The Strangely Empty Politics of Kamala Harris
With Kamala Harris’s campaign struggling to extinguish the possibility of another Trump presidency, she seems willing to try everything — except for a clear political vision that folds together broad antiwar sentiment and economic populism.
Kamala Harris speaking in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, on October 16, 2024. (Ryan Collerd / AFP via Getty Images)
On Monday, Kamala Harris and the Democratic National Committee started running a new attack ad in Pennsylvania. That’s not noteworthy in itself. Early voting has already started, and the Keystone State has emerged as the election’s most hotly contested battleground. Both sides are hurling plenty of attack ads.
But surprisingly, this ad isn’t directed against Republican nominee Donald Trump. It’s aimed at the Green Party’s Jill Stein, who’s currently polling around 1 percent. The ad shows Stein morphing into Trump while a voice-over warns that “a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump.”
Neither the Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton campaigns ran attack ads against Stein, even though her campaigns in 2012 and 2016 drew comparable support. Nor did Joe Biden bother attacking Green Party nominee Howie Hawkins in 2020. Harris’s unprecedented move is hard to interpret as anything but a sign of desperation, especially in the context of other developments in the campaign.
Harris seems to be adopting a gimmicky new strategy every day, from embracing cryptocurrency to announcing that as president she’ll run all policy through a bipartisan council of advisors. She’s throwing everything against the wall, hoping that something, anything, will put her over the edge.
There’s one tactic Harris doesn’t seem keen to try, though. She won’t embrace the kind of antiwar sentiment and economic populism that might appeal to many currently unenthusiastic voters, but which would infuriate the Democratic establishment and the donor class.
Do Stein Voters Just Need One More Scolding?
In a sufficiently tight election, it’s true that the Stein vote in Pennsylvania might exceed a Trump margin of victory. But anyone voting for Stein in a swing state is almost certainly aware of this possibility. In all likelihood, they’ve already been scolded about it repeatedly by liberal acquaintances. The average Stein voter is very conscious of the “spoiler effect” and chooses to vote third party anyway. Like it or not, they’ve taken it into account and made their decision.
If the Democrats wanted to diminish this problem going forward, they could choose to put their energies into promoting reforms like ranked-choice voting, allowing voters who want to build up third-party alternatives to the existing choices while also preventing the victory of the greater evil to do both. This would probably be a more effective solution than shaming the hardest core of dissident voters who, judging by the polls, are the only people planning to vote for Stein.
Failing that, if the Harris campaign wants to appeal to those voters — and, better yet, appeal to a vastly larger number of disenchanted Democrats to increase enthusiasm and turnout — they could engage in actual substantive political persuasion.
For example, Harris could pledge to end the flow of US arms going to Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal war in Gaza. This is the issue that most incenses many voters who might otherwise pull the lever for a Democrat as a matter of course. It wouldn’t be hard for Harris to justify this change in position. She could say that, as she saw the Israel Defense Forces literally burn patients alive in a hospital last weekend, or when she saw Netanyahu publicly mull sealing off all humanitarian aid to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to “starve out” Hamas fighters, she realized that her conscience would no longer allow her to support the war.
To be even more persuasive, she could fold this into a broader agenda for domestic reform. Right now, the United States devotes an obscene share of its resources to maintaining a globe-spanning imperial military force, complete with hundreds of army bases across the planet and a large enough weapons industry to sustain simultaneous proxy wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. At the same time, we maintain a tiny and miserly social welfare state. Diabetics die because their GoFundMes don’t raise enough to cover their insulin, and people stay in bad jobs or bad marriages to hold onto their health insurance. Low-wage workers in industries like fast food are often told that if they want to make a living wage they should go back to school and get a college degree, but college is so astronomically expensive that taking this advice could lead to inescapable debt.
A genuinely populist policy agenda would tie together the two halves of this picture, pledging to slash the military-industrial complex down to size to free up funding for a variety of initiatives to substantially improve the lives of working-class Americans.
When Biden ended his candidacy in July, grassroots Democrats were ecstatic. With Biden’s cognitive decline no longer an issue, they thought, they were sure to beat Trump. But this was far too hasty. Trump and J. D. Vance were leaning into an ugly and shallow pseudo-populism. Being able to string sentences together has not been enough to suppress the GOP; the content of those sentences matters, too. Harris’s words may be coherent, but they’re devoid of political vision. It’s a missed opportunity that’s likely hurting her in the polls.
The Road to Nowhere
There was a time when Senator Harris was a cosponsor of Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill. Instead of dusting off that position and fighting for it this year, though, she quietly backed away from it as well as a variety of similar past stances — on the Green New Deal resolution she’d once cosponsored, for example, which would have included “guaranteeing a job at a family-sustaining wage” for every American who wanted one.
It seems now that Harris was merely trying on a progressive costume to see what it did for her political career. However insincere, she could have put it on again for this election, possibly to great effect. Instead, she’s leaning away from politics as such, trying to seem blandly palatable enough to absorb whatever anti-Trump sentiment exists and squeak through in November.
Harris’s choice to tap Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate seemed to point in a promising direction. Walz has a solid record of social democratic policy accomplishments in his home state, and he’s an effective speaker. But judging by the amount of attention the Harris campaign gives both figures, a voter only half paying attention in the last month could be forgiven for assuming that Harris’s running mate was never-Trump Republican Liz Cheney.
In a moment of political lucidity in August, Harris pledged to go after corporate price-gouging, a deeply popular promise in a time of widespread frustration with unaffordable prices. Unfortunately, her campaign has since de-emphasized the idea. Much of her energy has gone instead into “country over party” appeals to an elusive category of partisan Republicans who, nine years after Trump started his first campaign for president, might be convinced to turn against him in the fall of 2024.
Since it was revealed that Dick Cheney will be voting for Harris, Harris surrogates keep cheerfully invoking “Bernie Sanders and Dick Cheney” to show what a broad coalition supports them. But beyond making those of us who value Bernie’s legacy throw up in our mouths a little every time we hear his name paired with one of the most notorious war criminals of the twenty-first century, all this does is feed into the Trump narrative that he’s battling a unified establishment.
The election is close enough that Harris could still stumble and flail across the finish line in November and become president in January. Stranger things have happened. Right now, though, the picture is bleak. The poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight, for example, has Harris beating Trump by about six-tenths of 1 percent in Pennsylvania and enjoying similarly razor-thin margins in other swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin. Other sources even have Trump a bit ahead. Given that the former president outperformed the polls both of the previous times he ran, this surely isn’t where Harris hoped to be in October.
Meanwhile, her campaign is a menagerie of niche and apolitical ideas that evoke novelty without threatening anyone in power, like voicing support for cryptocurrency and the weed industry. It’s a strange and empty kind of politics that’s almost not politics at all, so deep is her unwillingness to stake out any political territory that might make her enemies in high places.
Maybe sheer dumb luck will carry Harris to a narrow victory this November. But don’t be surprised if “country over party” falls flat — in which case, we’ll all get a chance to find out what happens to the country under four more years of Donald Trump.
Contributors
Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books, most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters.