I often say that the Democrats’ political problem is that they’re a party of capital that has to pretend otherwise for electoral purposes. This time they hardly even pretended. Kamala Harris preferred campaigning with the inexplicably famous mogul Mark Cuban and the ghoulish Liz Cheney to Shawn Fain, who led the United Auto Workers to the greatest strike victory in decades. Those associations telegraphed both her policy instincts and her demographic targeting: Silicon Valley and upscale suburbs.
Like Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, the strategy failed, only worse. At least Clinton won the popular vote by almost three million. Harris even lost among suburban white women, a principal target of this twice-failed strategy.
Like any major historical event, this defeat has many explanations. Preceding her disastrous campaign, there was the bizarre nature of Harris’s nomination. White House staff hid the severity of Joe Biden’s mental decline for his entire presidency, until his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump made it impossible to sustain the fiction of his competence any longer. There was no primary — not that the Democrats’ talent bench is deep, but it might have helped to have a competitive sorting — and, after a delusional bout of enthusiasm, we were quickly reminded why she crashed as a candidate in 2020. Tim Walz excited party loyalists for a week or two, but then his mediocrity became apparent, and he disappeared from view. There was the unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal war, which probably wasn’t decisive, but certainly cost Harris some votes.
However, one explanation making the rounds needs to be squashed: that Harris was “too liberal.” Supporting that claim is a September New York Times/Siena College poll that found 47% of likely voters viewed her as too liberal, compared with 32% who saw Trump as too conservative. (That same poll found a significant number of respondents wondering…
Auteur: Doug Henwood
