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 that this is unacceptable, yet it is not surprising. The old Democratic establishment does not want to reform its party “from the grassroots down” because they would loose power. The people would be in control, not the McAuliffes.
More here: http://www.politicalthought.net
With his habit of hurling epithets like “Republican lite,” Howard Dean is the best prime example of somebody who (in Nick’s words) “is deeply invested in restarting the DLC/liberal food fights” and would therefore be part of what Nick calls “the rump establishment.”
Dean has done much at the grassroots level and has much to contribute to the party, but he is far too polarizing a figure to be a plausible candidate for DNC chair.
It’s not a left-right thing really … what does that mean anyway? There are probably some “right” things that I could get behind. From where I am, a blue area in what once was a blue state, the party needs to remember its real roots — the people. Those inside the Beltway haven’t a clue, and because of that all they manage to do is try to emulate Republicans. Well, I’m not a Republican. And if someone doesn’t take this party away, far away, from that, I’d say it’s time for a true third party. Read Adam Werbach’s Nov. 3rd Theses (http://www.3nov.com/images/Nov3Theses_letter.pdf) for an idea about that. And forget about any nudges to the center. The party has gone too far in that direction already. And you know what it says to voters when one party keeps trying to look like the other party? That the other party’s right. And it’s not.
To me it’s completely about wresting the party away from the corporate/beltway leadership and building a grassroots party. That’s why I think Dean, Ickes and Rosenberg are the only acceptable candidates.
But really, I don’t think that there is any question that it should be Dean.
Except for being prematurely right about Iraq and bold about his criticisms of the Bush administration, Dean is not particularly liberal. He was part of the DLC at one point. It was however, his strong criticisms of Bush that got the Dems back in the race.
In this last election most of the volunteers on the Kerry campaign started in the Dean campaign. When his candicacy tanked, Dean started DFA, the organization raised $5 million contributed to over 700 candidates up and down the ballot and made a difference in some long shot and pivotal races.
What did Leo Hindery do in ’04? What did Wellington Webb do?
Moving left or right could pull in some swing voters is the classic political theory. But it’s wrong, most people are just not ideological. More important to the vast majority of people is: Does this party or candidate really stand for something? And that’s what Bush succeeded on making the election about: And more people thought they knew where Bush was coming from.
What the Democrats failed to do is to position the central question as simply: Does this guy have any clue about what he’s doing?
Those are the simple things that most people vote about, not ideological tests. And focusing too much on ideological tests detracts from the clear message on other items.
So definitely the most important thing is to stand up for something. That to me is the core problem right now – can one point at anything which the Democrats have stood their ground on in the past 4 years?
First , Kerry did not lose…the election was stolen through frudulent manipulation of the electronic voting system.
That said, Howard Dean is the only possible person to lead the Democratic Party.
We do not need to move ANYMORE to the center. The Democratic Party is already Republican lite!!!
It has to be Howard Dean…there is no one else articulate, passionate or honest enough. All this pontificating is diplomatic and appeasing but too corporate!
I agree with Nick Confessore that this is more a battle between an entrenched establishment and reform forces, with both sides having their fair share of both liberals, moderates and even a few conservatives.
Where I disagree with Confessore’s opinion is his suggestion that it is the OUTSIDERS, the REFORMERS who want to make this a battle about ideology. That may have been true a few years back, but my experience in the Dean campaign has taught me that the #1 reason people got involved in that effort was because they were sick and tired of Democrats rolling over every time the Republicans or the establishment media barked.
It had nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with testicular fortitude.
On the other hand, we have people like Al From and Peter Beinert who continue to frame the debate as one about ideology, as if they are the great defenders of the Democratic big tent against the crowd of pitchfork wielding radical lefties.
I suspect this may have something to do with where both Confessore and I are coming from. He is closer to the insiders than I am, so he can’t see what is so painfully obvious to us out here in the “heartland”.
“Pretty much anyone who is deeply invested in restarting the DLC/liberal food fights is by definition part of this rump establishment, since the distinction of vision between Democratic centrists and liberals pale next to the differences between the Democratic average and the Bush-era conservatives.”
I disagree. There a fundamental differences between DLC and progressive Democrats over, for want of a better term, economic populism that goes to the core of the party’s beliefs. While I would not dispute the need to shake up the party’s beltway establishment, that pales in the face of resolving what the party stands for.
I also thought the TAP piece presented a caricature of progressive Democrats, then and now. Gee, I remember when TAP wasn’t trying to emulate TNR’s rush rightward. Now with such items as this Tapped piece and the presence of people like Matthew Yglesias, I’m beginning to wonder.
Lead, follow, or get out of the way. From where I was working (for the first time ever, in a very red Florida county) all of the leadership and most of the effort came from DFA and MoveOn. I am shocked and infuriated that Kerry lost, that the entire national slate was beaten so badly, with a few brilliant exceptions. When someone suggests Joe Lockhart for chair, I want to scream.
. Top-Down or Bottom-Up .
I think that in addition to the Liberal/Dino conflict and the Washington/Heartland struggles there is the Top/Bottom struggle.
In the past the parties have been lead by the people on top, but with the Dean/Trippi group there was the start of a leadership from the Bottom. Many of us in the Virtual community are starting to suggest that it is possible to have a party that interacts with us rather than just uses the WEB as a way to gather money and foot soldiers.
It may be that this time the struggle for the DLC leadership is between those who want a classical party structure and those who whould like to explore if the party can really be organized as a Bottom-Up representative group.
If the Bottom-up’ers are represented then perhals we can develop the tools, community, etc. so that we can really separate the CORE democratic/progressive/populist… issues from those that are desirable or wedge issues, and then ofcourse proceed to properly frame/communicate these to the people who also believe in them.
It is hard not to come across as a sychophant, great post Ruy, I wish this could be fed into an amplifying circut.
I can’t say I agree. Since we live in an age where just a slight nudge to the center on a few key issues (partial-birth abortion? terrorism? gay marriage?) could mean the difference between getting a Democrat elected–both as President and to Congress–those small policy differences between Democratic centrists and liberals become very much personified, though they pale materially in comparison to the average Democratic views the Bush-era conservatives. Love the site and the book. thanks.