It’s Harris’s Race to Lose…

Conor here: A quote comes to mind.

“How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote FOR something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?”

-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

And the lesser of two evils—including whoever it is this go-round—often seem to get more evil.

By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies

I’m trying not to comment much on the election, but I will say this: It’s Harris’s race to lose, and she might lose it.

Why?

A Change Election?

Some analysts think this is still a change election — I’m among them — and many voters are still sick of billionaires running their lives. So what can those who want change do in this election? Democrats are still the party of “keep things the same, only better.” Not much change in that; or at least, not enough.

So what’s left to do? Voters who want change can support an agent of chaos (that’s definitely Trump) and upset the cart entirely, or they can stay home. Trump already has all his voters (see below), so the choices become either Harris or stay at home.

Unstrategic? You could say that. But angry people, in the main, aren’t perfect strategists, and the very very angry aren’t strategic at all.

The stay-at-home strategy hurts Harris the most, since Trump, as I see it, maxed out his voting ranks a long time ago — his peak is always near 48% — while Harris could still grow hers among undecideds. Yet instead of gaining new votes, her growth has stopped or receded. (See chart above.) Undecideds aren’t breaking in her direction, at least not in good enough numbers. Her campaign has stalled.

Working Class Voters

To try to determine why Harris has stalled, a survey by the Center for Working-Class Politics, YouGov and Jacobin magazine, tested various messages with workers in Pennsylvania, a key swing state. They chose five gleaned from her actual campaign and two alternatives, trying to see what worked best.

The real messages tested (those based on her campaign) were these:

  1. The Soft Populist message acknowledges that most businesses are job creators and play by the rules but calls out big corporations and Wall Street for price gouging and not paying their fair share of taxes.
  2. The Moderate Economic message focuses on Harris’s economic vision of an “opportunity economy” that achieves broad-based growth and emphasizes tax cuts for middle-class Americans.
  3. The Democratic Threat message calls on voters to defend democracy and liberal norms against the threat posed by Trump, highlighting his felony criminal convictions.
  4. The Defend Abortion message emphasizes Harris’s support of abortion rights against Republican proposals to enact a nationwide abortion ban, a position she attributes to Trump.
  5. The Immigration Critical message underscores Harris’s support for increased border security while facilitating a path to citizenship for immigrants who play by the rules.

The messages that weren’t from her campaign were these:

  1. The Strong Populist message more aggressively targets economic elites for getting richer while working Americans suffer, sets up a strong contrast between the working class and the billionaire class, and blames not only economic elites and Trump (as in the Soft Populist message) but a wider cast of Washington politicians for leaving workers behind.
  2. The Progressive Economic message foregrounds progressive economic positions, some of which Harris has already endorsed but often fails to emphasize, along with some policies that fall outside the campaign’s current policy proposals. These policies include reshoring American jobs, guaranteeing jobs for all those looking for work, and expanding Medicare access to include younger Americans who lack adequate health insurance.

Matt Karp summarized the results. The solution is clear. Nonpartisan populism beats all other messages, including partisan, anti-Trump populism; and the “threat to democracy” message actually loses some voters.

Apparently people still hate the billionaires. Yet Harris and her strategists persist in the partisan populist message and “threat to democracy.” To working class voters convinced the system is (still) rigged, she doesn’t look like the answer.

Democracy Under Threat

The failure of the threat-to-democracy message deserves comment. Trump has indeed let his strongman flag fly, proving to liberals that this threat is real. So why doesn’t this message work with the working class?

The answer is implied by the discussion above, but some writers make it explicit. Working class people are the primary national victims of billionaire greed. So what do they see as the threat, Republicans or billionaires?

Here’s Carl Beijer’s take: “‘Democracy is at stake’ messaging only works in a democracy”. From the paywalled part of his piece:

I would argue … that “democracy is at stake” messaging only works in a functional democracy. And since most people don’t think of the US as a functional democracy, most people don’t think that it’s actually “at stake” in any meaningful sense.

He explains, referencing the survey discussed above:

[W]hen Democrats start going on about how Trump could suspend elections or crack down on free speech or launch all kinds of other attacks on liberal democracy, a lot of people just shrug because they already think they have nothing left to lose.

