Is Harris too liberal?
How commentators misunderstand the Harris campaign
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Of any U.S. election campaign which I’ve witnessed from Europe, I’m finding that 2024 is the most misunderstood. And the misunderstanding is mostly about the campaign that Kamala Harris is running. Everyone pretty much understands who Donald Trump is and what he does. But Harris has been something of an unknown quantity, and the way that European media and commentators have tended to make up for this is just by reaching for preconceived notions about Harris rather than trying to genuinely understand what she is doing in this campaign. Among the most bizarre of these has been the idea that she is doomed to failure because she’s running an ultra-liberal, ultra-woke campaign.
This is complete nonsense. It conflates a genuine problem faced by Harris - Democrats in general are perceived as too liberal - with the separate idea that Harris herself is actively encouraging that impression.
Let’s start with what Harris is actually doing. Her campaign’s basic theory of the case goes something like this:
Her best way to win is replicating Biden’s 2020 coalition, which relied on unusual strength with moderate and suburban white voters. Biden actually lost minority votes compared to Hillary Clinton to 2016 (whose own performance had also been weak) because he won over disaffected moderates and independents who would have voted for the GOP before Trump came along. This coalition - the theory goes - has only grown stronger since Roe v. Wade drove even more white women away from the Republican Party.
The main area that Harris has to grow this coalition versus Biden in 2020 is in the suburbs of large metro areas and decent-sized towns. The 2022 midterms and other state-level elections seem to show that this is possible. The three governors of the Midwestern swing states - Tony Evers, Josh Shapiro and Gretchen Whitmer - all ran ahead of Biden with college-educated voters in 2022. Biden won about 75% of the vote in Wisconsin’s pivotal Dane County in 2020, and then Tony Evers blew through that and won 79% in 2022. Growth is possible.
At the same time, the campaign expects to see some erosion of support among minority voters in urban cores like Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta and Milwaukee. Again, this is what happened in 2020: Biden won fewer minority votes and more white votes than Clinton did in 2016. Increased strength in the suburbs is necessary to counteract that.
Finally, the campaign is expecting to bleed more votes in rural areas and among non-college educated white voters. Harris and Walz have been campaigning in places Democrats don’t usually go - rural counties and ex-factory towns - to try to staunch this bleeding. But again, some of it is inevitable: another reason you need the growth in the suburbs.
Trying to execute this strategy is particularly difficult for Harris, because she is a black woman, which means she is stereotypically perceived to be very liberal. She also took a host of very left-wing positions which she didn’t really believe in during the 2020 primary. Since her campaign launched, it has been laser-focused on counteracting this weakness and appealing to those moderate white voters. Her convention speech was draped in patriotism, chants of “USA!”, and the promise to make the U.S. military “the most lethal fighting force the world has ever seen”. She has done basically nothing to appease her party’s left flank - or a substantial chunk of voters in Michigan - about Israel, or anything else for that matter. She even campaigned with Liz Cheney and boasted about being endorsed by Dick!
There has been almost nothing aggressively liberal or left-wing about Harris’ campaign, something that progressives in the Democratic Party - and plenty of other people - are bound to criticize if she loses. In fact, they’re already criticizing it. They argue that the idea of Republicans swinging to Harris in large numbers was always a mirage, and that a platform of economic populism and/or specific racial appeals could have brought out the Democratic coalition on a large enough scale to win without them.
People who want to paint Harris’ campaign as too liberal, particularly in Europe, often misunderstand some basic truths about U.S. politics in the Trump era. They point to Harris’ recent depiction of Trump as a threat to democracy or a “fascist” as an example that her campaign is living inside a left-wing safe space rather than trying to reach out to undecided moderates. But that is precisely what this message is designed to do: win over disaffected moderates and Republicans who are disgusted by Trump’s conduct and character. If Harris were listening to the “focus on our base” people, she’d be ignoring Trump entirely and hammering home a message of jobs, grocery prices, and healthcare.
Or take abortion. I have frequently seen European commentators describe abortion as a Democratic base issue, truly one of the most insane U.S. politics takes of recent years. The overturning of Roe v. Wade created enormous pressure on white women to abandon the right and flirt with the left, and the result has been a shocking series of election and ballot initiative results - including the GOP’s meager performance in the 2022 midterms and the 19-point defeat of an anti-choice abortion measure in KANSAS, a state so synonymous with modern conservative governance that someone even wrote a book about it.
When it comes to the defense of democracy and abortion, Harris is not pandering to the left - she’s making a smart, targeted play at the part of the electorate she needs to win over in order to win.
But this isn’t all of the story. Because while Harris may not be too liberal - she’s certainly not running a liberal campaign - it’s true that Democrats in general have become perceived as much more liberal by the electorate at large in recent years. There are many reasons for this, not least that the party often gets blamed for broad cultural trends - such as “woke”, #MeToo, DEI, or “defund the police” - which are highly polarizing. But it’s also true that many Democratic politicians (including Harris!) have made unpopular pledges in order to win previous primary campaigns. The fact that Harris was able to avoid doing that this year because there was no primary is probably one of the reasons she’s currently doing as well as she is.
Harris may well lose. She’s running following high inflation, the pandemic, high immigration, and an unpopular incumbent. Given the political environment, it’s only the strength of her campaign and the extreme political weakness of Donald Trump which is preventing the GOP from running towards a landslide. The Harris campaign is in a knife fight for every last vote, and maybe it’ll fail to get enough. But if it does, it won’t be anything to do with being too liberal.