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.
Color me unsurprised by the midterm results, given the extensive and treacherous crosscurrents in politics today.
Without a doubt, the unaddressed gerrymandering in North Carolina and Wisconsin not only affected the outrageous partisan skew in their state legislatures but it also suppressed turnout, contributing to the narrow Republican Senate victories. Gerrymandering has a little appreciated suppressive effect on statewide races. When your vote has no chance of affecting the outcome in a congressional district or local judicial and legislative races, you’re less likely to think voting is worth the bother and this drags on statewide contests where there is less truth to that despair. That’s gotta be worth at least the 1.5% margins in these two Senate races. Wherever this gerrymandering ended in 2022, like Michigan, Democrats had clear breakthroughs. I suspect if Texas weren’t so badly gerrymandered, it would already be quite clearly competitive. The gross gerrymander in Florida also exaggerated the Republican sweep there.
Even more important factors in the 2022 results, however, have been overlooked. A week later and the talking heads still miss the most important demographic stories of the pandemic crisis: 1) Covid mortality and 2) the great pandemic migration. A year ago, I realized that the survival rates of the vaccinated combined with the partisan differences in vaccination rates would lead to approximately a net loss of fifty thousand Republican voters for every one hundred thousand Covid deaths. Since the vaccines appeared, at least a million people have died from Covid – and that skew in partisan death rates preceded the vaccines when red counties started prematurely lifting mask mandates and closures.
Frankly, 1.5 million dead is just the death rate measured in patients one month after contracting Covid. The earlier Covid variants killed up to 20% more between month two and six but these are often passed off as heart failure, diabetes and stroke – despite the known fact Covid causes and aggravates all of these conditions, which you can see in the spiking “excess death” rates, the vast bulk of which constitute cardiovascular and cancer deaths. These aren’t due to putting off checkups. The evidence suggests that the supposedly “non-Covid” excess death rates are in fact caused directly by Covid because A) Covid drives these types of problems (through TLR4 signaling, if you must know) and B) the excess deaths perfectly track Covid case counts, rising and falling with them.
Most of these short Covid deaths would be older men who tend to vote Republican anyway, even if vaccination rates weren’t skewed by partisanship. (I’ll leave off a psychological explanation as to why crypto-segregationists would flip out so self-destructively at the thought of being caught on the wrong side of cordons and quarantines they had built up for social “undesirables” over the centuries. “We’re not like *those* people,” seems to be the underlying excuse for dismissing Covid’s seriousness, as if wearing a mask was a confession to the world that they doubted the state of their own grace.)
Though devastating, this analysis doesn’t even take into account how long Covid affected the electorate. Though vaccines are less protective against long Covid than short Covid death, there are still ten to thirty million long Covid cases now – some quite serious and involving dementia, stroke and organ failure, none of which is conducive to enthusiasm in life, for voting or anything else. Though long Covid falls more on women, that partisan skew in vaccination still creates a heavy social burden that the corporate press refuses to acknowledge.
Neither the pandemic movements or the deaths and disability have been caught in the census statistics and therefore none of this data is in any polling or likely voter models. Inflationary currents may have shifted some wavering souls against the Democrats, but the lack of red county investments in education and health care took their toll. The 2022 results weren’t due just to young voters turning out who couldn’t be easily polled, but it was also older voters failing to show up because after they rejected reality, reality rejected them.
That problem won’t go away with Trump. Donald Trump isn’t the fever; he’s the thermometer. Segregationists need an ice bath before their brain (Fox News?) explodes from the self-mutilating cognitive dissonance.
In addition to Covid rejecting its deniers, American civilization is also about to get rejected by global warming, financial looting, rent-seeking, uncompetitive cartel control of markets, sickcare and an ever-giving cornucopia of other delusions flowing out of our “big lies.” We’ll need more than grievance conspiracy theories to rescue us from the very real damage.
But if grievance is all you care about, Donald Trump will make a perfect House Speaker. All the incoming “Freedom” caucus wants to do is sabotage Biden and Trump is the best qualified for the job – attacking, offending, making noise and accomplishing nothing. Plus, the job will be a poisoned chalice, suiting most Republicans behind the scenes just fine.