The advantage of this explanation is that it also explain[s] the popularity of the Strong Populist message — which, again, emphasizes that DC actually answers to the powerful rather than the people. [emphasis mine]

So yes, people might believe democracy is at stake. But maybe, just maybe, they define the problem as bipartisan, and Harris, in doing not much to “take on the billionaires” (to quote a once popular populist), fails to look like the answer.

Of course, we’ll find out soon what worked and what didn’t. But the “embrace Dick Cheney and comfort the rich” approach could cost her a lot.

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20 comments

  1. Acacia

    So what’s left to do?

    Uhh… vote third party? Jill Stein, perhaps?

    Or is that too much outside the box for Mr. Neuburger…?

    Reply
    1. ambrit

      Change that to: So what’s the Left to do?
      Then the choices boil down to either go all Kerensky or go all Trotsky.
      You’ll probably see many of us at the barricades soon since very few of us can afford brunch.

      Reply
    2. JohnH

      In any state that’s not a battleground, voting third party should be a no-brainer. It sends a message–dissatisfaction and dissent. Not voting conveys disinterest.

      Reply
  2. fjallstrom

    Committing a genocide and demanding that the voters affirm the support for the genocide is also probably not doing her any favours.

    Far as I can see from my little corner of the internet:
    * People like to vote for candidates they like.Remember when being the most popular candidate was important? Now it is all about being the least unpopular.
    * Biden’s approval rating had been stable at minus 12-13 for some time until the genocide started and he slowly worsened to minus 19-20 (then the debate and him being pushed aside). Harris approval and favourability ratings seems to have peaked a month ago. Joy only brings you so far when doing a genocide.
    * The usual badgering backfires when used against anti-genocide voters:
    – Trump will endanger minorities! – Harris is doing genocide right now!
    – Trump will be worse on Gaza! – Worse then genocide?!
    – Vote the lesser evil! – How can genocde be a lesser evil?!
    – We can push her left after the election! – No you can’t, and the genocide shows it!

    I don’t know how many percentages this is, in particular as US media dutifully diverts their eyes and protestors are promptly removed from the public view. But if Stein gets more voters then the margin of losing, remember that the choice to get the genocide done was more important then winning the election.

    Reply
    1. ChrisFromGA

      Trump seems to get it that genocide is bad for business. He’d probably be Netanyahu’s “tough” buddy, who gives him what he wants but also gives him the hard talk he doesn’t want to hear.

      “Hey, Bibi, cut this out now and I’ll give you a casino and some land in Florida. Plus some more beautiful F35s”

      Harris would just dither and send Blinken on his 89th trip to Egypt, while more and more bodies pile up.

      Slow death vs. quick.

      Reply
  3. CA

    I have no idea who will be the next president. What will be distressing to me though is that there seemingly will be no accounting for a current Biden-Harris administration that has supported war in Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, bombings across regions and countries, even military encirclement and preparation for war with China:

    https://nytimes.com/2024/10/29/us/politics/us-military-army-china.html

    October 29, 2024

    New Vehicles, Face Paint and a 1,200-Foot Fall: The U.S. Army Prepares for War With China
    The big and cumbersome Army is trying to transform itself to deploy quickly to Asia, if needed. It is an inherently dangerous business.
    By Helene Cooper
    Photographs and Video by Kenny Holston

    Reply
    1. Acacia

      She’ll prolly get the Merkel treatment.

      Her phone and Internet will be surveilled. Some kompromat will be sussed.

      The spooks will contact her, and… wink wink, nod nod… you know.

      Reply
  4. Peter Steckel

    Pivoting to a supposed threat in China while practically losing against alleged “threats” (can I air quote hard enough on this phrase) in the Middle East and Russia is just asinine. I read a summary of a study by Raytheon earlier this year – which I cannot locate through google now for some reason – in which it stated there was not a single system it produced now that did not have some critical components made and imported from China. In short, what do folks in the military expect will happen to Raytheon’s ability to rearm in a war with China?

    Reply
  5. Froghole

    Many thanks for this. I would hope that the future is not of two establishment candidates vying with each other and exploiting the tyranny of small differences, but of an establishment candidate in opposition to an insurgency candidate. After all, there are now plenty of votes to be had in insurgency policies. Although a dynamic of that type did not succeed in the past (viz. the Goldwater and McGovern disasters of 1964 and 1972), it did – just – succeed in 2016 and might – just – succeed in a few days’ time. The question is therefore whether a Harris defeat will finally discredit the DNC and allow the ‘progressive’ wing (to the extent it has not been debauched by the corporate establishment) to wrest control, or whether a Trump defeat will permit the GOP corporate establishment (to the extent it still exists) to reassert control over the RNC.

