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.
There’s no way in hell Obama’s going to pick Nunn for VP. There’s no reason to say why; anyone with half a brain knows why and it doesn’t need to be explained. Nunn’s just another old man in a country that’s had enough of old men.
Well, Steve Kornacki at the New York Observer offers one explanation — Nunn is Sistah Souljah:
“That Mr. Nunn is from a Southern state doesn’t hurt, and that some on the left have begun carping about his conservative record on social issues like gay rights is actually a political plus, too – a chance for Mr. Obama to reach out to center-right swing voters who roll their eyes at the liberal interest-group establishment.”
http://www.observer.com/2008/obama-and-cheney-option
Yeah, all of those soldiers who got early discharges for being part of the “liberal interest-group establishment” (for which read: queer) WILL just carp carp carp. They didn’t just start doing it, though. Where’s Karnacki been since the mid 1990’s? Apparently the choice of Nunn will reassure anybody troubled by the fear that Obama might have actually meant it about gays and lesbians being citizens too.
I actually agree with Karnacki on that point. It’s just what I’ve said before — if Obama picks Nunn, I won’t believe him on gay issues either. I’m already a skeptic.
“Lieberman’s position on military ballots in FL was dictated to him by the Gore campaign. It was only a “surprise” to those hard-line lawyers who were out of the Gore political loop. Moreover, Gore probably wouldn’t have even been in the position to win FL without Lieberman’s presence on the ticket (look at the 2000-2004 numbers in South Florida).”
I suppose I could have intuited the latter, but I’m happy to know the former. Lieberman’s statement at the time infuriated me. I honor our servicemen, but I don’t happen to think that the vote of a peacetime soldier in Germany is more important than that of a WWII veteran in Florida — and the latter were expected to follow the rules, sign their absentee ballots, and get them postmarked before Election Day.
Ducdebrabant:
I don’t think there’s any real chance of Nunn going on the ticket unless he offers something like the “repentence” you are suggesting.
Have to quibble with one of your analogies, though: Lieberman’s position on military ballots in FL was dictated to him by the Gore campaign. It was only a “surprise” to those hard-line lawyers who were out of the Gore political loop. Moreover, Gore probably wouldn’t have even been in the position to win FL without Lieberman’s presence on the ticket (look at the 2000-2004 numbers in South Florida).
Look, I hold zero brief for Lieberman these days; I seem to be “to the left” of a lot of Democrats who think he should be stripped of his committee assignment if he keeps attacking Obama; I think the mere act of endorsing McCain is enough grounds for booting him out of the Caucus as soon as is practicable.
But that doesn’t mean we have to accept a lot of revisionist history about Lieberman’s responsibility for Bush. If anything, Gore lost FL when he failed to push for a statewide recount from the get-go, as a lot of us felt at the time.
Thanks for the comments.
Ed Kilgore
It’s been pointed out to me on another site that a repentant Sam Nunn would be a very dramatic development and a real boost to gay people. So it would. The repentance is missing, though. He makes no apologies, offers no regrets, makes no promises, refuses to state a present position, and then he does something really surprising. He has the gall to claim credit for the fact that gay men and women, thanks to DADT, no longer have to lie on enlistment forms as they did pre-DADT. Thanks to DADT, perhaps, but very little thanks to Sam Nunn, who wanted to keep things exactly as they were. Neither DADT nor anything resembling it was his original position. If he’d had his way completely, they’d still be lying on enlistment forms and, I suppose, still be getting dishonorable discharges. You know, instead of just discharges. He’s a long way from admitting he was wrong, and that is a bottom line prerequisite in my view.
Sam Nunn could be a mistake if the Obama campaign is serious about winning Colorado, New Mexico or possibly Nevada. 2004 exit polls in Colorado indicated that 4% of voters were gay/lesbian. Many gay men (less so lesbians) hold a surprising positive view of McCain, particularly in these Western states. Placing someone like Nunn with such a distinguished pedigree of heterosexism/homophobia could prove a mistake. Why risk Colorado, New Mexico or Nevada (all will be very close) on the off chance you might pull in Georgia. At the very least, Nunn will need to do some explaining to these voters as to why he now thinks “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” should be revisited, and what are his current views.
More importantly, elevating a conservative, Southern white male into the future leadership of the Democratic Party is a mistake for 2016 and beyond. The Democrats need to look West, Northwest, and Southwest as they consider their future, not to the remnants of the old Democratic base in Dixie.
Perhaps Bowers is easier to differ with than Jonathan Capehart, whose article “Don’t Ask Nunn” was in the Washington Post last Wednesday:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/10/AR2008061002527.html
It may have been just a matter of time, but not quite as much time as it took Bowers. The comparison of Nunn to Lieberman may fail in one way, but unless Nunn enthusiastically embraces Obama’s program, I’d be very much worried about his independence turning into obstruction. He turned on a President of his own party already, when he was in the Senate, and what is the Vice President but President of the Senate? Another surprise like Lieberman’s jumping to the Republican position on putative military ballots in Florida without signatures or dates is not something I would care to see.
Nunn of course deserves credit for his work on non-proliferation.