20/20 Foresight

Once an election is over, hindsight can make the winner’s strategy look perfect and the loser’s seem doomed. As my colleague Jonathan Swan said recently on “The Daily”: “The winning campaign, everything they did was genius, and then the losing campaign are just a bunch of idiots. And the truth is that neither is necessarily true.”

The truth instead tends to be that presidential campaigns make strategic decisions that come with benefits as well as costs. And those decisions aren’t guaranteed to succeed or fail.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll analyze a core strategy that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have each pursued. After Tuesday, I suspect we will come to see both as crucial, albeit in different ways.

Harris’s caution

On paper, Harris is the underdog. In rich countries around the world, incumbents are doing badly; the ruling parties in Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy and Japan have all recently lost power. In the U.S., President Biden has a 40 percent approval rating, and less than 30 percent of adults are satisfied with the country’s direction.

Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, points out that voters appear eager for change and specifically seem skeptical of progressivism. (I recommend his essay on the subject.)

Given this backdrop, Harris has run a strikingly cautious campaign. Game theorists would describe it as a low-variance strategy. She and her aides avoided moves that might have gone very well — and might have gone very poorly.