The Kamala and Tim Show

The “tacos” video set the stage. Released by the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign days before the Democratic convention, it showed Harris and Walz chatting at a jazz club in Detroit — new running mates and sudden besties, laughing about their differences. They compare musical tastes (he’s Springsteen and Seger; she’s Aretha and Prince). She mocked him for not answering her phone call. She teased him for eating what he calls “white-guy tacos.” (“What does that mean, like mayonnaise and tuna?” she said. “What are you doing?”)

The running mate relationship is one of the most artificial alliances in politics, which is why campaigns struggle to define it. Some pitch their candidates as instant soulmates: In 1992, Bill Clinton and Al Gore danced to Fleetwood Mac and pretended to embark on a buddy-movie road trip. Some treat the ticket as a business arrangement: In 2016, Donald Trump didn’t think much of Mike Pence , and their awkward half-hug at the Republican convention suggested the feeling was mutual.

The Harris-Walz campaign has tried a different kind of introduction, full of cute banter and self-deprecating jokes (she loves Venn diagrams; he harbors strong opinions about gutters ). It’s been read as a pitch to the TikTok generation, but for older voters of a certain age, it has a familiar ring. If Trump slammed into politics with the tropes of 2000s-era reality TV, Harris and Walz, intentionally or not, are projecting something different: a sitcom vibe. And not just any sitcom — the multi-camera family shows of the 1980s.

Harris and Walz both came of age in those years, when cable had yet to splinter viewers’ habits and everyone was glued to the same three networks, broadcast on 20-inch screens. It was hard to escape the laugh tracks and living rooms, whether they had the upper-middle-class trappings of Growing Pains and The Cosby Show or the working-class grit of What’s Happening Now!! (There was also, of course, a workplace-family sitcom called Coach .) If Harris and Walz truly speak in wisecracks, it might be because the setup-punchline-eye roll rhythm was seared into their brains.

But there’s a reason, beyond generational reflex, that the Harris campaign would sometimes adopt a sitcom voice. Long before a wave of single-camera comedies filled TV with detestable characters and absurdist scenarios , these shows established a model of everyday American life with a particular aesthetic: wholesome and warmhearted, with an ear for kitchen-table problems, an appetite for sprawling blended families and a template for gently overcoming differences. Family Ties began with a political premise: Two hippies find themselves raising a son who is a briefcase-toting Reagan Republican. They always wound up hugging in the end.

The analogy isn’t perfect, not least because ‘80s sitcoms existed at a different moment in race and gender relations. Today, it’s hard not to cringe at the concept of Diff’rent Strokes (white Park Avenue family adopts two Black kids from Harlem; hijinks ensue), and it’s difficult to separate Bill Cosby’s iconic dad on The Cosby Show from his real-life crimes.

And of course, the more attention the Harris-Walz campaign gets for folksy videos and cute character memes, the more it faces criticism for sidestepping the details on substantive issues. Still, in a race that’s sure to hinge on personality as much as policy — against an opponent who’s a master at creating a TV-worthy buzz — the Harris campaign has reason to embrace a certain moment in American culture. Here’s how the campaign can feel like a sitcom version of itself and where the politicians might take a hint from the shows themselves.

The blended/found family

It may have started with The Brady Bunch in the ‘70s, but many ‘80s sitcom families were built on the idea that families are created as much through circumstance as blood. Sometimes it was the constraints of a limited set and a 22-minute running time; parents dispensed advice to their teenagers’ friends as if they were their own. Sometimes it was high-concept: A British butler or a literal alien wound up in a middle-class suburban home. (The title character of ALF was a fuzzy creature from the fictional planet Melmac, who somehow spoke with a Vaudevillian patter.) Sometimes it was TV’s way of turning tragedy into farce: The premise of Full House was that a TV anchor’s wife died in a car accident, so he invited his hot musician brother-in-law and his nerdy stand-up-comic best friend to help him raise his three daughters. Lo and behold, they had different parenting styles.

