Does policy matter? Lessons from two elections and one ongoing campaign

The last of the national elections that defined 2024 — which was, by any standards, an epic year for election enthusiasts — is rapidly approaching. Three score and ten days remain for the citizens of the United States to pick a government; and, while it was the Republicans who were the party of Abraham Lincoln, it is the Democrats who are clothing themselves in his mantle this time around, declaring they are “for the people”.
 

One question that is worth asking at this point, however, is this: Are elections about policy, after all?
 

The Democratic Party has surged in opinion polls recently —- though probably not enough to win — because of what people are calling “vibes”. The replacement on the ticket of the current octogenarian President by his much younger vice-president seemed sufficient to significantly expand the party’s coalition of voters. Data shows, for example, that the median age of donors to Kamala Harris’ campaign is 56, while the same statistic for Joe Biden’s campaign was 66. (The distribution of donors to the President was also significantly skewed, with the mode at above 70.)
 

This has happened without a significant shift in policies. After all, vice-presidents cannot exactly define themselves independently from the Presidents they serve. To some extent, Ms Harris’ rhetoric about issues like peace in West Asia is distinct from that of her boss — in her convention speech, she focused both on defending Israel but also on the rights of the Palestinians. But the criticism that her campaign has been light on broader policy initiatives may be relatively justified.

But, if the vibes are working, do policy proposals even matter? Perhaps it does under certain circumstances.

For example, they can define you negatively. At the Democratic National Convention last week, speaker after speaker referred to plans and initiatives that had been outlined by the right-wing, Washington DC-based think tank The Heritage Foundation in a publication they called “Project 2025”. This purported to be a set of policies that could be implemented immediately by a possible second Donald Trump administration. Mr Trump has sought to distance himself from the effort. But, given the close links between some of the authors involved and his own campaign circles, that denial hasn’t exactly taken hold.
 

This is the worst of both worlds for Mr Trump. A man who normally doesn’t like to engage in policy details (or read long and detailed books) is having to avoid being defined by a 920-page policy document that his own election consultants didn’t vet. He won in 2016 without any policy details of note; he would like to avoid discussing such details still; but instead his campaign has to address policy questions, from abortion to education, that he would like to leave unresolved. The Democratic politician Pete Buttigieg pointed out “the biggest scandal of the year is actually a policy scandal … The simple fact that they wrote down their own policies”. There are shades here of the way that constitutionally guaranteed reservations emerged as a problem that the Bharatiya Janata Party had to address in India’s elections earlier this year.
 

The other way that policy proposals matter is that they can, if necessary, redefine you or your party. This may be an interpretation of how the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, for example, approached its manifesto for the parliamentary election it swept earlier this year. The most important aspect of their claim was that everything was “fully costed” — in other words, nothing made it into their manifesto that did not have a clear and transparent cost for the public exchequer, a cost that was paid for in some other way. This infuriated the left of the party. But it was a useful way to distinguish Keir Starmer’s Labour from that of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, whose shambolic 2019 campaign included spending promises of all sorts, including some that seemed to be added on in the final weeks without any real thought. It also distinguished Labour from a Conservative Party that, following unfunded tax cut proposals from the short-lived administration of Liz Truss, seemed to have irresponsibly crashed the UK economy.
 

Policy-based arguments at an election can be a straitjacket when you have to govern later. The “tough on immigration” policies that Labour promised during the campaign, for example, did not exactly address how questions of integration and assimilation would be handled domestically. But the latter is now surely a major priority, after right-wing riots in parts of the country this month. The government is also quite clearly looking for excuses to spend more — for example, in reviving certain infrastructure projects — than it had earlier promised to do.
 

If Ms Harris is elected, she will have less constraining her. In the end, the issues that will dominate the US election — abortion, inflation, and the state of American democracy — are not exactly those that a President can control through a policy announcement on day one or even in year one. Her argument here is necessarily negative: That the other candidate has the wrong approach to administration and policy, and she has the right one. The border between “vibes” and policy is narrow, in this telling.
 

This is a familiar approach in India. Few elections have been defined by manifestos, but manifestos have often been seen as a guide to how the rival parties will govern. At least one major party — the Bahujan Samaj Party — famously abandoned even the idea of manifestos decades ago. Its leaders have made the justifiable claim that, in a country defined by historic disadvantages and divisions, and where there is a reasonable consensus on the direction of policy, what matters is how effective and inclusive administration is. Although the BSP is an electoral also-ran today, it is worth noting that this approach gained them considerable success in the past.
 

It is also, perhaps, a guide to how the Opposition will have to deal with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Mr Modi’s long-running administration likes to set targets, but does not always want to run on specific aspects of the reform that would make it possible. The implicit assumption here is that the voting public trusts Mr Modi and his party to deliver these targets better than any alternatives. The Opposition has focused on critical mobilisation against any of the specific policies or reforms when they are finally announced — to land, or farm regulation, or lateral entry into the bureaucracy. But this may not be as effective as it could be unless they also tackle the “vibes”. They have to convince the public that the incumbents cannot be trusted to implement whatever policies are chosen. This is much harder.

The writer is director, Centre for the Economy and Growth, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi