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”m sorry about the reaction against superdelegates, which is really overblown. In 2008, despite all the fooferaw, they ended up voting the way everybody else did, so I really don’t see the problem.
But I’m just old enough to remember the catastrophic election of 1972, and the reason superdelegate positions were created. The public doesn’t like it when the most eminent, the longest-serving, the wisest, the most committed people are shoved rudely aside by insurgents — their positions disrespected, their service disregarded, their views scorned.
When the anti-war movement took over the party under McGovern it should have been energizing, but the way the newbies openly despised and denigrated people who’d been dedicated Democrats for decades, doing so much of the heavy lifting, was disgraceful.
Long-established powerful people can be arrogant, yes, but so can upstarts. Besides, the Democratic Party was not then, and is not now, and is not likely to be tomorrow, a mirror of the top-down hierarchical conservative movement, with its dittoheads and astroturfers. We’re just not in danger of that.
The spectacle of Hubert Humphrey, civil rights hero, father of Medicare, being spoken of so vilely and treated with such disrespect was shocking.
McGovern’s supporters often treated unsympathetic governors and members of Congress as enemies of humanity. That part of humanity that voted for these men and women didn’t always appreciate it. A lot of Americans felt that, when you wipe your ass with a Senator millions of them voted for, you were wiping your ass with millions of voters.
You never want the party to look extreme, unmoored or crazy. You never want it to look too radical or too reckless. The McGovern delegates made it possible for Nixon to portray McGovern credibly as a radical.
The embrace of Jimmy Carter, an outsider, by established Democrats in 1976; the embrace of Barack Obama, an outsider, by established Democrats in 2008: this armored both candidates against the skepticism Americans naturally have toward disruptive change.
The superdelegates were meant to be a brake on a runaway party, yes. If the party is very closely divided, why shouldn’t its elected leaders, its elders and its most distinguished voices not be able to keep it from going off a cliff?
But they were also to keep the party anchored publicly, visibly, to its living traditions, and respectful of its most distinguished members. The position of superdelegate was meant to be an honor. In 2008 the Obama rank-and-file (worried they’d side with Hillary) came very, very close to publicly dishonoring anybody with a superdelegate role. That would have been a big mistake.
It’s great when a 20 year old gets deeply involved, or when a forty year old who has never deigned to become involved suddenly chooses to do so, but neither person should consider himself superior to the one who has been toiling in the trenches for forty years and been instrumental in some of the party’s greatest successes.
The McGovern delegates, many of them, had done nothing for the party up to that point (and would end up doing little of value for it in 1972 either) yet their arrogance and self-righteousness was often breathtaking. One reason we won in 2008 was that, not only did Obama bring new people into the party, but it was not done in such a way that it completely up-ended the party.
The party that year wasn’t simply taken away from everybody who wasn’t an Obama Democrat. It wasn’t re-organized in such a way as to heap scorn on all who came before. People weren’t thrown out of positions for being the wrong gender or the wrong color.
That’s what happened under McGovern, alas. So I’ll be really sorry if we gut the reforms (and they WERE reforms) that undid some of the institutional damage of the McGovern candidacy.
Disagree I may with some of the Democratic Leadership Council’s views, but I never disagreed with the idea that the party shouldn’t be an amalgamation of special interest caucuses (which is what the McGovern people turned it into).
The proof of this wisdom was our comeback in 1976 after the disaster of 1972. I wish we wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater all over again.