It’s barely been 48 hours since Joe Biden dropped out of the race for the White House, but one thing is clear: Kamala Harris can win.
The Democratic Party, from voters to leaders to delegates to donors, have lined-up behind Vice President Harris. There’s no guarantee yet that she will actually be the candidate. But in 24 hours she raised $81 million and secured enough delegates to win the party’s nomination—not a bad day’s work.
There is, of course, some worried hand-wringing. Most of the worries boil down to “the last time we ran a woman, she lost.” This is true—but it also treats one woman as a stand-in for all women, and derives a sweeping lesson from a single race.
It seems worth mentioning that a white man has lost in every single other election in American history, including two times to a Black man. Trump lost the popular vote to Clinton in 2016, and again to Joe Biden in 2020. We have not extrapolated out from that long history of losses that white men can’t win. We shouldn’t do the same based on the one election in which a woman was a major party’s nominee.
Harris also offers several unique strengths, particularly vis a vis Donald Trump. There is first—and most obviously—the fact that Trump has spent years attacking Biden for his age and cognitive abilities, suggesting that an old man shouldn’t be running the country. That was always a risky move for a candidate who is only three years Biden’s junior, and who will himself be in his 80s, and the oldest president ever, if he wins and serves a full term. But now it looks like an especially boneheaded strategy.
The GOP was remarkably successful at making Biden’s age an issue, and after the disastrous Trump/Biden debate earlier this summer, the entire country has spent the last month talking about how old is too old to sit in the Oval Office, and expressing concerns about the prospect of a very old man leading the nation. Well, Trump is now that very old man. He is a man who is not particularly articulate, and who often fumbles his words and mixes up people, places, and things. Voters have been primed—by him—to be very concerned about age and cognitive function. It was only in contrast to the subdued Biden that he seemed vigorous. Now he is almost surely facing off against a candidate who is two decades younger, appears significantly healthier, and comes across as much more intellectually adept—advantages that will hold true whether the ultimate candidate is Harris or some other, possibly even younger Democrat.
Harris is also a former prosecutor, a fact that hurt her with the left in the 2020 Democratic primary when protests against police violence were raging and criminal justice reform was a bipartisan issue, but which looks very different in 2024. The Trump campaign has made this election partly about crime and safety. If the match-up is Harris versus Trump, then it’s also the prosecutor versus the convicted felon. And the convicted felon oversaw a big jump in the murder rate while he was in office, while the former prosecutor saw murders go down during her time as vice president.
As a prosecutor, Harris’ record is unlikely to please the authoritarian right or the prison-abolitionist left, and she certainly made some missteps, but it’s the kind of reasonably tough-on-crime agenda that average voters might find largely unobjectionable: Opposed to the death penalty but cracking down on gun and violent crimes; diverting first-time non-violent offenders away from prison and into job training and educational programs; telling parents of serially truant students that they could face jail time if they didn’t get their kids in school. As a senator, she worked on bipartisan criminal justice reform initiatives.
As Harris put it during a campaign stop in Delaware on Monday, “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.” And, she said, “I will proudly put my record against his.”
To detractors and skeptics, Harris’s biggest vulnerability is her identity: she’s a woman, and a multi-racial one at that. America has had nearly two and a half centuries of unbroken male rule, and that rule has also been entirely white for every single one of those years except eight—and the lone Black man to ever hold the office was indisputably a unique political talent. Hillary Clinton was one of the most qualified candidates to ever run for the presidency, and she ran against a thoroughly unqualified boor of a man and lost anyway—in part because Trump attracted legions of voters motivated by sexism and thrilled with his misogyny.
But the peculiarities of an election eight years ago are not identical to the ones at play now. To many voters (including this one), a Clinton win felt inevitable, not urgent. This time around, no one is under the impression that Trump can’t win. And because the history-making quality of the potential first female president doesn’t feel at all preordained but rather like a difficult but in-reach goal, we very well may see many more people willing to work hard and turn out to make it happen.
America in 2024 is not America in 2016, psychologically or demographically. Young voters who were not eligible to cast ballots in 2016 are the most racially diverse in U.S. history. And the fastest-growing racial group in the U.S.? Multi-racial Americans, of which Harris is one: her mother was Indian and her father is Black. This is not to say that multi-racial voters are going to automatically cast their ballots for Harris. It is to say that in a nation where one in ten people now identify as multi-racial—and where nearly 1 in 5 are Latino, and more than 1 in 10 are Black—a Trumpian strategy that depends on racial animus and resentment is a risky bet, not just for the legions of non-white voters, but also for a white American public whose partners, children, grandchildren, neighbors, friends, and loved ones are less likely than ever to be white. Harris’ very existence may indeed push racially-resentful voters further toward Trump. But she may also trigger Trump’s own racial animus, and that very well may turn off even many conservatives.
Nor is Harris blazing a wholly uncharted path. Black women have ascended to positions of power across the U.S., especially in the Democratic Party, where Black women are also the most reliable voting bloc. Black women are, like women more broadly, underrepresented in the halls of power, and particularly in executive roles (no state has ever elected a Black female governor). But Black female executives are far from nonexistent. Black women are mayors of major American cities from Los Angeles to Philadelphia to New Orleans to Washington, D.C. Electing a Black woman president would be huge and historic—and far from impossible.
Harris has also been stronger than Biden on Democrats’ winningest issue: Abortion rights. Everywhere abortion has been on the ballot, abortion has won. Trump has already wisely identified abortion as a losing issue for his campaign and is trying to just not talk about it, while Biden was uniquely bad at talking about it. Trump is responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade and making this whole mess, and picked a vice president who wants a national abortion ban with few exceptions and who dismissed pregnancy from rape as a mere inconvenience. Biden famously avoided saying the word “abortion” at all, and in his debate with Trump turned what should have been a home-run abortion question into a bizarre ramble about women being raped by their in-laws and immigrants killing white girls. Unlike either of these men, Harris has a solid pro-choice record, and the ability to speak cogently and urgently about reproductive rights.
Perhaps most importantly, Harris has momentum behind her. For better or worse, Trump reshaped American politics into something between spectator sport and reality TV. Democratic voters tend to be much more circumspect and rational than Republican ones, showing with their ballots that they prefer competence to drama. But the Biden campaign felt like a collective slog toward inevitable defeat; the primary emotions he invoked were pity and dread.
Biden dropping out and endorsing Harris was not only the biggest news story in the nation, but she immediately racked-up endorsements and donations. And sure, a small handful of donors acted a little salty about a candidate who doesn’t look like them, or like most of the candidates who came before. But Harris largely has the wind at her back.
There are a lot of words that may come to mind when one thinks of Donald Trump, but “new” is not one of them. Harris is not a new kid on the political block, but she has never had the national profile of Biden or Trump, and has been newly propelled to the top of the Democratic candidate pool. She sits at the fortunate intersection of inspiration (a potential first), anger (over anti-abortion laws), novelty, and hope. No amount of campaign spending can buy that kind of emotional resonance. And if she can keep hitting all of these bright notes as she faces off against a sour old man, she can be the person who finally tosses Trump into the trash heap of history, and makes clear that his MAGA movement has fully expired.
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