This Election Has Been Defined by Presidential Policy Pandering
In June, former President Trump traveled to Las Vegas where he unexpectedly revealed a new tax idea: no taxes on tips. Why was Trump suddenly so keen on eliminating taxes on tipped earnings? Because he was trying to win the electorally important state of Nevada, which is home to a large number of Las Vegas-area service workers who rely heavily on tips for income.
This wasn’t a policy that fit into some broader framework or comprehensive theory of how taxes should work. It was an idea, floated in the middle of a rambling speech, targeting a specific, electorally important group, and offering them a benefit through the tax code.
Trump didn’t even try to pretend otherwise. At the June rally, he announced the plan, saying, “for those hotel workers and people that get tips you’re going to be very happy because when I get to office, we are going to not charge taxes on tips people (are) making.”
There’s a word for this: pandering. And it has defined many policy proposals from both the Trump and Harris campaigns this year.
In recent weeks, for example, Democrats have grown concerned that their party’s candidate was not connecting with men, and in particular with black men. So Harris began to tout an “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” that included fully forgivable loans of up to $20,000 to black entrepreneurs.
As it turned out, the loans wouldn’t be limited to black men, because that would probably be illegal. But the Harris campaign marketed them that way for the same reason that Trump pushed ending taxes on tips in Las Vegas—as an election season ploy to win votes from a specific cohort the campaign wanted to court.
Trump’s tax pandering wasn’t limited to tipped wages: Over the course of his campaign, he has proposed eliminating taxes on Social Security (to court seniors) and on overtime pay. He even proposed retroactive tax deductibility on generator purchases, after a series of brutal hurricanes hit the east coast. Even with election season coming to a close, he has continued to roll out new ideas. At his Madison Square Garden rally over the weekend, he proposed “a tax credit for family caregivers who take care of a parent or a loved one.”
The last one was likely a response to the Harris campaign’s proposal to require Medicare to cover long-term care. The Harris plan was minimally sketched out and of dubious value; it would be expensive, and it probably wouldn’t work all that well.
But as with Harris’ price gouging plan—which at times was described as a sweeping system of quasi-price controls and at times cast as a modest expansion of state law surrounding price hikes during emergencies that would rarely be used—the point wasn’t really to propose a plausible, detailed policy that could actually be executed, or at least discussed in terms of real benefits and tradeoffs.
The point was to have something to say on the campaign trail about long-term care. It was more of a marketing concept than a plan for governance.
Trump, who has always been better at marketing products than delivering them, needed something he could say in response; it was pandering matched with counter-pandering. And Trump isn’t the only one to engage in this counter-pandering either. After Trump pushed his no-taxes-on-tips idea this summer, the Harris campaign adopted it as their own. The two camps have been in a race to see which can out-pander the other.
Far too much of this year’s presidential campaign has followed this playbook, or something similar, on both sides of the aisle. Policy proposals are treated not as opportunities for coherent, holistic visions of government and its responsibilities, but as vote-getting handouts to specific constituencies or voter worries. Food costs too much? Here’s a vague price gouging proposal. Inflation hitting tipped workers hard? How about we eliminate taxes on tips? Hurricanes? How about a tax break for generators? Democrats worried they might lose black men? Here’s a series of loans cast as an opportunity agenda.
Pandering is hardly new in politics or policy. Politicians have long sought to win constituencies and placate voters with narrowly targeted policies designed to address specific concerns. All politicians pander to some extent.
But in the past, pandering has at least sometimes been a voter outreach tool for politicians with bigger ambitions and clearer visions they intend to pursue. In 2024, there’s hardly anything else in play. The campaign agendas are barely more than marketing one-sheets: half-baked promises to sell to voters with the details to come later. The pandering is the point.
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