Was Harris/Walz messaging the best the Obama/Biden braintrust had for the wounded working class? If so, time to get out of the way.
Many pundits agree Harris faced an uphill task, defending a rejected, out of touch incumbent — even against a gaga, media-enhanced, billionaire crime boss pandering as a Christian nationalist. The outcome reinforces the inadequate time, focus and coalition-building Harris needed to offset not just incumbency but outrageous propaganda and misogynist, racist bigotry.
Trump’s narrow victory provides key teaching moments, making obsolete a spate of conventional beliefs about what constitutes winning. Beyond that drastic cognitive differences didn’t count, trust in old thinking (including my own) crumbled: 1) that superior, focussed campaigns with clear messaging longer correlate with winning (especially vs. the bizarre, unhinged Trump scattergun that somehow worked in swing states); 2) that tons of “public” donations are not decisive (in this age of dark billions; yet Harris had more than enough to present her case); 3) that we can’t depend on strong door-to-door, get-out-the vote ground game (failing badly with seven million AWOL 2020 Biden backers; he set records with 81 million; Harris 74).
Finally, what also perished were once permanent thresholds: that reality-based mindsets, strong oratory, far more truth-telling, and a better informed, scandal-free candidate would beat a convicted, scandal-ridden insurrectionist and Liar-in-chief – whose endless, empty promises only decoy his base. What ambushed Harris were targeted billionaire payola, years of leverage from phony, online propaganda, bought rightwing influencers, and decades of dishonest FOX noise.
Dems misread the odds and voter fury
In short, a better-known, more working-class-friendly white male would have faced many fewer obstacles – even an easier takeoff ramp. The risk-adverse, no option Democratic Party was burdened with a long shot – and that allowed the more visible, celebrity Deplorable-in-chief to defeat incumbency, despite disqualifying vulnerabilities that would have instantly doomed any other figure.
Though Biden was wrong to deny massive personal negatives, forced then to push the Harris squeeze play, he probably thought he still had the best chance to again beat Trump. No doubt, a Biden campaign, more comfortable talking kitchen-table economics, would have dramatized his considerable achievements underway that already were fostering the justifiably angry working class. It’s not hard to imagine, as a thought experiment, that a half million crossover voters (and/or multitudes in non-voting Dem voters) might have repulsed another certain rancorous chaos round by Don-Old the Dunce. Mistaken Democrats shared Biden’s denial, even that more infamous debate moments would not rear their heads. Hell, Biden, inexcusably inept at keeping PR current, never created a strong, now necessary online presence – or cultivated key talking heads with sway over critical, purple-state, non-MAGA centrist voters.
Despite the flashy opening, Harris was wounded as an unvetted stand-in running as a liberal woman of color from California, despite three positive elections with brouhaha about procreative rights and women bleeding to death in parking lots. All of Harris’s strengths were buried by MAGA bluster about inflation (as if high gas or grocery prices answer to WH control); or delusions that tariffs won’t accelerate inflation; even that all national problems answer to the (statistically insignificant) trans community or countless “criminal” immigrants “flooding across open borders.” In retrospect, Harris should have talked less abstractly about “freedom,” lost rights, “opportunity economy,” even “democracy.” Instead, where was the constant drum beat that at least validated grocery and housing inflation miseries, employment/retraining challenges, and the need for fairer blue-collar and middle-class tax relief (not just no higher taxes)?
With assumptions battered, what now?
So, 2024 results should deliver incisive, myth-destroying lessons to the Democratic Party that candidates and messaging must change. That includes axing the failed assumption that just campaigning against the manipulative Hustler-in-chief (among many GOPers) would succeed, that making the election all about Trump while loyal to the status quo would work. Since November, where’s any rejection of the entrenched Dem staffers who couldn’t cut the mustard? Where’s the new blood and new thinking marked by empowering younger, more working-class oriented Democrats (like AOC) who disown failed politics as usual? Where’s even the admission that a more genuine, Sanders-like VP pick from PA or Michigan or Wisconsin would have helped, vs. a nice-guy liberal governor from an uncontested state?
What Democratic bigwigs, beyond a few progressives, even now criticize Biden failures, especially his gross negligence in not stopping the brutal Israeli onslaught? Where was respect to progressive Dems (absent or third party) and an admission that driving RFK, Jr. from Dem primaries was a blunder, like demoting Sanders against Hilary? No easy tasks, but if a party wants to defend the very mixed status quo, it must be far more innovative than passively nominating the VP of a rejected administration. Why did candidates not distance themselves from obvious Dem failures, like the unspeakably ineffective AG Garland, taking so much time to indict Trump he escaped justice and formal prison sentences? Banking on more Rethug calamities is not a savvy political agenda.
I’d like to think far more attention to climate change – and sustainable alternatives to the reality-denying drill-baby-drill Trump folly, pointed, kitchen-table defenses of law and order (vs. looming, law-denying Trump crimes, promises to pardon J6 convicts), admission that Dems are part of the immigration mess, let alone full, constant validation that the bottom 80% have been unfairly excluded from decades of American prosperity.
If failure doesn’t teach, then what?
But this piece is less about Monday quarterbacking than asking whether today’s stodgy, power-addicted Democrats can adapt rationally – and refashion core party assumptions while finding more genuine, less career-sounding pols to nominate. We know what absolutely no longer works – amassing a fundraising treasure and then using it to hire unhip talent, then wasting a half billion dollars on ineffective TV ads (vs. direct counterpunches to online propaganda), or reliance on “outsider-” driven ground games (whether post cards, phone calls, or house visits) vs. unimpeachable endorsements and promotion by trusted, impactful locals.
We can’t go back, as it were, and demand Biden acknowledge his own flaws and age denial, thus reducing Dem options to his VP stand-in. We must keep reminding the powers-that-be that Trump raised his overall totals only modestly vs. millions of now disenchanted Biden backers not spurred by hardnose, urgent incentives to protect what remains of democratic institutions.
One final disappointment is that Dems, plagued with a second loss by a woman candidate (and painfully against the Chauvinist-in-chief!), may be reluctant to crash the onerous WH glass ceiling. I think it’s high time, hell, well past time, that America faces its own backward bigotries about race and gender as that bias excludes fully over half of the most appealing party talents. To that degree, Biden delaying blunders and party passivity not only will tarnish his notable achievements, but tragically put to bed again the moral and political necessity to elect a president who’s not old, white and male.
COMMENTS