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Five weeks after officially becoming the Democrat party’s candidate for president, Kamala Harris still hasn’t held a press conference. In that span, she has only given one interview, a truncated, heavily scripted affair in which she leaned heavily upon her vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz. Only on Sunday did her campaign get around to posting some of her policy positions on her website.

Democrat power brokers are clearly hoping that they can keep doing this all the way to the Oval Office, and why not? It is an old and venerable American political trick that has worked more than once before: sell the candidate like soap flakes with a campaign that is long on excitement and short on specifics.

The first time this happened in a presidential campaign was 184 years ago. As “Rating America’s Presidents” explains, in 1840, the country’s main opposition party at the time, the Whigs, ran William Henry Harrison for president and John Tyler for vice president — that’s right, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Many years before this, in 1811, Harrison was governor of the Indiana Territory when he defeated a native American confederacy led by the fearsome Tecumseh in the Battle of Tippecanoe. In 1840, the Whigs were determined to get Harrison into the White House not based on his public positions, but rather upon the appeal of the persona they fashioned for him.

Harrison had also run unsuccessfully in 1836. During that campaign, Nicholas Biddle, the former president of the Bank of the United States and a powerful Harrison backer, directed that the candidate should stay quiet about virtually everything: “Let him say nothing—promise nothing. Let no Committee, no Convention, no town meeting ever extract from him a single word about what he thinks now and will do hereafter. Let the use of pen and ink be wholly forbidden as if he were a mad poet in Bedlam.”

This advice went double for 1840. The Whig camp included those who favored the rechartering of the Bank of the United States, federal action to stimulate the economy, and a strong central government, but they also counted among their ranks opponents of all those positions, united only by their opposition of Democrat President Andrew Jackson and Jacksonianism, and hence also of Jackson’s protégé, Martin Van Buren, whom Harrison opposed in both 1836 and 1840.

The Whigs’ lack of a clear message was compounded in 1840 by their choice of John Tyler, an anti-Bank states’ rights advocate who had been a Democrat until he fell out of favor with Jackson. There was nothing unifying this motley group, and so the Whigs had to find an approach for the 1840 campaign that wouldn’t expose their deep divisions on the issues.

In December 1839, the pro-Democrat Baltimore Republican inadvertently handed it to them. The paper derided Harrison as a simple man who was unfit for the presidency: “Give him a barrel of hard cider and a pension of two thousand a year and, my word for it, he will sit the remainder of his days in a log cabin, by the side of a ‘sea-coal’ fire and study moral philosophy.”

A presidential candidate who studied moral philosophy would be most welcome today, but it was the other part of the statement that gave the Whigs their main chance. They took the Democrats’ 1828 strategy of portraying Andrew Jackson as a champion of the common man and took it to the next level.

Harrison became “Old Tippecanoe,” the humble war hero, an ordinary man with simple tastes, content with a log cabin and a jug of hard cider. To this, they contrasted a deeply unfair caricature of Martin Van Buren as an out-of-touch, champagne-drinking, cosseted aristocrat who had spent public funds on lavish furnishings for the White House.

One political cartoon pictured Harrison greeting his visitors, Van Buren and his entourage. “Gentlemen,” says Harrison, “you seem fatigued. If you will accept the fare of a log cabin, with a Western farmer’s cheer, you are welcome. I have no champagne but can give you a mug of good cider, with some ham and eggs, and good clean beds. I am a plain backwoodsman. I have cleared some land, killed some Indians, and made the Red Coats fly in my time.”

The Whigs held rallies, passed out hard cider, staged marches, and generally made the 1840 election into a party celebrating “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” This was all great fun, but it was also the sum of the Whigs’ appeal to the American people. The Democrats were confounded.

One Democrat editorialist vented his frustration: “In what grave and important discussion are the Whig journals engaged?… We speak of the divorce of bank and state; and the Whigs reply with a dissertation on the merits of hard cider. We defend the policy of the Administration; and the Whigs answer ‘log cabin,’ ‘big canoes,’ ‘go it Tip, Come it Ty.’ We urge the re-election of Van Buren because of his honesty, sagacity, statesmanship…and the Whigs answer that Harrison is a poor man and lives in a log cabin.”

No one was interested in appeals to reason. Old Tippecanoe ran the table, defeating Van Buren by 234 electoral votes to 60. Van Buren later suggested that even the Whigs must be ashamed of what they had done: “No one of that number can now hesitate in believing that the scenes thro’ which the Country passed in that great political whirlwind were discreditable to our Institutions and could not fail, if often repeated, to lead to their subversion.”

Van Buren was overly optimistic. These tactics would be repeated again and again. Today we’re getting Tippecanoed again with Kamala’s campaign of “joy.” She is young! She laughs! She’s a woman of color! She isn’t old and mean like Trump! It has worked before. It could work again.