The Perils Of Backseat Driving Kamala Harris

She can try to bring the anti-Trump coalition back together, or she can chase the unicorns of 2008. It's still not clear which approach will make the most sense.

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The shakeup of the race for president has thrown the election into flux, even if topline poll results this week look much like they did in June. These recent findings mask significant changes beneath the surface, as different segments of the electorate adjust to the new Democratic ticket. Younger voters are perking up; older voters seemingly don’t know what to think.

Perhaps swings between those groups will cancel each other out and the race really will be unchanged. But it would be wrong to have confidence in a prediction like that today, when Donald Trump should be riding high after his nomination, with the airwaves to himself, as Democrats retool and await their convention. Survey data could be lagging. I wouldn’t be surprised, when the dust settles, if polls reflected anything from a largely unchanged race to a substantial lead for Kamala Harris. That’s what Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio is worried about, and it’s consistent with the GOP-wide freakout we’ve witnessed.

If Dems had downgraded from a wounded-and-losing Biden to an even weaker candidate, Republicans wouldn’t be grousing. 

But in this passing period of uncertainty, all of the jockeying for influence over how Harris runs her campaign stems from projecting today’s neck-and-neck numbers well into the future, fostering the impression that she can’t win unless she does everything juuust so. And it’s driving mutually contradictory theories of Harris’s optimal path.

One theory is that the recent king-tide of good feelings is a predicate for success, obligating Harris to nurture unity of the anti-Trump left. Another is that basking in happy vibes is an error, insofar as it means pandering to ideologically sympathetic voters at the expense of persuading swing voters.

Harris almost certainly does have to lock down a critical number of swing and low-propensity voters in order to win, and unless the bottom falls out from under Trump’s campaign, that will entail some amount of persuasion. 

But the question of the day, month, year, and decade is: what’s the best way to do that? Is it to triangulate against activists? To adopt centrist issue positions and articulate them constantly? Is it to cultivate a moderate surface-level persona (just be cool) to create an advantageous contrast with Trump? Is it about fostering celebrity star power? Or is it mostly just a matter of luck?

OBAMA WHY ART THOU

One way to beat Trump is by reassembling the coalition that elected Biden four years ago. Biden got more votes for president than anyone in history, but the demographic makeup of that coalition was novel.

In 2008 (and to a lesser extent in 2012) Barack Obama won by forging an alliance between young voters, progressives, minorities, and working-class whites. By the time Biden won, the white working class had swung dramatically to the GOP, but he made up for it by bringing a ton of white suburban and older voters into the Democratic camp. More precisely: After Trump became the face of the GOP, repulsed normies turned away from the party en masse. The anti-Trump coalition is big enough to win, and if all Harris does is re-energize it, she probably will.

But writing for the Atlantic this week, the journalist Ron Brownstein argues Harris’s surest path to victory will likely require her to build a hybrid coalition, swinging a ways back toward the one Obama built. More non-college voters of all races. 

This idea has gained purchase quickly, and theories about how to do that vary depending on whom you ask. 

My podcast cohost

Matthew Yglesias

thinks Harris would be best served by making conspicuous policy gestures that code moderate. Four days after Biden withdrew from the race, and two days after Harris locked down the Democratic nomination, he wrote, “everyone needs to be realistic that she's still down in the polls and needs the leash to run a campaign aimed at persuading the center.”

By contrast, recently coconut-pilled progressives like David Klion want Harris to maintain factional cohesion—presumably this advice would apply in general, but Klion argues specifically that she should court the left by rejecting the pro-Israel governor Josh Shapiro as a running mate.

I’m much more uncertain (and have no specific suggestions to offer) about the approach Harris should take, or the balance she should strike. As a threshold issue, it isn’t clear to me whether Harris urgently needs to do anything, because we don’t know who’ll be winning when the dust from the shakeup settles. But more to the point: all these years later I remain deeply uncertain about the implicit question at the heart of the debate: How exactly did Obama’s coalition come together?

(Photo by Trevor Stone)

Was the cerebral, cosmopolitan Obama able to run up the score with non-college whites because he mastered the art of cross-racial working-class appeals and issue moderation? Was it that he seemed steady-handed, serious, and methodical at an uncertain time? Was he simply such a cultural behemoth that it became “cool” to support him—even in parts of the country where racial resentment runs high? Or… was he mostly lucky to be running for president at the end of eight disastrous years of GOP rule? 

