Kamala Harris Learned The Most Important Lesson Of All
A unified Democratic Party defeats Donald Trump—if she can hold it together, she'll win.
Hello, Off Message readers! I’m Luppe B. Luppen, but if you’re on social media you may know me better as @nycsouthpaw. While Brian relaxes at an undisclosed location, he’s kindly let me stand watch at the helm here for a shift.
At this juncture, with the Democratic national convention behind us, and a single (?) presidential debate on the schedule ahead of us, I wanted to offer my perspective on what Kamala Harris and her promising campaign appear to have learned from three recent historical developments: Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, Harris’s own failed primary campaign in 2019, and Joe Biden’s success, with Harris as his running mate, making Donald Trump a one term president in 2020.
If the first six weeks of her surprise 2024 candidacy are any indication, Harris has absorbed just the right mix of lessons from these experiences. And the best way to see why is to set aside the twists and turns of the daily media cycle and pull the spotlight away from Trump—without losing sight of how dangerous he is to the republic and the people who live in it.
What’s most important is the degree of unity Democrats can maintain through election day, fueled not just by their antipathy to Trump, but by their degree of trust in the party leadership.
Harris plainly realizes this. It’s why, for now at least, she’s winning.
SAUCE FOR THE TRUCE
While the story of Democrats’ uneven record against Trump begins in 2016, the thinking really starts with the fact that Democratic voters have constituted a dependable majority in American politics for decades. Democratic candidates have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection victory marks the only time a Republican has won the popular-vote contest since his father did it in 1988.
But this reliable popular majority has not allowed Democrats to control the recent course of American politics, as it would have in a truer representative democracy. The antidemocratic vagaries of the U.S. political system—the electoral college, small states’ disproportionate power in the US Senate, and Republicans’ success in appointing partisan apparatchik federal judges and Supreme Court justices to lifetime sinecures—have combined to leave Democrats weakened and demoralized while Republican politicians and social movements exercise enormous power even in defeat.
As much as the American system frustrates Democratic popular majorities, in the realm of presidential elections, Republicans have benefited more than once from something internal to progressive politics: Democratic division.
Earlier this year,
and I published The Truce, a brief, reported history of the Democratic Party over the last several election cycles. Our story begins with the great intraparty rift between progressives and centrists that fueled the long and destructive primary campaign of 2016, the acrimonious nominating convention that year, and Clinton’s defeat in the general election. We note that an arguably decisive bloc of progressives in key states stayed home in 2016, contributing to Trump’s narrow Electoral College victory. The majority of our book documents how Democrats overcame that division to assemble a winning coalition in 2020 and a historically strong midterm performance in 2022.The rousing success of the 2024 Democratic convention suggests Harris has managed to forge the same truce we wrote about in our book. Like Biden before her, Harris has conjured the strange alchemy of circumstance and political maneuvering that induces progressives and centrists to defer their long struggle for dominance within the party and—for the most part—row in the same direction.
Getting Democrats to put aside their differences isn’t as simple as it sounds—or arguably as it should be given the fascist alternative. How did this truce happen? The extremism of Trump and his MAGA movement loom large, of course; a broad anti-Trump consensus played an undeniable role in bringing Democrats together. But so too, in 2020, did other factors. The sudden appearance of the COVID crisis clapped a stopper on traditional campaigning, and the warm personal relationship between Biden and Bernie Sanders made it easier to bring their one-on-one primary to an end. In 2022, the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which stripped American women of a right they’d held for 50 years, provided a powerful unifying force—one that Harris, as we report, arguably led the party to put at the center of its midterm campaign. It was a rallying issue that didn't have personal opposition to Trump at its center (though he appointed half the Justices behind the Dobbs decision).
In 2024, the party's coalescence around Harris has had a similar element of serendipity. Biden’s falling out with progressives over his support for Israel’s war in Gaza, his disastrous June debate performance against Trump, and the ensuing struggle over whether he should accept the Democratic presidential nomination laid the groundwork for some progressives who'd become disillusioned with Biden to get behind Harris. Though they have historically been skeptical of her campaigns and her record as a prosecutor, she represented a means to lever him out of the race. A new coalition growing up out of the cracks in the old one. (Notably, other elected progressives, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders himself, stuck with Biden longer than his fair-weather centrist allies did.)
2020 HINDSIGHT
The Truce tells a story of rapprochement between Biden and ascendant progressives, but Harris was more than just a bit player. Our close examination of Harris’s doomed 2020 primary campaign and first two years in the vice presidency helps illuminate and decipher her early moves on the trail this year. It can hopefully serve as gauge of her campaign’s success over the next couple months.
As a candidate, Harris has always been adept at generating voter enthusiasm and producing memorable campaign moments. Her Oakland, CA, campaign launch in January 2019—with the election a distant 22 months away—drew a large, enthusiastic hometown crowd. Her choreographed confrontation with Joe Biden during the first primary debate a few months later also generated palpable enthusiasm, reflected in both media buzz and small-dollar donations.
