Along with the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner survey released August 9th, Democracy Corps has also released a strategy paper by Stan Greenberg and James Carville.
The paper, titled “From Small Bounce to Big Opportunity” examines Kerry’s post-convention gains on personal characteristics and national security issues and points to ways the campaign can use the theme of “Strength at Home” to address both national security and economic issues, where Kerry has not yet won all the support that he has the potential to attract.
TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 26: The Obama Coalition Revisited
It’s pretty obvious Kamala Harris’s candidacy changes the 2024 presidential race more than a little, and I wrote at New York about one avenue she has for victory that might have eluded Joe Biden:
During her brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, Kamala Harris was widely believed to be emulating Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign strategy. She treated South Carolina, the first primary state with a substantial Black electorate, as the site of her potential breakthrough. But she front-loaded resources into Iowa to prepare for that breakthrough by reassuring Black voters that she could win in the largely white jurisdiction. She had the added advantage of being from the large state of California, where the primary had just been moved up to Super Tuesday (March 3). For a thrilling moment, after her commanding performance in a June 2019 debate, Harris seemed on track to pull off this feat, threatening Joe Biden’s hold on South Carolina in the polls and surging in Iowa. But neither she nor Cory Booker, who also relied on the Obama precedent, could displace Biden as the favorite of Black voters or strike gold in the crowded Iowa field. Out of money and luck, Harris dropped out before voters voted.
Now Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for 2024 without having to navigate any primaries. But she still faces some key strategic decisions. Joe Biden was consistently trailing Donald Trump in the polls in no small part because he was underperforming among young and non-white voters, the very heart of the much-discussed Obama coalition. Can Harris recoup some of these potential losses without sacrificing support elsewhere in the electorate? That is a question she must address at the very beginning of her general-election campaign.
There’s a chance that Harris can inject a bit of the Obama “hope and change” magic into a Democratic ticket that had previously felt like a desperate effort to defend an unpopular administration led by a low-energy incumbent, as Ron Brownstein suggests in The Atlantic:
“Polls have shown that a significant share of Americans doubt the mental capacity of Trump, who has stumbled through his own procession of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and incomprehensible tangents during stump speeches and interviews to relatively little attention in the shadow of Biden’s difficulties. Particularly if Harris picks a younger running mate, she could top a ticket that embodies the generational change that many voters indicated they were yearning for when facing a Trump-Biden rematch …
“In the best-case scenario for this line of thinking, Harris could regain ground among the younger voters and Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted away from Biden since 2020. At the same time, she could further expand Democrats’ already solid margins among college-educated women who support abortion rights.”
Team Trump seems to believe it can offset these potential gains by depicting Harris as a “California radical” and a symbol of diversity who might alienate the older white voters with whom Biden had some residual strength. Obama overcame similar race-saturated appeals in 2008, but he had a lot of help from a financial collapse and an unpopular war presided over by the party of his opponent.
Following Obama’s path has major strategic implications in terms of the battleground map. Any significant improvement over Biden’s performance among Black, Latino, and under-30 voters might put Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina — very nearly conceded to Trump in recent weeks — back into play. But erosion of Biden’s support among older and/or non-college-educated white voters could create potholes in his narrow Rust Belt path to victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
These strategic choices could definitely affect Harris’s choice of a running-mate, not just in terms of potentially picking a veep from a battleground state, but as a way of amplifying the shift produced by Biden’s withdrawal. Brownstein even thinks Harris might consider following Bill Clinton’s 1992 example of doubling down on her own strengths:
“The other option that energizes many Democrats would be for Harris to take the bold, historic option of selecting another woman: Whitmer. That would be a greater gamble, but a possible model would be 1992, when Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate; Gore was, like him, a centrist Baby Boomer southerner—rather than an older D.C. hand. ‘I love Josh Shapiro and I think he would be a great VP candidate, but I would double down’ with Whitmer, [Democratci consultant Mike] Mikus told me. ‘I don’t think you have to go with a moderate white guy. I think you can be bold [with a pick] that electrifies your base.’ I heard similar views from several consultants.”
Whitmer’s expressed disinterest in the veepstakes may take that particular option off the table, but the broader point remains: Harris does not have to — and may not be able to — simply adopt Biden’s strategy and tweak it slightly. She may be able to contemplate gains in the electorate that were unimaginable for an 81-year-old white male incumbent. But the strategic opportunity to follow Obama’s path to the White House will first depend on Harris’s ability to refocus persuadable voters on Trump’s shaky record, bad character, and extremist agenda. Biden could not do that after the debate debacle of June 27. His successor must begin taking the battle to the former president right now.
I’m trying to keep my powder dry, but with the release of the swift boat ads, I’m beginning to think that it’s time MoveOn, or some other 527 make an ad attacking Bush’s VietNam service, starting with the line, “The Republicans spent XX$ producing a political ad attacking Kerry’s military record. Perhaps it’s time we looked at what George W. Bush was doing during the VietNam war…” then they could ask some tough questions about how many men he jumped ahead of to get into the TX natl guard, and how many men were sent to VietNam and died there so that the Shrub could sit on his backside swigging beers at the local cantina missing drills.
Frankly, I think it’s time to get dirty.
Don’t get too antsy, boys and girls. It is still a long way from August to November, and the days grow short in late October. There are two debates coming up. I see a real key here in framing the issues prior to those debates so as to set an agenda for them. I’m expecting at least one question to Kerry about the $87 billion vote, and another on the vote to authorize the Iraq fiasco. That will be when Kerry needs to have the right answers, but he’ll need to be consistent with what he says now. What he has to do now is set up the message to come from those debates and to establish low expectations for himself in those debates and higher expectations for George Bush.
Now if there were only a way to fix things so that someone would ask Bush about sovereignty…
Kerry and company need to stay ahead tho.. and not let Bush set the topic of the day by directing questions at Kerry.. they need to diffuse that nonsense and get Bush on the defensive some more..
Meanwhile, it seems Bush is really vulnerable on nat’l security. Unlike 2002, the more moves he takes, the more America realizes that a lot of time has gone by and yet not a lot has been accomplished. And because it all depends on framing the possibility of terror, which can be interpreted in any way even on the most clear days, there is near inertia in his numbers.
Of course, the sad spectacle of his CIA chief nominee being outspooked by Michael Moore: http://martinirepublic.com/item/cia-chief-nominee-outspooked-by-michael-moore …won’t help with prospective converts, either.