In this spirit, Harris’ blended family took center stage at the Democratic convention; even her husband’s ex-wife was on hand to lend support. Harris’ racially diverse nieces and stepchildren spoke admiringly of their aunt and stepmom. Walz and his wife shared their experience with reproductive technology, underscoring the modern ways that families come to be. It was a made-for-TV setpiece, hugs and all — though, to be fair, the Trumps have a blended family, too.

The cool woman and the dorky guy

In many ‘80s sitcoms, women were the straight-men, so to speak, offering up amused reaction shots as the men spun off in unapologetic nerd-dom. On Growing Pains , Dr. Jason Seaver did gangly dances in sweater vests as his newspaper-reporter wife, Maggie, looked on, indulging his ongoing efforts to look cool. In one 1985 episode, he took his son to a Springsteen concert, then embarrassed him by giving him a noogie in front of a local TV crew. It worked out in the end when the son realized that dad was just being himself.

In the Harris-Walz campaign dynamic, she’s clearly the cool one, praising his experience as a coach while still poking gentle fun at his Minnesota blandness. And the campaign has positioned second gentleman Doug Emhoff as a nerdy goofball who happened to marry a cool girl. At the Democratic convention, Emhoff’s son Cole made an introductory video with serious sitcom energy, between the Bar Mitzvah photo of his father with the outlandishly large bow tie and jokes about Emhoff’s athletic prowess and cooking skills. “I thought, what is my goofy dad doing here?” Cole says — which is basically the premise of a dozen ‘80s shows.

The light self-mocking trickles down to campaign artifacts. Trump’s official merch is all defiance and triumph: mug shots with the terms “Never Surrender!” and “Not Guilty!” Harris’, by contrast, is quirky and familiar: T-shirts with resurrected yearbook-style photos of Harris, a “Coach” T-shirt and a pack of old-school, football-themed iron-on patches to represent Walz. There’s also a “throwback Doug mug” with a picture of a teenage Emhoff in a Laguna Beach T-shirt.

The woman in charge

TV has had a way of easing America into accepting “firsts” and sweeping cultural changes. In the ‘80s, that was the rise of women’s economic and political power. Before third-wave feminism fully took hold, TV offered Who’s the Boss? in which a high-powered female advertising executive hired a jock as a housekeeper. Clair Huxtable of The Cosby Show was married to a doctor but had a legal career in her own right. Growing Pains began when mom went back to work, so dad had to move his psychiatry practice into the house and — say it ain’t so! — watch the kids after school. Still, there were very few fights about the household division of labor or the gender pay gap.

Now, the Harris campaign has to ease Americans into seeing a woman as a potential president. (It didn’t go so well in 2016.) And while Harris has long campaigned about gender writ large — the Dobbs decision and reproductive rights are winning issues for Democrats — she’s far less likely than Hillary Clinton to highlight the historic nature of her candidacy. Harris is positioning herself as a top cop in heels — a seasoned prosecutor who will shut down interrupters with a signature “I’m speaking” — but her Facebook profile describes her as “Wife, Momala, Auntie. She/her.”

The Very Special Episode

Many of the weekly problems in ‘80s sitcoms were small-bore and personal: concert tickets and school dances and miniature moral dilemmas. But every so often, the writers took on a serious subject, and the mood shifted from lighthearted romp to Afterschool Special . Mr. Belvedere did an episode on Alzheimer’s disease. Silver Spoons did child abuse. Family Ties did alcoholism … and embezzlement … and death. Punky Brewster had an episode about a serial killer on the loose. Nancy Reagan showed up on Diff’rent Strokes to make a pitch for the War on Drugs.

The Harris campaign is trying to flip the ratio: putting issues front and center, while still leaving room for casual banter on Facebook Reels . (Facebook, after all, is where the ‘80s sitcom audience now lives.) Still, it’s notable that Harris’ first one-on-one TV interview as a presidential nominee took place with Walz at her side. Talking to CNN’s Dana Bash, the pair addressed the issues: Harris talked fracking and Israel; Walz admitted to misspeaking about his military service.

But near the end of the televised hour, in a short interstitial clip, they reprised their sitcom shtick — with an assist from Bash. “What about the spice situation?” Bash asked Walz, as the three of them ordered barbecue. “I’m going to let him speak for himself,” Harris said. All that was missing was the canned laughter.