruelty and disdain toward liberal social norms and provokes outrage pell-mell for the sole purpose of “owning the libs.” It shows that someone will govern for all Americans, not just the hypereducated. It doesn’t even have to be about issues — it can be about drinking, popping a nicotine pouch or letting your kids have too much screen time and eat McDonald’s.

At its best, vice signaling is lighthearted and fun: It’s Tim Walz ribbing his vegetarian daughter that turkey counts as a vegetable in Minnesota. It’s Representative Jared Golden carting around a wagon full of beers and shotgunning one with a constituent. It’s Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and my old boss Senator John Fetterman wearing a leather jacket and Carhartts in the halls of Congress.

The debate showed that vice-signaling works. Left-wing interest groups melted down, but undecided voters liked Ms. Harris’s performance, rating her the winner by a wide margin.

The reason it works is that white college-educated Americans approach politics with a rigidity alien to most Americans, according to an analysis by one Republican pollster. Across more than 50 policy questions posed in one of the largest and most comprehensive surveys of public opinion, voters with college degrees are the only group to offer ideologically consistent answers most of the time. Most voters are heterodox; only college-educated voters are not. Under their influence, Democrats are too easily caricatured as the party of an out-of-touch, no-fun elite that demands fidelity to ideology in a way that most voters don’t connect with.

The clout of college-educated voters within the Democratic coalition has risen dramatically in recent decades. Whereas John F. Kennedy won white voters without a college degree while losing those with degrees by two to one, Mr. Biden lost noncollege voters by two to one while winning those with degrees. While college-educated voters account for less than half of the Democratic coalition, we wield outsize influence on the party, providing most of its staffers, elected officials and donations.

The two areas where Ms. Harris needs to gain ground are Mr. Trump’s strongest issues: the economy and immigration. On the economy, Ms. Harris could deploy vice signaling to emphasize that under her tenure as vice president, domestic oil production hit an all-time high — something two-thirds of voters see as a virtue but college-educated elites consider a vice. She should embrace the words “supply side,” “deregulation” and “cutting through red tape,” vice-coded words in the minds of college-educated elites that nonetheless accurately describe what is necessary to achieve liberal goals like increasing access to affordable housing and deploying clean-energy technology.

On immigration, Ms. Harris has said that she would pass the bipartisan border deal that Mr. Trump kneecapped. That bill gives the president the authority to shut down the border if crossings reach a certain level — a position supported by 64 percent of Latino voters. Ms. Harris could really lean into it by declaring that she will shut down the border. That would be likely to elicit controversy, but it is also merely a more provocative way of stating her current position — one that will generate more attention.

In doing so, Ms. Harris would be taking a page from Michelle Vallejo, a Democratic candidate in the Rio Grande Valley whose recent ad drew the ire of interest groups for its single-minded focus on border security. Or Representative Ruben Gallego, running for Senate in Arizona, who has taken a tough stance on border security and whose support of increased funding for the police earned him the endorsement of the Arizona Police Association. He once tweeted that his staff members were banned from using “Latinx” in official communications because the term exists “largely to appease white rich progressives who think that is the term we use.” (In the latest polling, Mr. Gallego holds a solid lead over his opponent, Kari Lake.)

This is how vice signaling rounds out the picture: if voters cannot identify any areas where Ms. Harris diverges from the rigid ideology of the college-educated, they will assume she’ll cater to them. By isolating the keepers of the orthodoxy, Ms. Harris places herself closer to Americans not only on the issues themselves but also on voters’ heterodox approaches to life, values and politics. Taking popular positions is one thing; having credibility in the minds of voters is another.

So Ms. Harris must continue to vice-signal with gusto. She has an opportunity to change the public’s perception of Democrats as the orthodox party — to ask people to take down their lawn signs touting tolerance and instead actually be tolerant of a diversity of views.

Adam Jentleson, is a former chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and the author of “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.”

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