Kamala Harris' real problem: Who are the Democrats, anyway?

To accuse Kamala Harris’ campaign of reflexively repeating the mistakes of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign — as Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic did recently — may sound like drive-by leftist snark, carrying an unfortunate (and presumably unintended) undertone of sexism. But it also reflects a deeper and broader anxiety felt across the liberal-progressive spectrum: Polls are dead even, 10 days before what has been billed (fairly or not) as a world-historical presidential election. After the sugar-high of the Biden-to-Harris switch and the exhilaration of the Democratic convention, this is a difficult future to face.

Among the media and political classes, the operating assumption at the moment is that Donald Trump — by any normative standard, a disastrously undisciplined and erratic candidate — is likely to win that election, even without resorting to skulduggery or mob violence. That “gut feeling” has zero predictive value, to be clear, and may be nothing more than lingering PTSD from 2016. 

But liberal stress and bewilderment presumably isn't improved by seeing Democrats doing exactly what they always do in the latter stages of a national campaign: skewing sharply rightward to emphasize a commitment to national security and corporate profits, in the supposed pursuit of “persuadable” independents and wavering Republicans. (Or perhaps just in pursuit of the donor class, which is not technically the same thing.)

We have seen Harris out herself as a gun owner in a sit-down with Oprah, embrace Wall Street-friendly economic policies and campaign with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who supported literally every aspect of the Trump agenda before his overt attempt to subvert the 2020 election. All of this, of course, reflects conventional wisdom as imparted by highly-paid consultants, and it's not inherently illogical: Chiseling away even a handful of conservative voters who don’t much like Trump, but are reluctant to vote for someone they’ve been told is a radical socialist Black lady who wants to turn everyone trans, could make a crucial difference in several of the most important states. 

The leftist response is also logical, on its own terms: Democrats have tried this before, hamster-wheel style, without conclusively defeating the increasingly fash-flavored right. So maybe it’s time to stop doing the same thing that doesn't work over and over again — admittedly a radical notion — and try something else instead, such as leaning into broadly popular social-democratic policies on health care, taxation, student debt and green-energy transition, and hoping to win elections by driving high turnout among younger voters, people of color, LGBTQ voters and so on. (Let’s not get into canceling the blank check issued to Benjamin Netanyahu — but sure, maybe that too.)

I’m personally sympathetic to that road-not-taken argument, but to recycle another of the Democratic Party’s quadrennial hamster-wheel themes, none of that matters in the face of an existential emergency. In any case, nothing about the party’s exhausting, alarmist messaging or its murky self-image is going to change dramatically in the last week before a do-or-die national election. 

There are signs that the Harris campaign intends to go hard on abortion rights in the final days — a potentially decisive wedge issue — alongside the Cheney pivot and the strategic decision to directly label Trump with the F-word. But minor tactical adjustments in late October are hardly the point. The Democratic Party is what it is, a fundamentally unstable coalition of affluent metropolitan white folks and working-class people of color, whose interests are beginning to pull them in different directions. 

Right now the paramount question — for many people, understandably enough, it’s the only question — is whether the Democrats’ campaign strategy will work this time around, or at least work a little better than it did eight years ago. Lest we forget, Hillary Clinton got 2.8 million more votes than Donald Trump did in 2016, but the distribution of those votes turned out to be an insurmountable problem: If we subtract California, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York from the overall total, Trump won the rest of the country by 5 million votes.

Most of us in this business have been cured of making confident predictions based on “how things work,” because these days nothing works the way it used to, or works at all. Time runs in flat circles, scientific research has been subjugated to “doing your own research” and a presidential candidate can tell the nation, on live TV, that immigrants are eating their pets without suffering significant political damage. Neither you nor I nor anyone else has the slightest idea whether the Harris campaign’s scramble for the patriotic middle ground will reel in the potentially decisive electoral votes of Michigan or Arizona or North Carolina. (It’s safe to say that whichever candidate can win two of those three states is overwhelmingly likely to be the next president.)

But here's one thing I do know: Don't count on the confident pronouncements of supposedly hardheaded insiders whose Realpolitik bibles have been through the washing machine too many times. I read James Carville’s New York Times op-ed predicting a Harris victory this past week and felt a dim but distinct longing, somewhere inside, for a vanished world of reassuring wisdom. Then I felt a much deeper longing — a longing to spend the next two weeks drinking whiskey and watching old movies, because that guy hasn’t backed a winning Democrat in this century. If that wasn't the kiss of death, it was an awfully good simulation. 

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And one more thing I know for sure is that if the Harris campaign’s last-ditch Liz Cheney triangulation doesn’t work, and the underlying political and ideological assumptions of the Beltway’s elite caste are once again revealed as fatally flawed, the consequences will be ugly — for the Democratic Party, for the future of our so-called democracy and for the trajectory of the entire world in this century.

Not just because Donald Trump will win the election and become president, although that's bad enough. But because of how that happened and under what circumstances — and because the only American political party that pretends to stand for constitutional democracy, rational government and broader equality will once again blame its own voters, or the Russians, or the ignorance and bigotry of people it views with contempt, for the catastrophic consequences of its own incoherence and uncertainty, and for the fact that it could not prevent the entire system it claims to cherish from collapsing into clownish anarchy.