To win, Harris must embrace Bidenism
It plays to her strengths and hides her weaknesses
If you enjoy America Explained, please upgrade to a paid subscription. Paid subscribers will be able to read a companion post to this one which explores the new dynamics of the presidential race from the perspective of Donald Trump.
Nothing is certain, but it looks very likely that Kamala Harris will inherit the Democratic nomination from Joe Biden. We’ve seen a shock and awe endorsement campaign designed to scare anyone else from entering the race; the Biden-Harris campaign has already legally become the Harris campaign; and Harris has raised a lot of money in the last 24 hours. So let’s assume that she’s going to be the nominee. Even if she’s not, the same strategy applies to winning the nomination in some sort of competitive process as it does to winning the general election.
There are four factors which heavily influence how Kamala Harris ought to run a presidential election campaign:
Harris is a black woman. As a black woman, she faces well-documented prejudices which will be a drag on her support and which have caused many pundits to pre-emptively write her off;
Harris has fairly high name recognition, meaning people have heard of her. But what she stands for is less clear, and she has a lot more space than either Trump or Biden to define herself in the public mind. She gets to re-introduce herself to the American people and how she does it really matters;
Democratic base voters are very excited about Harris. She’s a breath of fresh air after Biden and she makes politics feel exciting again. She would be the first female president, the first Asian-American president, the second African-American president. Harris needs to maintain the enthusiasm that this generates;
Presuming she can rely on her newness and hatred of Trump to get the base out, Harris needs to make a strong appeal to white swing voters and even some wavering Never Trump conservatives.
What all of this adds up to is that Harris has to run by continuing an approach to politics that I would roughly call “Bidenism”.
Bidenism has, to my mind, two parts. The first, which Harris can’t replicate, is to be a a folksy old white guy. Biden has a particular aesthetic which defuses charges of radicalism and appears non-threatening to older and more moderate voters. In 2020, Trump tried running the standard GOP campaign whereby you accuse the Democrats of being radical Communists hell bent on destroying America. But he quickly had to abandon it and shift to “Sleepy Joe”, because it’s really hard to get a charge of radicalism to land on Joe Biden.
The fact that Harris can’t escape the “radical Communist” line of attack so easily is precisely why she has to embrace the second half of Bidenism, which is a set of policies and approaches to inter-Democratic conflicts which is best described as moderate. While she has a chance to define herself, Harris needs to put some distance between herself and the Democratic Party’s progressive base and establish in the minds of voters that she represents the same non-radical, non-threatening set of political beliefs that they saw in Joe Biden. So, yes, she needs to go hard on abortion rights - that’s a popular issue for the Democrats, anyway. Same for defending democracy. But I would also like to see Harris do some of the following things:
Talk about how America is a land of opportunity to which her immigrant parents were fortunate to come, but also how she gets frustrated when people don’t follow the rules and come into the country legally;
Play up her history as a prosecutor and strong belief in law and order, pointing out how high crime was under Trump and how she believes it’s a top priority to bring it down further, which she knows how to do;
Lay out policies to deal with “deaths of despair”, the opioid epidemic, and the revival of (white) rural communities - stressing how Trump just talks about these things but Biden-Harris actually acted on them;
Strongly signal that she will continue Biden’s trade policies, make no new trade deals, and ramp up the economic containment of China;
Say that she wishes abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare”;
Manufacture some other fights with the Democratic Party’s left.
The point of all of these policies is to furiously signal that Harris is not the person that Republicans are going to try to paint her as. They come, of course, with a risk of alienating the left wing of the Democratic Party. But so what? Politics is about choices and risks. If you don’t make any choices or take any risks, you lose - much as Harris did in 2020, when she failed to take any clear position in the struggle between moderate and liberal factions within her party. The moderate version of Harris is the one that seems to conform best to her instincts, to her history in politics before 2020, and to her service in the Biden administration. She can and must own it in order to win.
There’s another reason Harris doesn’t need to fear distancing herself from the left: The historic nature of her candidacy and the stakes of beating Trump make it extremely unlikely that she would face a serious backlash if she did. Biden has already done some of the things on my list - in particular, his immigration policy has been particularly out of step with mainstream of the party - with minimal pushback, because nobody in the Democratic coalition wants to lose to Trump. To quote Matthew Yglesias:
If nominee Harris says abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” are feminist groups really going to torch the potential first woman president?
If Kamala Harris says — as she wrote in her book on crime — that “virtually all law-abiding citizens feel safer when they see officers walking a beat” and liberals need to “get past biases against law enforcement” and embrace “an unequivocal No Tolerance strategy” for street gangs, is she going to get denounced as racist? I doubt it.
I understand that, to many people, this approach to politics can seem cynical and uninspiring. But if politics is about anything, it’s about winning. If you’re a party activist, you should want your presidential candidate to sound absolutely nothing like you, because most voters are not party activists. If you want to win, you should get excited about someone who embodies your values but packages them in a way that appeals to the median voter and who knows how to make the compromises which are necessary to gain power. Then, and only then, can you set about trying to achieve the things you want to achieve.
Will Harris take this approach, or will she try to waffle somewhere in the middle? I don’t know. But if she wants to win, she needs to make choices and take risks - fast.