The Kamala Harris hype is real
She's hit the ground sprinting and is well positioned to beat Trump.
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Just three days after President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, Harris has already secured enough delegates to be the presumptive Democratic nominee. The speed with which the party came together around her is inspiring.
Harris has been endorsed by almost everyone who matters in Democratic politics — senators, governors, key organizations, unions. She’s also raised some $100 million and counting from more than 880,000 small donors, more than 60 percent of whom hadn’t contributed before during this cycle. If anyone was on the fence about whether Biden stepping aside was the right move, they probably aren’t now.
The past three days have been a remarkable display of Democratic consensus and unity after a bitter intra-party argument over whether Biden should be the nominee. The rush to support Harris also indicates that the party believes she can beat the Republican candidate — giant orange fascist blight Donald Trump.
New Harris-Trump polling started trickling out yesterday, and it contained good news for Democrats. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken entirely after Biden announced his decision to step aside showed Harris up two points nationally (and up four points when RFK Jr. is included). Another poll showed Harris and Trump tied.
Given that Harris just had her first rally as the presumptive candidate yesterday, we’ll need more time to figure out exactly how the race has changed. But there are already a number of reasons to be hopeful about her prospects of winning this November.
Unifying looked easy. It’s not.
The first indication of Harris’s strength is … well, pretty much everything that’s happened since Sunday.
Harris has been pilloried over the last four years as a middling politician, largely on the grounds that she suspended her 2020 presidential campaign before Iowa. The reliably confused Pamela Paul at the New York Times, for example, argued this week that “Harris is a fundamentally weak candidate” who “fizzled out” in the presidential race.
As political scientist Jonathan Bernstein points out, though, Harris’s candidacy didn’t fizzle out. She had solid endorsements and decent polling — but she figured out that Biden was too far ahead to beat in a very crowded field and dropped out early. That allowed her to stay on good terms with party actors and put her in a position to get the vice presidency. That’s not losing. It’s winning.
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We have even better recent evidence that Harris is a skillful politician, though. Namely, she just nailed down the presidential nomination in around 48 hours and raised $100 million.
The rush to endorse Harris and the flood of donations was so speedy and so uniform that it looked easy. But there was no guarantee it would go so well. AOC warned last week before Biden stepped down that many donors “do not want to see the VP be the nominee.” Some leading Democrats, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were calling for an open process or some kind of mini primary.
Harris certainly benefited from the fact that Democrats are sick of division and eager to move on to uniting against Trump. But her strength also indicates that she has used her vice presidency to solidify her standing with most party actors and interest groups — not least with Joe Biden himself. Harris engineered an unprecedented victory immediately following an unprecedented moment of uncertainty for the party. That’s the work of a talented politician.
Harris and abortion rights
Harris is also well positioned to run on some of the central issues of the election. In particular, she’s a good voice for the party on abortion, which has been an especially energizing issue since the Supreme Court gutted abortion rights in its Dobbs decision in 2022.
The Dobbs decision was hugely unpopular and remains so, even in Republican strongholds — anti-abortion measures in deep red states like Ohio and Kentucky have gone down to defeat. Democratic strength in the 2022 and 2023 off-year elections have been attributed by most analysts to the electorate’s support for abortion rights. Democrats are fighting to get abortion referendums on the ballot in November in states like including Arizona, Nebraska, and Florida.
Despite Democratic successes under his watch, Biden has always been an imperfect messenger on abortion rights. A devout Catholic, he started his career by arguing that the Roe decision protecting abortion rights “went too far.”
Biden is now solidly pro-choice, and his administration has of course defended abortion rights, most recently winning a Supreme Court case defending abortion pills. But his ambivalence lingers.
Even in 2023, after Dobbs, Biden was careful to note his own personal discomfort with abortion procedures, stating in one speech, “I happen to be a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion.” Immediately following the Dobbs ruling, Biden’s administration struggled to come up with a strong rhetorical or policy response. He’s also been weirdly reluctant to even say the word “abortion” in speeches.
Harris has no such reticence. She visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in March; she’s believed to be the first president or vice president to ever visit a clinic providing abortion services.
“She talks about abortion rights, and she talks about it unapologetically,” Kelly Baden, vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute, told NBC News this week.
The GOP has been trying to shift attention to anything except abortion. Though forced birth has been a defining Republican issue for generations, it was barely mentioned at the recent RNC. Trump claimed he wouldn’t sign a national abortion ban and that he wants to leave the issue up to the states, but talk is cheap, and the fact is he appointed the three Supreme Court justices who provided the decisive votes for ending federal abortion rights. Harris has called this attempted Republican pivot an exercise in “gaslighting.”
“States are passing bans at six weeks of pregnancy — before most women even know they’re pregnant. Those are Trump abortion bans,” she told Rolling Stone.
With Harris as the nominee, and to Trump’s sorrow, “Trump abortion bans” is a phrase we’re likely to hear a lot more before November.
Harris the prosecutor
On Monday, in her first big speech after Biden’s endorsement, Harris emphasized her experience as a prosecutor and said it put her in a strong position to make the case against Trump.
“I was a courtroom prosecutor,” she said. “In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump's type.”
She hit the same theme yesterday during her first campaign rally as the presumptive Democratic nominee. It was so well received by her audience in suburban Milwaukee that the crowd broke out in “KA-MA-LA! KA-MA-LA!” chants. Watch:
The contrast here is glaring. A jury found Trump liable for sexually assaulting writer and journalist E. Jean Carroll; he’s been accused of sexual assault and harassment by numerous other women. He was convicted of fraud for misvaluing assets in New York. A jury convicted him of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments before the 2016 election. He also faces charges involving mishandling of classified documents and illegally attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
Harris got her start in politics, as she says, as a prosecutor. As San Francisco’s DA and California’s AG, she went after fraudsters engaged in Trump-like scams. She obtained a $1.1 billion judgment against for-profit Corinthian College for fraud (Trump, for his part, agreed to a $25 million settlement after his so-called Trump University was sued for deceptive practices). She also won an $18 billion settlement against large banks for foreclosure misconduct. (Trump is promising massive deregulation of Wall Street.)
Parts of Harris’s record in California are controversial with progressives. She threatened to prosecute parents of chronically absent children. No one was actually sent to jail, but as a policy, using prisons to threaten struggling parents is not a great precedent. Her record has also been criticized by sex workers and by drug law reformers (she prosecuted 1,900 people for marijuana violations).
But Harris’s background as a prosecutor isn’t as much of a problem for her today as it was when she was running for president in 2019 — before covid, the George Floyd murder, and the ensuing spike in crime across the country. She’s also no longer running against Democrats — she’s running against Trump, whose criminal justice policies are nightmarish.
Project 2025, the Heritage Project blueprint for a Trump second term, is rabidly anti-sex worker; it proposes criminalizing porn as a step towards criminalizing trans and LGBT people (whose very existence the right considers pornographic). And Trump wants to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, a massive undertaking that evokes histories of police states and concentration camps.
Policing remains a major fissure in the Democratic coalition, and Harris’s focus on her role as a prosecutor may exacerbate that to some degree. At the same time, though, it gives her a powerful way to (accurately) frame Trump’s record as one of corruption and crime.
Trump has tried to mitigate those associations by having his minions in Congress spew out baseless conspiracy theories about Biden’s supposed involvement in influence peddling in Ukraine. But all that burble about “Biden crime family” is useless now that there’s a different candidate. That’s a big part of why Trump has been petulantly whining since Biden dropped out.
Trump and Vance will show who they are
Harris clarifies the stakes of the election in other ways as well. She’s the first Black woman nominee of a major ticket, and the first Asian woman nominee. She’s facing a ticket of two white men, one of whom has been held liable for sexual assault.
A Harris/Trump election draws clear lines: the Democrats, for all their flaws, are the party of multi-racial democracy; the Republicans are the party of violent white patriarchy.
Harris’s candidacy is an invitation for the GOP to show exactly who it is. And so it has.
Vance wasted no time this week sounding dogwhistles. He made a case in Ohio on Monday that Harris isn’t “grateful” enough for what the country has done for her. He then he turned it up a few notches later that evening in Virginia, where he addressed Harris and said, "What the hell have you done other than collect a government check for the past 20 years?" (Watch below.)
These comments are very on brand for Vance, who during an interview with Tucker Carlson in 2021 cited Harris as an example of “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives” and argued that people without children should not hold political power.
Misogyny definitely has a constituency in the US. But viciously insulting people without children is a poor strategy for fairly obvious reasons; currently 19.6 percent of Americans between 55 and 64 are childless.
Trump and Vance will lob a lot more sexism and racism at Harris over the course of the campaign. That may well be damaging to Harris; racist and sexist attacks can be effective. But it’s also true that egregious racism and sexism can alienate a lot of the electorate. It seems especially calculated to backfire against Republicans in an election focused in large part on abortion.
Hope
The future remains difficult to predict, and we know, to our sorrow, that voters are capable of electing Donald Trump.
Given Democratic enthusiasm and unity, though, and given her own skills and record, Harris is in a strong position to highlight Trump’s awfulness, tout Biden’s record, and put forward a vision of an America committed to inclusion and hope rather than hatred and cruelty.
“Donald Trump wants to take us backward to a time before many of our fellow Americans had freedoms and rights,” Harris said during her speech on Monday. “But we believe in a brighter future.”
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
“A Harris/Trump election draws clear lines: the Democrats, for all their flaws, are the party of multi-racial democracy; the Republicans are the party of violent white patriarchy.”
This is exactly it. This history of the GOP over the last several decades has led to this moment. That is undeniable and a lot of centrist pundits need to stop denying that.
Excellent summary. One note, about the marijuana convictions. Only 45 of these 1900 marijuana convictions went on to have prison sentences imposed though. It’s a widespread misconception.