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 agree with the above comments. They are pragmatic and realistic given the current political landscape.
I think the party can moderate some of its views and more importantly, its image, on abortion, guns, and gay marriage while still maintiaining New Deal principles, such as fiscal conservatism,social security and coherent internationalism. Also, we need to distance ourselves from the Hollywood set. It only confirms suspicions that Dems are a bunch of hedonists out to destroy family values. Again, these are image issues, but frankly, image is what sells politics to most voters.
Some call it Republican lite, I call it winning for a change.
Agreed Gabby.
And what I find particularly galling is that even many of the left’s otherwise fairly eloquent theorists and pundits are extremely quick to criticize the Democrats if they diverge even in the slightest way from the New Deal orthodoxy.
Thomas Frank’s book on cultural conservatism makes many good points (particularly about the conservatives’ persecutorial paranoia), but he seems, quite honestly, to be committing the same fallacy he accuses the Kansas Republicans of committing in reverse: he refuses to consider that any person might honestly decide that economics matters less to him than other issues. In Mr Frank’s perfect world, all the rich are Republicans, and all the poor are Democrats.
But this ignores a very basic fact: that it is possible to see the world in terms other than your own advancement. By his logic, I should be a Republican. After all, I’m from a well-to-do neighborhood and would benefit (in the short term anyway) from Bush’s tax cuts. But I’m not a Republican, because to be a Republican I would have to ignore the fact that what’s good for me is actually bad for the rest of the country. While the conservatives’ state of “perpetual victimhood” indeed makes no sense, he refuses to admit that a rational choice may in fact be taking place, albeit in a very strange, prejudicial way.
He also has also been seduced by the far-left myth that the DLC is the Republican Fifth Column in the Democratic party. He seems to blame the DLC for the decline of unions, rather than noting the increasing dissapearance of manufacturing jobs, where unions were most common. He claims the DLC hungers only for the vast soft money in the pockets of the social moderates, despite the fact that McCain-Feingold outlawed this practice even as he wrote the book. He also claims, strangely, that Democrats have backed deregulation and privatization, but offers no examples to prove this assertion. I for one cannot think of a single instance in which Republican deregulation or privatization plans found many friends on the other side of the aisle. Al Gore, if I remember correctly, called the Republican Social Security privatization racket “much too risky.” Hardly the words of a “pawn of business.” Frank also seems content to ignore the failed Clinton health care proposals of 1994, and the Kerry health care proposals of 2004, whose focus on egalitarian access runs strongly counter to the typical corporate line of social Darwinism.
Labor unions were, and still are, an extremely useful engine for progressive change, but to blame their decline on the DLC is simply silly. More likely, it was the oft-repeated right-wing myth of their ties to the Mafia and their corruption that convinced some workers to abandon the unions that had given them so much. The task for the future will be to introduce unions to the service sector, where the vast majority of the working poor are now employed. If this is done, a resurgent labor movement could perhaps wrest some of those blue-collar conservatives from their cultural fears.
I find it rather dissapointing. A brilliant dissection of the far-right’s victimhood fantasies coupled with an inability to see the Democrats as anything but the “union party.” His willfull blindness to the disappearance of manufacturing jobs (coupled with Republican whisper campaigns about unions’ alleged corruption) allows him to blame the “right-wing” DLC for unions’ decline.
The Democrats never left the unions, the union workers just got fired or laid off (manufacturing jobs declined every year after 1960), and the labor movement never really tried to court the new working poor (service workers). That’s changing, thank goodness, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let him say that my party abandoned unions. It’s just not true.
Unfortunately, in the age of television, the cult of personality rules. Anyone who is interesting and good on TV has a shot at being president, provided they have the credentials to be president.
I firmly believe that we do not need to change our policies. We do need to change marketing firms, and we need a new spokesman.
Would Joe Biden have won this race? I don’t know, but I know that if a yellow dog Democrat like me could barely stand to listen to Kerry speak, how terrible must he have been to the middle?
We need the left, we’ve always needed the left, but many of us have been the left. And you know why they call it LEFT? Because you always get LEFT at election time.
Liberals ultimately reject democracy in favor of the elitism which Hannity and Limbaugh allege. That elitism is evident when libs implore that we go left instead of right.
The party has had a Kamakazi wing for decades. That is what we call them. Kamakazi liberals. Always going out in a blaze of moralistic glory.
I’m with Gabby on this one.
Now I grant that I am fairly young (this was my first presidential election), but frankly I think it’s safe to say that purist ultra-liberalism is not a winner in this country. If we stuck to such dogma, we would run the risk of becoming merely mirrors of the Republicans, who blindly trumpet tax cuts and repeal of government aid, even when there is evidence that the tax cuts do nothing constructive, and when the government programs they want to cut are effective.
We should not be about dogma, but rather about what works to get the things we want. The older welfare systems weren’t actually fixing poverty, so we reformed them. The various groups that declare the Democrats aren’t doing enough for them should stop and think: are their interests necessarily those of the whole nation? We should strive for the national interest. My parents, for example, actually would get their taxes raised by the Kerry plan, but voted for him anyway becasue it would be better for the country.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, we need to tweak the message, and that’s all. Ideologically, I think we’re right where we should be. It should be mentioned, also, that with the exception of his anti-war rhetoric Howard Dean was a pragmatic centrist. Just look at his Vermont record. I don’t know how the myth of him as “McGovern II” got started (probably by a right-winger) but it makes no sense.
I don’t recall who it was that said it, but it might have been LBJ.
“To be a politician you have to be able to count.”
It’s a simple thought, and always true. If you don’t have the votes for something, you don’t have the votes for it.
LBJ understood that elections could be stolen, and he also understood that elections could be won, and he did some of both.
To all the young bucks of the party who think the DLC way is selling out, I would remind you that those of us who back the DLC learned our lessons in 1972 and 1984, when we thought we knew better, too. We created the DLC for that reason, because we realized the party had won 1976 by default, meaning in 1984 we really hadn’t won the presidency in 20 years.
We did 1988 your way, and it got us Dukakis.
We did 1992 our way, and it got us Clinton.
Your choice is not DLC or the liberal wing. It is DLC or RNC.
Better wise up and smell the Senate losses.
And don’t talk to me about bona fides. I was a McGovern delegate, and I campaigned with Fritz Mondale. For 20 years now we have fought this battle in the party, and the more the left demands of the party, the further it sinks.
It makes it more depressing in that there is no one to blame like Nader in 2000. We threw everything we had at this and we still lost, and lost solidly.
If this keeps democrats together well I hope thats a good thing because that will mean that the DLC and such types will actually be listening to the new blood once in a while.
I read the article.
So we adopt a right wing Democrat of our own, in order to win. I think this needs to be about presenting the values that Kerry and other traditional, New Deal type Democrats expound rather than putting our tails between our legs and crawling right.
Again…instead of flailing around begging for help from the right of this party, hammer, hammer hammer at the difference between the Republicans and us, as we go through this insane Bush II administration.
If we cannot make our point as Bush takes down the economy, Social Security, the environment, the criminal justice system–not to mention presides over what is turning into an ongoing guerrilla war in Iraq, we are not worth acquiring the office. The point is to embrace the core values of our party, not turn to Republican light, and look at the South as our only hope.