Democrats Find Confidence Without Complacency

It's a balance they didn't strike well in 2016, with tragic consequences

Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

The lead Kamala Harris built over Donald Trump through the first month of her campaign was palpable in the thematic content of the Democratic national convention. Nearly every choice and presentation was designed to nourish and grow her margins rather than hector or plead with the public to rethink things.

Harris likes to say “we’re the underdogs in this race.” It’s a crafty line, asserted to set expectations low and keep effort high—but it isn’t really true anymore. If it were, the convention would’ve been a darker-tinted affair, with a much different balance of pro-Harris and anti-Trump thematics.

But the art of being prepared entails anticipating what might go wrong and taking steps to prevent it. How might Harris’s current lead—three to four points and climbing—disappear, or somehow not deliver her 270-plus electoral votes?

I can think of at least seven ways, some more likely than others:

• There could be a polling error in Donald Trump’s favor that even the Harris campaign doesn’t anticipate.

• Relatedly, the electoral college bias could be greater than it appears to be in current polls. Right now, Harris’s national lead over Trump is very close to her lead in most swing states, suggesting a very small electoral college bias, and thus a high likelihood that if Harris wins the national popular vote, she’ll win the presidency. But the national polls could be closer to the mark than swing-state polls, auguring a 2016 redux.

• A hidden scandal could surface, though both Harris and her running mate Tim Walz have been through so many different kinds of vetting, it seems unlikely.

• An exogenous event, like a market crash, could drive her support down.

• Republicans and their allies in foreign autocracies could drown her in late-October fuckery.

• Democratic voters could become complacent, or driven back into despair, driving margins down just enough to cost Harris the election.

• Swing voters could break back to Trump (or to third parties) before November.

Harris and Democrats can only exert control over a few of these: Democrats could do more than they’ve been inclined in the past to anticipate and pre-empt Republican fuckery—but they can’t control the GOP. President Biden can help insure against governing crises, but he can’t perform miracles.

By contrast, effective motivation and persuasion are well within their powers. And the convention and campaign thus far suggest Harris and her party are being much more mindful of underperformance than Democrats were eight years ago.

NO KAMA, OBAMA

It’s not that 2016 Democrats did everything wrong. But the campaign that year evinced a much greater degree of complacency than we see today, reflected in a mix of overconfident strategic decisions, and in the idea that Trump’s aberrance was self-discrediting. There was a widespread sense within the party that beating Trump entailed little more than shining a light on all the things that made him off putting.

How on Earth could you possibly not vote against that?

On September 18, 2016, President Obama addressed a Congressional Black Caucus awards dinner and delivered the kind of appeal I suspect we will not hear from any leading Democrat this cycle.

This wasn’t exactly typical of the 2016 cycle: Obama didn’t go around badgering and guilt-tripping people into political activity all the time. And I remember wondering what was behind this admonition. The thought of inviting Trump to the White House, as Obama was ultimately compelled to do, must have repulsed him. Perhaps he suspected, presciently, that black turnout would drop off without him on the ballot.

There was something forceful about it, but it was still odd. ‘Vote for her, or I’ll be mad at you’ isn’t how you’d go about mobilization or persuasion in almost any other context. The closest comparison I can think of is Trump petulantly telling his supporters that he’d never visit the state of Minnesota again if he lost. “I lose Minnesota, I’m never coming back.”

Given a mulligan, Obama and the Clinton campaign would obviously change some things, and this is probably one of them. Instead of banking on their lead, they would have done more to remind people of the 2000 election, when a misguided sense of indifference led the nation into calamity. Instead of browbeating his supporters about the importance of voting, Obama would’ve beseeched them—found ways to articulate how things could go wrong and warned against them.

In other words, it would’ve looked more like the campaign Democrats are running today.

SCHATZ THROUGH THE HEART

In his speech to the convention Wednesday night, Bill Clinton alluded to two elections it must have killed him to see Dems lose: his vice president’s and his wife’s. “We've seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn't happen,” he warned, “when people got distracted by phony issues or overconfident.”

Overconfidence and phony issues alike derailed Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and Bill Clinton was not alone worrying they could overtake Harris’s too. Michelle Obama articulated more precisely how the early Harris momentum might slip.

“No matter how good we feel tonight or tomorrow or the next day, this is going to be an uphill battle,” she said. “We cannot be our own worst enemies. No. See, because the minute something goes wrong, the minute a lie takes hold, folks, we cannot start wringing our hands. We cannot get a Goldilocks complex about whether everything is just right. And we cannot indulge our anxieties about whether this country will elect someone like Kamala instead of doing everything we can to get someone like Kamala elected.”

This, too, was about 2016—about the likelihood that Republicans will stumble upon a line of attack that turns out to be sticky, or that Harris takes a position that some of her natural allies view as too extreme or too conservative. Beating Trump is more important than that everything is just so.

Against the backdrop of a four day party, this was the flipside of mobilization: insurance against demobilization.

Barack Obama’s role, by contrast, was persuasion—to widen the party’s appeal by depicting it as an organization that will generously welcome all people of good faith. “We’ve all got our blind spots and contradictions and prejudices,” he said. “If we want to win over those who aren’t yet ready to support our candidates, we need to listen to their concerns and maybe learn something in the process. After all, if a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people. We recognize that the world is moving fast, that they need time and maybe a little encouragement to catch up. Our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they’ll extend to us.”

In past elections, particularly in 2016, progressive Democrats would grouse about the party’s willingness to share the stage with Republicans. This year, there was much less complaining. For one thing, progressives are now among the leaders in the party, and can expect prominent speaking roles without having to fight for them. But Democrats understand the assignment better now.

As Brian Schatz noted Wednesday, “Our message is simple. We can fight about the rest of it later. We can fight about the size and the scope of government later. We can fight about libertarian issues or social issues later. We have freedom and democracy to preserve together, and there are certain principles that are bigger than party politics.”

He also noted that, to be truly effective, the proposition has to come from Republicans, like when Adam Kinzinger spoke Thursday and said of Harris, “whatever policies we disagree on pale in comparison with those fundamental matters of principle, of decency, and of fidelity to this nation… to my fellow Republicans, if you still pledge allegiance to those principles, I suspect you belong here too.”

Every appeal along these lines was well taken, because over the course of one month, Democrats have swung from helpless defeatism, to the belief they can win, with a hunger for victory. They know, at least on the level of abstraction that a bad poll conducted independently doesn’t obligate them to curl into the fetal position. The reversal since Joe Biden’s debate performance has left them well poised to win, they just have to nurture it for another 10 weeks.