KAM’S STRATEGY

Obama was obviously charismatic. He also certainly did stake out moderate positions relative to the time (against same-sex marriage, for fossil-fuel extraction, etc). But if you were a close follower of politics back in 2008, you may have a feel for the following thought experiment:

Which would have been more damaging to Obama’s popularity: If he’d embraced a health-insurance coverage requirement before the election? Or if one day his resounding gospel baritone transformed into a high-pitched squeaky voiced and he lost his soaring rhetoric about hope and change?

I think I know the answer! 

The GOP never wanted for ways to convince voters that Obama was a crypto-radical. Obama was a Harvard-educated lawyer who came out of Chicago politics and had emphasized his work as a community organizer. He had differing degrees of association with Jeremiah Wright (“god damn America”) and one-time Weather Underground fugitive Bill Ayers. Obama’s full name carried resonances of both Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden!

None of it stuck because Republicans couldn’t compete with him for sheer wattage. He won the election with 53 percent of the vote and a 70 percent favorability rating. That was probably an artifact of charisma and good timing more so than issue positioning. Bush’s abysmal record softened the defenses of voters who normally would’ve been resistant to voting for a black Democrat, and Obama was able to disarm them further by being new and mesmerizing.

The Bush presidency was such a disaster that it temporarily reversed a long running realignment of working class whites into the GOP. This was the Iraq war quagmire and the financial crisis, yes, but it was also a recession right in the heart of midwest swing-state territory.

Some working-class white voters may have been swept up in Obamamania; perhaps others were disarmed by his policy appeals. But what if Obama’s political talents (though surely considerable) have been mythologized? What if he won with a coalition that today’s Democrats can only dream of rebuilding because the stars aligned, and we went looking for evidence that he built it with clever tactics? 

What if he was mostly just lucky to have run for president in this valley, where non-college white voters, who had been drifting secularly toward the GOP for years, had a temporary change of heart? Obama had opposed the Iraq war. Obama was from the midwest. Obama was not responsible for the creation of the housing bubble or for its implosion. Was Obama a rare political talent, or was he lucky? Yes.

It would be great if Harris could beat Trump with a seven point spread. The wider the better. She has much of Obama’s charisma and even youth appeal. She is a great avatar for reproductive freedom and democracy. She can play for the center on issues like immigration and crime. But to opine on whether she can replicate his margins—even his diminished 2012 margins—we need to know which aspects of his success are replicable. 

Like Obama, Harris is suddenly the embodiment of a new era, with an army of happy social-media warriors, and a magnetic presence. Low-propensity voters may just decide it’s fun to ride with her. If that’s the case, Harris can ignore everyone offering plug-and-play tips on how to increase her vote share and keep running the race she’s running. If all she does is reassemble the anti-Trump coalition, with a sprinkling of new voters, she will win.

But unlike Obama, Harris isn’t running against a discredited incumbent presiding over economic strife. She will have a harder time appealing successfully to swing voters with issue positions. And if she makes those appeals in ways that burst the bubble of party unity, she may end up weakening rather than strengthening her hand.

Consider two possible options:

1. “Crime is lower and the border is more secure under me and President Biden than it was on Trump’s best days.”

2. “I disagree with the way President Biden and congressional progressives have approached the issues of crime and immigration.”

Would the first approach distinguish Harris enough to do much persuasive work?

Would the second approach spoil the party?

This is the paradox she’ll face if the race remains stuck within the margin of error. 

Trump is a worse and more incompetent person than Bush, but he’s much less unpopular now than Bush was in 2008, and he’s stronger with the kinds of voters that Democrats have been trying and failing to reach with issue appeals and policy spoils.

If the Democratic coalition is brittle but currently united and riding high on Harris, then conspicuous, uncanny issue moderation—the kind that entails antagonizing elements of her base—risks spoiling the zeitgeist with little upside. At the same time, if Harris can’t make inroads through persuasion of some kind, she may well ride this new era of good feelings straight to defeat. 

Under either approach, it’ll be a white-knuckle ride through November. And it won’t be because Harris couldn’t replicate Obama’s perfect formula; it’ll be because the conditions Obama rode to prominence no longer exist.