Some elections are about big ideas: Should slavery expand to the Western states? How should the federal government respond to the Great Depression? How long should the U.S. military remain in Iraq?
Then there are the small elections.
These are the ones where the candidates propose small, carefully designed ideas to win support among key blocs of voters: passing a targeted tax cut or expanding the social safety net in some small way.
And then there’s whatever this election is.
Vice President Kamala Harris is running a classic small-election campaign.
In many areas, Vice President Kamala Harris is running a classic small-election campaign. She’s proposed lowering prescription drug costs, expanding the tax deduction for startups and passing laws against price-gouging at the grocery store, among other commendable but small-scale ideas.
Underlying her campaign is one very big idea: restoring abortion rights taken away by the Dobbs decision through a new law. But this is mostly about returning to the status quo of just a few years ago, undoing a major change to the fabric of the country that already happened, rather than making a new one.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, is running on big ideas. The problem is that most of them are terrible and it’s unclear to voters which ones he’d seriously pursue.
A group of his former aides put together Project 2025, a drastic plan to dismantle the executive branch and give the president expansive new powers. The proposal is so unpopular that his campaign has repeatedly disavowed it, rather unpersuasively.
But even if you set those ideas aside, he has proposed some dramatic ones entirely on his own: imposing an across-the-board tariff on all imported goods, deporting millions of immigrants, abolishing the Department of Education, repealing the Biden administration’s efforts to fight climate change, pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, launching politically motivated prosecutions of his opponents and reducing aid to Ukraine for the fight against Russia, among other things.
The consequences of these proposals would be disastrous. Economists warn the tariffs could boost inflation as much as 1.2% while costing a typical middle-class household more than $2,600 per year. Mass deportations would tear families and communities apart while triggering labor shortages and slowing job growth. Conditions on everything from basic democracy to climate change would be worse.
In this context, Harris’ small-ball campaign makes sense: It keeps Trump’s big, bad ideas in the spotlight and widens the exit ramp from the GOP ticket for Trump-skeptical Republicans and conservative-leaning independents. But it does offer a weird contrast. It’s as if you asked your friends where to go for dinner, and one suggested Applebee’s and the other a multistate crime spree. Many voters recall similar apocalyptic warnings about his 2016 campaign. Still, convincing voters of the risks of Trump’s ideas can be difficult. Many recall similar apocalyptic warnings about his 2016 campaign and feel like his actual presidency wasn’t that bad. Others think his simplistic ideas just might work. Polls show slim majorities favor his plans for tariffs and mass deportations, apparently unaware or disbelieving of their disastrous effects on the economy. And Trump throws out so many ideas in such a haphazard way, some voters simply don’t believe he’ll follow through on any of them. After all, he has proposed building 10 futuristic “freedom cities” on federal land and developing flying cars. No one thinks he’s actually going to do that. And he failed to follow through on most of his 2016 campaign proposals, keeping only 23% of his promises, according to a tally by PolitiFact. These include some of his biggest and most memorable pledges, such as building a border wall with Mexico and repealing the Affordable Care Act. There’s something sad about all of this. Trump’s pre-politics celebrity and dedicated fan base allow him unprecedented freedom to propose bold ideas that would sink other politicians. But he wastes it on proposals that would trash existing institutions and hurt the vulnerable. When he does have a good idea — like rebuilding America’s roads, bridges and airports — he lacks the ability to follow through, leaving it to his successor. At its best, a presidential campaign can build the will for Americans to do big things: break up monopolies, re-energize the space program or increase access to health care, to name a few examples from the past. That’s not the kind of election we’re getting this year, and it may be a while before conditions are ripe for another election centering on bold proposals. Hopefully, when that time comes, the big ideas won’t also be bad ones.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline. 
