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 a lot of good points in this study but I will also point out several paradoxes within the party’s make-up which make solutions very difficult to reach.
1). Yes crime needs to be brought under control but it should be pointed out the U.S. had some of its lowest crime rates under Obama. Many constituencies within the party will not accept crackdowns which disproportionally target their communities or give a blank check for law enforcement to do whatever they want or not do anything at all as we all saw in Uvalde. As for immigration, well, one can make a pretense to “controlling the border” (certainly Obama did) but the bottom line is so long as the U.S. is rich and freeer and the rest of the world poor, immigrants are going to continue to try and get in and all the walls and raids aren’t going to stop them.
2). Yes inflation needs to be brought under control but are people willing to accept a recession that cost them their jobs to get it? I don’t think so. Given that it’s a world problem and that the U.S. cannot control Chinese supply chains or energy trading markets, Please explain what other solutions are out there, especially when oil companies deliberately sit on leases for oil drilling they already have?
3). Didn’t the Democrats just pass bills to deal with infrastructure and brining back jobs? What more do you want them to do?
Here’s the bottom line:
“people waiting in line felt like they’d worked extremely hard, sacrificed a lot, tried their
best, and were waiting for something they deserved. They’ve suffered long hours, layoffs,
and exposure to dangerous chemicals at work and received reduced pensions.
But this line is increasingly not moving, or moving more slowly [i.e., as the economy
stalls].Then they see people cutting ahead of them in line. Immigrants, blacks, women,
refugees, public sector workers. In their view, people are cutting ahead unfairly. And then
in this narrative, there is Barack Obama, to the side, the line supervisor who seems to be
waving these people ahead. So the government seemed to be on the side of the people
who were cutting in line and pushing the people who are in line back.
I dunno, I guess when some people who have always been in the back of the line start moving up out of simple human decency and fairness I suppose there will be people who resent it. I would think the solution is to make things move faster or not have a line at all. Either way, because some of those people “cutting” happened to vote for the party, what it supposed to do? Ignore them? You can’t please everyone but you can be fair to all of them. I think most people would support that but we have to realize it won’t be all of them and there’s really nothing that can be done to satisfy them.
The notion that you can do very little about immigration is weird coming from a party that treats government as a good solution for practically every issue.
Enforcement and rewards and penalties can be used in all policy areas.
A can’t be done and a shouldn’t be done comment. This is basically a summary of where the party stands.
Levison’s memo is good, but Teixeira’s letter of January 27th, “What Would Working Class Say”, is better at offering solutions. You can find it on The Liberal Patriot website.
According to Levison’s memo, which analyzes the problem accurately, ” Democratic candidates can identify with these narratives and seek ways to address the legitimate concerns that are a deeply felt part of the working class experience in modern America without endorsing the extremist narrative that has incorporated and exploited them with such marked success.”
No, we can’t. We burned that bridge long ago. When the working class raised these legitimate concerns, we called them racists. We told them that their concerns over issues like crime and illegal immigration were just “dog whistles” and “code words” for racism. Meanwhile, the Republicans told them that their concerns are legitimate and deserve action. The working class may forgive our inaction on their concerns but they will never forgive being told that they are fools or bigots for having them.
Andy Levison fails to point out what Democrats *should* say using this three part narrative. Do Dems buckle down on corporations hurting the working class to show they are on their side? Do we need to lie and pretend everything was wonderful for everyone in some golden past? This problem is painfully clear when he compares the rhetoric of Ryan and Vance.
I am getting a lot of scolding on this site but not a lot of positive solutions.