But back then, she proved unable to sustain momentum, tripped up by her tendency to temporize—and tack toward the center—in interviews. Her endorsement of Bernie Sanders’ plan to extend Medicare to all Americans largely dissolved under questioning about what would happen to private health insurers if it were enacted. Her debate salvo against Biden, in which she condemned his historical opposition to federally mandated bussing, lost its punch when (with Biden campaign encouragement) reporters started asking questions and discovered that Harris and Biden agreed about the policy in the present.
Harris’s mixed messaging mirrored (and perhaps stemmed from) dissension within her campaign, where Harris permitted rivalries to persist among her top advisors, and a cadre of high-powered California political consultants clashed frequently with isolated campaign managers and members of her family.
In 2019, these missteps cost her dearly. After a promising launch, skeptical progressives found a great deal of evidence to confirm their suspicions, and they rejected her in favor of candidates like Sanders and Elizabeth Warren whose lefty bona fides preceded them. Centrist voters also found plenty of reasons to mistrust Harris, and they, too, could easily park their votes with Joe Biden, who, along with Sanders, was the only candidate in the field with universal name recognition. Without solid footing in either camp, Harris’s polling suffered, and her fundraising dried up in turn. Before voting began in 2020, she was out of the race.
TAKE THIS WALZ
Today, we can see the lessons of that difficult campaign, and a recognition of the overriding importance of Democratic unity, reflected in Harris’s early strategy. The circumstances of Biden’s exit and his immediate endorsement gave the fledgling Harris campaign a tremendous infusion of Democratic enthusiasm, record-breaking fundraising, and a flood of follow-on endorsements from party leaders clear across the Democrats’ ideological spectrum. Since then, her campaign has been focused on sustaining momentum and foreclosing any opportunity to get knocked off message. In picking Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, Harris delivered a tangible and (practically speaking) irrevocable boon to the progressives who had been her biggest critics within the party. Her early campaign events and her convention prioritized strict message discipline, at the expense of freewheeling press access and voter interaction. They insulated her from veering off message before she’d consolidated the party’s base.
The only noticeable breakdown in this strategy came in Harris’s unscripted confrontation with a small group of Gaza protesters at a Michigan campaign rally, challenging them with an icy stare to pipe down unless they wanted to see Trump elected. While many Democrats clearly agreed with her stark warning—that dissension within the coalition works to Trump’s benefit—the open breach threatened to put the conflict in Gaza at the center of Harris’s early days as the presumptive nominee. When Gaza protesters interrupted Harris’s next rally in Arizona, her approach to them was far less confrontational—and clearly worked out in advance.
This battened-down approach has had its own costs—in particular, it annoys the campaign reporters who write stories from the trail every day—but its basis in Harris’s experience in 2020 is easy to understand. The Harris campaign was doing all it could to play to its strengths and control its message, avoid the stumbling blocks of the last race, and preserve the gift of a unified party.
Harris and her campaign have clearly recognized they can’t stay on lockdown forever. She and Walz submitted to a joint interview with CNN last week, which went smoothly, and a debate with Trump still looms. No doubt, Harris and Walz will talk to reporters and activists and voters without scripts in the weeks to come. To some degree, gaffes, contradictions, and other missteps from the candidates are inevitable. But what voters should watch for is whether those mistakes merely inflame media coverage for a few days or whether they generate infighting, as Democratic voters prepare to cast their ballots.
Harris and Walz emerged from Chicago with a united Democratic Party. If they can hold it together for the next two months, I like their chances.
 | A guest post by
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Lots of good food for thought here. I do think it is time to retire the blithe use of “progressive” and “centrist” as labels. They have lost any coherent meaning. I am considered highly progressive when it comes to policy, particularly on economic policy, where I am almost always in agreement with the assessments made by David Dayen and others at the American Prospect magazine. In 2020, the candidate I supported was Elizabeth Warren. So, those are my “progressive” bona fides, in brief. In 2016, I supported Hillary Clinton, not because I am “centrist,” but because I assessed that she had far superior experience and capability to govern intelligently and effectively. These are factors that should, in my view, be much more prominent in journalist political reporting and voter assessment, and I do not think they fall neatly into either a “progressive” or “centrist” bucket. We need a lot more focus on competence, and a lot less on ideological litmus tests. Thankfully, likely because of the many unusual circumstances, Harris has managed to navigate her way past the litmus test minefield this year, at least so far.
So all it took was a plague, a fascist and the destruction of women’s rights to convince everyone to get along. I’ll never understand why so many people are unable to simply vote for the best candidate. We are a big country! We don’t want the same things! We are choosing a leader, not a spouse. Don’t expect total compatibility.