As probably everyone by now knows: Donald Trump has now been elected to his second term as president of the United States, with likely disastrous consequences for minorities, immigrants, and working class people as a whole to come.
Plenty of scholars, journalists, pundits, and online personas have spilled ink on the topic of how this happened when the mood in the united states on election day was much more optimistic as to the chances of Kamala Harris winning. I'm not going to pretend to know the answer but I do have some thoughts I want to ramble on...
Some Things to Get Out of the Way:
I voted for Kamala this year, Biden last election, and Clinton the one before that. Begrudgingly for all, might I add. To me, they all represented a center-right neoliberal imperial order that gave nothing but lip service to the downtrodden and truly only represented corporate interests.
However, I voted for them because I have come to believe that a vote is not a moral act, but a strategic one. Elected officials will always be adversaries and the communities they 'serve' always have to fight and organize underneath the elected official; voting strategically in this reality means trying your best to elect your weakest adversary.
For example, Kamala's role in the abhorrent Biden administration as it enables a genocide in Palestine is deplorable, yet I still voted for her because I believe that she would be more easily forced to change course through protest and direct action.
That aside, I - the eternal pessimist - believed Kamala would lose approximately 2 weeks after she picked Walz as her running mate. Not because of the pick but because after what seemed to be a wave of support for her campaign - due in part to excitement about Biden stepping down and Walz being relatively progressive, popular, and from a swing state - she made a series of unforced messaging and strategic errors that all but killed it.
I saw it as a sign that this campaign was only paying lip service with Walz and would run an increasingly Hillary Clinton-esque pivot-to-the-right campaign. I'll get into some of the steps I think were critical blunders a little later.
I want to make it extremely clear that I don't think Kamala would have won the election if she had just taken my position on each and every single issue me and my progressive buddies care and talk about. I understand that I am much more to the left of the average democratic voter let alone American voter. The argument I want to make is 'listen to the polls and meet people where they are instead of listening to overpaid consultants that have been using the same playbook since Obama and only narrowly won in 2020'.
Listening to Black Voices:
I am not black, but several people who I look to for black perspectives have generally reacted to the outcome by stating that racism and misogyny are the primary cause of the difference in the vote between Joe Biden's run and Kamala's. Among these, FD Signifier and Olayemi "Olay" Olurin who are public leftist figures. I actually specifically watched a discussion among Olay and other journalists/pundits a few days before the election where the mood in the room seemed extremely optimistic, if not confident, in a Harris/Walz victory. At the time, I wondered to myself if I was just being too much of a doomer.
While I do believe racism and misogyny played a significant role, it gave me a bit of pause to read FD and Olay's takes after the result because my initial gut reaction was that the campaign had made the same mistakes as the Clinton campaign had. It was just the classic 'the moderates are the key' cliche strategy that to this day democratic pundits believe is fundamentally good strategy.
My opinion on the matter was well condensed by the tweet from @real_hotguts:
"what lewis means here is harris adroitly followed the sensible centrist rules on winning elections and it did not work. and because all sensible adults in the room know There Is No Alternative, the point of failure must be elsewhere, perhaps in the hearts of voters themselves"
This general idea is why I was surprised to hear FD's and Olay's gut reactions. I want to understand their perspectives better, but it's not like I can just reach out and ask in the horde of online comments they already receive.
If I could, I'd probably try to get a sense as to how far this belief extends. If strategy was not the issue, and it was simply Kamala's race and gender, does this mean they don't believe the US could ever elect a black woman as president? If so, does that not imply that if we, as progressives, want our lesser adversary to be elected, we must always beg the democrats to run a white man, and therefore sometimes vote against the most capable candidate in order to ensure it is a white man on the ticket?
Is that not a capitulation to the preferences of those same racists? Is that not simply throwing in the towel? Do we truly have to wait for enough whites to either develop a conscience or die (let's face it many are old, but there is a concerning block of young right wing men) before we can actually try to run the most qualified candidate, regardless of race or gender?
I truly am struggling with this set of logic because - trust me - I am under no illusion that this isn't a deeply racist and patriarchal country, but I also don't think waiting around for some switch to flip and run more old white men in the meantime is the path forward either. We must look for other points of failure.
Problems I Saw in the Harris/Walz Strategy
Kamala's team campaigned further and further to the right of her relatively progressive campaigns of the past and gave up on plenty of popular measures - like the public option or universal healthcare, DACA, path to citizenship, restricting weapons sales to Israel, etc.
They made Liz Cheney, daughter of the infamous war criminal and architect of the Iraq war Dick Cheney, a central campaign figure. The strategy, as I understood it, was that Liz would appeal to 'old guard' republicans in suburban communities displeased with Trump's harsh rhetoric and cult of personality.
They got fewer republican votes than Biden did in 2020. In the end, if some voter is looking for a candidate with right-wing messaging, why would they pick the one that’s less to the right and perceived as tactically pivoting rather than having long-term beliefs in right-wing ideology?
The Harris/Walz campaign also appeared to put very little distance between the administration they would represent, and the deeply unpopular current Biden/Harris administration. The only real time I saw Harris emphasize a difference in opinion she held was when she disavowed Biden calling republicans garbage.
She didn't distance herself on Palestine, economic policy, immigration policy, packing the supreme court, and many other key aspects that polls generally showed were key concerns for core blocks of American voters.
Whether the campaign wanted to or not, Harris is a part of the current administration, she was and will always be viewed as having a hand in its policies, outcomes, and problems.
The simple math I want to demonstrate here is that if the Biden administration and its stances/policies/outcomes on these issues are viewed negatively, then running on 'more of what you got the last 4 years but with a fresh new face' is not exactly going to inspire millions to 1) take off work, 2) wait in line for possibly hours, 3) tell their friends and go vote.
The American people, regardless of positive economic averages and overly-generous media coverage, have felt like things have not been going in their favor the last four years.
We knew this during the final Obama term. And I had thought we had learned that lesson. Americans are very willing to throw a Trump-shaped grenade at their problem when the alternative is just 'more of the same you got the last 4 years'. This is not a winning message, and coddling the right isn't either.
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kagumail.uselessly535@passinbox.com
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