Democrats are in mourning after the November 5 defeat, but it’s not a bad time to appreciate what the party’s presidential nominee accomplished, even though she fell short of victory, and I wrote about how far she came at New York:
On March 12, the presidential contest was locked into place. On that day, Donald Trump clinched his third presidential nomination and Joe Biden clinched the Democratic nomination. Biden’s accomplishment had been in somewhat greater doubt than Trump’s owing to his party’s deep concerns about his advanced age and unpopularity. Despite that, he had put aside some of his own and his party’s anxiety about his running for reelection in part because of fears that if Vice-President Kamala Harris were the nominee, she would be incapable of beating Trump. Indeed, there had earlier been talk of Biden dumping Harris from the ticket to find a more appealing vice-president.
Suffice it to say that almost no one at the beginning of 2024 had Harris as the Democratic nominee on their bingo cards. Yet she seamlessly took over the party when Biden withdrew from the race following a catastrophic debate performance against Trump on June 27. She subsequently united Democrats, made big gains in the polls against Trump, and produced an incredibly close race that fell just short.
This sudden leap to the threshold of the White House represented a distinct contrast with the slow and steady progress Harris made earlier in her career. While Trump’s first successful run for office in 2016 was something of a lateral transfer from the heights of popular culture he had long commanded as a reality-TV star and a fixture of New York high society, Harris was then only just entering Washington. She had spent the previous quarter-century as a state and local prosecutor, rising through the ranks of California law enforcement and politics. Within three years, this junior senator was running for president, and the next year she was elected vice-president. During her years as a prosecutor, she was known as much for her interpersonal as for her professional accomplishments, becoming a staple of California’s more rarefied circles despite her own modest background as a child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants. Harris’s views and interests fit her comfortably into the pragmatic-progressive wing of her state’s Democratic Party. But she showed some real toughness in winning her first statewide race in the tea-party year of 2010, narrowly defeating the popular Los Angeles district attorney to become California attorney general. By then, she was known as an ally of President Barack Obama, whom she had backed early in his 2008 candidacy when he was an underdog running against Hillary Clinton. Her 2020 presidential campaign was very much modeled on Obama’s historic effort, after a period of senatorial tempering when she was a notably effective member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
But seeking a “lane” to the presidential nomination in a crowded field led Harris to take some notably left-bent positions that would later help Trump label her as an extremist, including support for single-payer health care, total commitment to LGBTQ rights, and criminal-justice reforms that extended to decriminalization of illegal border crossings. When her candidacy failed (after a brief moment of ascendence in 2019 when she scored major points against early front-runner Joe Biden over his one-time opposition to busing) amid signs of disorganization and strategic mistakes, her reputation as a rising political superstar took a hit. But her many assets were enough to make her a logical choice as Biden’s running-mate in 2020, and she did a fine job as a vice-presidential candidate, never upstaging her boss but not submerging her identity in his either.
While she will be eternally grateful to Biden for lifting her to the vice-presidency when other options were entirely available, the 46th president did her few favors once they were in office. Even as it became apparent that the new administration’s handling of migrants and asylum petitions was controversial and quickly unpopular, he placed Harris in the highly visible position of representing the new administration in Latin America, where she was sent on a hopeless journey to persuade refugees from poverty and violence to stay home. No, she was not “border czar,” but her association with the issue was indelible. She was also charged with being the public face of another administration initiative that wasn’t unpopular but was doomed: a drive to enact a national voting-rights measure over a Republican filibuster in the Senate. She finally got the chance to do something distinctive and in her wheelhouse when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Biden’s reluctance to talk about abortion in the frank language the wave of state bans and restrictions demanded soon led Harris to become the administration’s — and to a considerable extent, the Democratic Party’s — chief advocate for the restoration of reproductive rights.
But even as her public profile improved (along with her job-approval ratings), Harris had to negotiate without a hint of disloyalty the seas of Democratic unhappiness about Biden’s age, unpopularity, and signs of unfitness for another four years as president. When the crisis of his candidacy erupted after his disastrous performance in the June debate with Trump, Harris was ready. As steady pressure from Capitol Hill and around the country confronted Biden with his eroding support, she was even steadier in her support for her boss. And when Biden finally came to grips with the necessity of his self-sequestration as Democratic nominee, the moment came and went when the president and party might have seriously entertained the idea of choosing someone other than Harris as a successor via a “blitz primary” or some other gimmick for starting the nomination process all over again just before or even at the Democratic Convention in August. Biden, determined to control the nomination even as he abandoned it, never wavered in harnessing his withdrawal to a firm endorsement of his vice-president as his replacement, and after just a few days of uncertainty, the party, including every potential alternative to Harris, fell into line.
It was this all but miraculous switchover, which angry and confused Republicans called a “coup,” that in turn produced the sense of relief and excitement that made the DNC a lovefest and gave Harris the kind of almost-immediate lead over Trump (in fundraising, enthusiasm, and the polls) that Biden could never achieve.
Harris’s struggle against Trump was a tempestuous contest that steadily tightened as the former president hammered away at her on one level as a progressive (or as he calls her, a “Marxist”) extremist and at a much lower, personal level as a “low-IQ” diversity queen as unfit as Biden to serve and sharing the responsibility for his alleged policy failures. Her own campaign combined old-school Democratic base mobilization with a clear focus on converting anti-Trump Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, even as she continued her demands for the restoration of abortion rights and laid down an economic and immigration platform differing just enough from Biden’s to make her credible as a “change” candidate. As the race entered its final phase, Harris stepped up media appearances and began to stress her own version of the threat to democracy posed by Trump, focusing on his dangerous unpredictability and hinting at an age-based unfitness reminiscent of what Republicans said of Biden. Despite what happened on November 5, Harris almost certainly doing better than any Democrat could have anticipated in the doldrums of June.
No Republican has ever lost Ohio and won the Presidency likely for two very good reasons I can think of:
1. Ohio is worth 20 EV making it one of the biggest swing states. You really can’t write off 20 EVs and have a lot of chance at the whole thing.
2. Ohio is a slightly right to the middle of the road state and any Republican not carrying it will also likley be loosing many other states.
NO causal relationship with the Ohio thing. It’s just a battleground state. 3 seperate influences, Farm Belt, Industrial Midwest, and appalachia. It is true that no Republican has won without carrying Ohio. But that just means Ohio is illustrative of trends in battleground states and not a causal agent.
As other states gain population and Ohio loses it, this relationship may break down.
As far as the 4 big states, 2 are blue (Michigan, Pennsylvania) The other two are up in the air (Ohio, FL) I’d like to see Kerry take em both early so I can go to bed.
Based on your comments I have told everyone I know that Kerry will win. I just hope it’s not hopeful spin.
There is a very real possibility that Bush will lose the EV and win the popular.
Oh, the Gods are nothing if not amused.
cheers.
If Kerry carries three out of four of those battleground states or more, then even if he loses WI, he seems to be leading in Iowa, he would win. Is it true that Kerry might carry Arkansas? That seems unlikely.
On the Osama tape, which could determine the outcome of the election, it is curious how the right has had NO problem proclaiming without condemnation in the media and insinuating in the campaign that Osama favors Kerry. Krauthammer (in the Washington Post a few weeks ago) and now Safire (in the NY Times) and lately — with a flap from the Kerry camp — FOX have insisted WITHOUT EVIDENCE that this is so. But now there is evidence of the opposite but liberals are squeemish or dutifully cowed. (Kerry, unlike on flipflop, where both he and the mainstream media, including liberals, were all but silent for 5 months, only raising the issue AFTER the Republican Convention, obviously can’t speak to this issue. On flipflop, Jonathan Chait devastated the spin, then went on to explain away press silence (none dare say ‘justifying the lying’) on the issue.
Here’s a letter on the Osama tape that I sent to the NY Times. Like my last 50 letters, they surely won’t print this one either. But progressives really should have forced the mainstream media to confront this issue:
To the editor:
William Safire’s “Osama Casts His Vote” (op-ed, Nov 1) is remarkable for brazenly levelling the potent standard Republican charge that Al Qaeda released the tape to help Kerry, but then diverts attention to other subjects without making any substantive argument to back his point. Using a semantic method of argument, that bin Laden is “echoing” the Kerry campaign in suggesting that Bush is deceptive is itself a transparent sleight of hand — as if bin Laden could not possibly have gotten that bizarre notion anywhere else. But then, to top off the argument, he claims, as do all Republican and many Democratic pundits, that the tape helps Bush substantially.
So bin Laden releases a tape certain to help Bush in order to help Kerry? The more powerful argument, meekly given short shrift in passing by Maureen Dowd in “Will Osama Help W.?” (op-ed Oct 31), that “some intelligence experts suggest” that Osama prefers Bush for the latter’s foolish belligerence, fits the facts of the situation. Dowd also understates the case: Bush has failed to pursue Al Qaeda full force since the Afghanistan War, while also handing jihadism “Christmas” in the form of the Iraq war. Why wouldn’t and doesn’t bin Laden prefer Bush, a preference consistent with his actions?
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I know that this is an uncomfortable issue, but the playing field has been one-sided, and, as in flipflop, this could decide the election. Even if Kerry, in spite of all this and the distortions of the Matt Bai Oct 10 article that became the theme for the last three weeks of the Republican campaign, manages to win, in a truly level playing field, the Dems should have been able to take the White House and the Senate, and put the Repubs in danger of losing the House. But as things have gone, a reverse of 1994 just goes against the grain of the machine agenda.
You note that “no Republican has ever won a presidential election without carrying Ohio.” Indeed, I have heard this factoid repeatedly in various media reports over the past few weeks. In most reports, there is an implied causal relationship between Repubs winning Ohio and winning the White House–a causal relationship I find questionable at best. (Why Ohio–i.e., what is the special relationship between Ohio and Repubs? I also note that I have heard no report concerning the relationship between Ohio–or any other state–and Dems winning the White House.)
Anyway, just wondering if you can shed some light on whether there is in your mind any such causal relationship, or whether this is more a curiosity than anything else.
Thanks for the insightful blog.
I share your analysis, but you are clearly following assuptions that undecideds do not swing to the incumbent. Are your sure, given the emphasis on terrorism/security that seems to trump the Iraq war and economic/health care issues.
It looks like the polls are still over sampling republicans in the national tallies. The state polls seem to be more accurate. What about the Democracy Corp poll…any news yet. Also, the Repubs are still trying to go to the appellate court for the State of Ohio to appeal the decision by the lower court. Is there any news? Thanks for these wonderful and insightful updates on the Polls.