I’ve been offline for a while, because I happened to emerge from an election watch event in Washington precisely at the moment when the networks projected Obama to win the presidency.
Downtown D.C. quickly became a street party, with cars honking horns, people screaming and high-fiving each other, and just about everyone looking happy. I’m sure there were some Republicans in the vicinity, but if so, they kept a low profile or went along with the excitement as a matter of empathy or protective coloration.
Ir was by far the most exciting election celebration I’ve ever witnessed, and it was one of the few times I was happy to be in Washington.
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 appreciate your taking note of it. That’s more than Political Wire is doing.
ducdebrabant:
While I don’t necessarily share your less-than-happy assessment of what Barack Obama will do as president, I do share your anguish about the underside of last night’s results. The Prop 8 win was a shock (check out the county-by-county numbers at the LA Times site to see the very limited areas in which it lost), and the Florida initiative was even worse, since it required so large a vote.
We intend to do some analysis on this subject at TDS, with the goal of helping break the back of state-sponsored homophobia in the future. That’s a very small contribution to a big challenge, but we must all do what we can, or every celebration will leave someone on the sidelines, unable to join in.
Thanks for the comment.
Ed Kilgore
At the same time they embraced a black man, voters all over America punished and persecuted gay men and lesbians.
An Obama administration intent on consensus, determined to achieve legislative victories not by majorities of 60 but by majoriities of 80 and 85 in the Senate, cannot be expected to do much for them. The value of the new Democratic majorities will be measured mainly in what they will not do. No Constitutional amendment targeting homosexuals, for example.
And should the Congress bother (in these trying times) to re-enact employment non-discrimination, or add gays and lesbians to hate crimes legislation, Obama will presumably sign the bill. We can expect the White House to issue another executive order forbidding discrimination in the civil service. Gay men and lesbians in the military can probably sit and stew for the next four years unless they roll legislation ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell by their own efforts. Obama may not hinder it, but he won’t expend political capital in his first term to help them.
This centrist administration will make mostly symbolic gestures and get out of the way of the determined advocates of gay and lesbian equality, but it won’t be a determined advocate, or much of an advocate, at all. I accept that. It’s better than the last 8 years, that’s for sure.
But they’re hunting us in California, they’re hunting us in Arkansas, they’re hunting us in Florida, they’re hunting us in Arizona. The most we’ll get from the White House to protect us from the states is a cup of tea and a kind word.
All this election has done for gay people is de-federalize an assault on our citizenship and liberties and return it to the states. This should have been a happy day for all Americans. For some of us, it isn’t altogether that.
In no state where attacks on gays and lesbians were on the ballot did kindness, generosity, or even good sense prevail. America didn’t give up hating this year. It just decided to transfer its loathing from a race to a sexual minority.
Obama’s generation of black men and women may indeed be the Joshua Generation, seeing the Promised Land, but Obama is not even the Moses, let alone the Joshua, of gay men and women and their struggle. Perhaps we have no right to expect that. Perhaps he has enough on his plate.
But if not this President’s plate, then whose? We gay men and lesbians have stood at the threshold of the Promised Land for generations now. Who knows when we will see it? Perhaps when Barney Frank becomes President?