    For me another interesting dynamic is the neocon one. After all, the two main candidates are effectively titular fronts for underlying interests, and the neocons have been in power regardless of party. They successfully infiltrated Obama and usurped Trump. Latterly they have drifted decisively into the Democratic column because of Trump’s real or imagined unreliability, and his failure to dress blatant warmongering in elegant rhetoric (for the neocons simply cannot forgive his ‘honest vulgarity’). To be a neocon is to have a nose for power, and presumably they will drift back towards Trump in order to ‘save the government’ (i.e., to tame him, as in 2017-21). Absent Israel and Iran, where his natural instincts are strongly neocon, I wonder how dependent Trump will be on the neocons, assuming an uneven spread of neocon assumptions, ideology and predicates across much of the bureaucracy? My fear is that, for all his bluster, he will be as much in thrall to them as ever.

    Reply
  6. ambrit

    The Democrat Party had a chance with Sanders to offer voters real Populism and the ensuing contortions they went through to eliminate any chance of that message being sent out to the voters was both edifying and depressing.
    It suggests to me a variation of that old 2nd Amendment talking point: They’ll get “Our Democracy” when they pry it out of the hands of the Oligarchs.

    Reply
  7. Pat

    While this is framed as Harris’ election, it ignores that she was a backroom puppet hoisted onto the public and would in all likelihood never made it past the starting line in a robust actual primary system. I don’t think you can go with this having been Harris’ election to lose and put aside the fact that Harris has never played well to the big room. Nor can you ignore that her entire tenure as Vice President, admittedly a largely ceremonial job, came across as possibly the most inept and useless since maybe Agnew. True Biden putting her in charge of the border was probably vicious payback for owning him in the primary debate, but rather than taking it as a challenge she disappeared. So it may be nitpicking about an article I find supportive of campaign premises that are popular here, but this was the Democrats’ election to lose.

    And I would also posit that one of the reasons they are losing is that they think the public is stupid. Might that threat to Democracy position being a net loser be because they themselves engage in actions that are not Democratic, the most obvious of which was the selection of Harris to be the candidate? That people notice that their ability to talk freely is under great threat today from top Democrats as much or more than from Trump and his Republican allies. I should have made that Democrats and their Republican allies but this way I get to point that their choosing to embrace the more established of their opponents not only doesn’t play well in a change election but truly is edifying to a public who was wondering why Democrats never achieve the change they have promised in earlier campaigns.

    As for the strong populist message, well most of us here know why that will never be the choice.

    Reply
    1. Samuel Conner

      > Might that threat to Democracy position being a net loser be because they themselves engage in actions that are not Democratic, the most obvious of which was the selection of Harris to be the candidate?

      “Saving democracy” is, in their mouths, code for “saving Democratcy”.

      It’s a small Inner Party, and we aren’t in it.

      Reply
    2. Dr. John Carpenter

      Your first paragraph sums it all up. This article seems to me to be more of the “we just have the wrong messaging” nonsense that I’ve seen since Hillary wiped out. It’s not the messaging. It’s what you’re selling. Kamala couldn’t make it to Iowa in 2016 despite being signal boosted by the media and powers that be. I believe it was said then the more people saw of Harris, the less they liked her. Voters aren’t as stupid as the Dems think. They just don’t like her.

      The only thing I’d add is the author posits this is a change election and then wonders why the candidate who says she can’t think of a single thing she’d change from the current administration is teeing up a loss. Hmm..’tis a mystery!

      Reply
  8. Zagonostra

    If people are ok with voting for genocide, I can only hope for the speedy demise of this country. I’m not wishing harm or pain on anyone, but this AngloAmerican imperial project has run its course.

    Reply
  9. Alan Sutton

    Thanks Conor.

    I haven’t read the article yet but am inspired to comment straight from the top.

    Beautiful to see Hunter Thompson quoted but you limited him to his (prescient) comment from 1972.

    I still remember “Generation of Swine” and others which don’t seem to be listed anywhere anymore.

    Poor old Hunter took it all very seriously and paid the ultimate price for it. If only we had him here now to comment on Kamala. Or Trump!

    What fine prose we would be reading.

    Reply

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