Reveal who the VP truly is, not the brand burden from the 2020 distortion field

Jul 25, 2024

Why has Kamala Harris been endorsed by the leading moderate think tank Third Way, but not by Bernie Sanders?

A consensus has emerged over the last few days that the battle for the White House boils down to defining Kamala1. Specifically, either defining her as a California radical who was the most liberal US Senator (as Trump and GOP Senate candidates want) or as a pragmatic prosecutor (which mainstream Democrats want).

On Tuesday, we laid out three dynamics that will influence how Harris is defined:

Harris’s true self is moderate, and her public campaign discomfort derived from being pressured left
The 2020 primary dynamic squeezed her, while the 2024 primary-free dynamic frees Harris to be herself - and focus on the middle
Biden was moved left over the past four years, and those dynamics must shift for Harris to win

We’ll dive into the first two today. And be talking much more about it at WelcomeFest in DC on Tuesday, which will feature some of the sharpest analysts of these topics:

2020 Pre-mortem on Centrist Harris

The doubters often go back to the “For The People” 2020 campaign flop (or all the way back to her statewide campaign for AG in 2010, which she narrowly won in deep blue California).

But forget all the postmortems of the 2020 Harris presidential primary campaign. Five years ago this week, The New York Times wrote a pre-mortem just months into her presidential primary campaign that captures the upside of Harris: she is by nature the type of moderate that can win the middle.

At her strongest, Senator Kamala Harris is forceful and pragmatic. She elates crowds in Iowa and South Carolina with her denunciations of President Trump, and spells out her policy agenda — on matters like restricting gun sales, reducing prescription drug prices and giving tax benefits to renters — in precise terms.

And it also captures a downside, not so much to Harris as to where the Democratic primary zeitgeist went in 2020: to extreme litmus tests. Here’s the next paragraph in the same article:

Then there is another version of Ms. Harris: unsteady when addressing litmus-test questions — the hypothetical or intensely ideological queries like whether a single-payer system should void all private insurance, or whether a convicted terrorist should be able to vote from prison. She is intensely resistant, sometimes to the point of visible discomfort, to her own party’s thirst for policies that would redraw the American economy and system of government.

Wait a second, Kamala Harris was “intensely resistant” “to the point of visible discomfort” at Democratic activists’ “thirst for policies” that would lead to massive changes?

That sounds like someone who could appeal to many swing voters! But alas, 2020 was a funhouse mirror that distorted formerly pragmatic Democratic. It was basically like dozens of little Iraq War votes for the next generation of rising star candidates. As Matt Yglesias recently wrote, Harris:

caught a bit of world-historical bad luck in that she happened to run for president during literally the only political cycle in history where a track-record as a tough on crime prosecutor could possibly be construed as a weakness. I do not think she handled this situation correctly, but it was an honest-to-God weird situation.

2020 was weird!

The NYT article headline shows where the media and progressive mindset was at the time:

Ah yes, the horror of “relevant policy”.

With five years of hindsight, we know just how wrong this narrative of the 2020 Democratic primary electorate was - and how well Kamala’s instinctive pragmatism could have won out over Elizabeth Warren’s “big, structural change” if emphasized:

“I’m not trying to restructure society,” Ms. Harris said. “I’m just trying to take care of the issues that wake people up in the middle of the night.”

Kamala was right, and the real-time coverage of the 2020 Democratic primary was wrong. Joe Biden’s team devised a winning strategy in that primary because, in their words, “We turned off Twitter. We stayed away from it. We knew that the country was in a different headspace than social media would suggest“

But while Kamala The Human Being was right in 2020, her presidential campaign team pushed her along with the Twitter-infused media narrative. The pragmatic candidate got mauled by the online leftists in her employ:

One adviser said the fixation that some younger staffers have with liberals on Twitter distorted their view of what issues and moments truly mattered, joking that it was not President Trump’s account that should be taken offline, as Ms. Harris has urged, but rather those of their own trigger-happy communications team.

“Not Ideological”

Re-reading the 2019 coverage can be tortuous, as it relives just how damaging the overreach of the progressive left was - and how its ramifications are still being felt today. The same NYT article again:

At times, her shifts in tone and substance have been abrupt. Earlier this month, she laid out a clear and creative plan to lower drug prices with presidential executive powers. Then, hours later, she took a new and confusing stance on “Medicare for All”-style health insurance, endorsing the program but opposing taxes typically seen as necessary to fund it.
That set of instincts — her preference for narrow, tactile proposals over grandly ambitious ones, her facility with procedure and unease with ideology — defines her approach to politics, according to Ms. Harris and her closest associates. And her ability to reconcile those inclinations with her party’s mood could determine the fate of her campaign.

It was not the mood of the party! It was the mood of the young staffers and activists on Twitter! Many great leaders got swallowed up by the Online Left, and then spit out by voters. Only the Twitter-less Biden was immune, and left standing.

While not fun to re-live, the 2020 primary still shapes the Democratic world today. But it can also shape a counter-reaction that can power Kamala to an electoral college victory.

Here’s another problem she had in the 2020 primary: actually caring about what all the buzzwords and unrealistic policy proposals meant:

Part of the difficulty, Ms. Harris said, was her impulse to take any given question and start “running through, in my head, all the scenarios about how it would actually work.”
“It can be very — obviously — challenging for me as a candidate, because it can be misinterpreted, I think, as being evasive, or, ‘Is she sure? Is she wiffly-waffling?’ Or whatever,” Ms. Harris said. “But it’s just, I really do think through these things.”

Kamala isn’t just sharp and energetic. She’s ideologically flexible:

Five associates observed, in near-identical language, that she is “not ideological.”

The centrist’s curse of ideological flexibility can be the greatest gift of a politician.

Coronation Upside

A competitive race for the nomination would have brought some benefits - baseline democracy benefits of increased engagement, partisan benefits of attention, raising the profile of potential Vice Presidential nominees, and maybe even moving the conversation to swing voters.

But competition also poses risk on the “moving Kamala to the center” strategy - largely because she is personally moderate and it was the competition that pushed her left!

The risk most often mentioned about a competitive primary was the party fracturing. But given the dynamics within the party ecosystem, and the delta between over-educated activists and low-information swing voters, the bigger risk is actually in unifying all of the “professional left.” As Lauren wrote in her critique of Ezra Klein’s praise of Biden’s unity approach, unity did not actually work for Biden’s re-election prospects. Biden was unpopular and losing - and not listening to the general election winners in the party.

A competition for the nomination may have enhanced a focus on electability, but it would force Harris to compete for every interest group bloc in the Democratic ecosystem. While conditions today are different than in 2020, the nonprofit progressive industrial complex is still strong. The Groups still have their litmus tests and foundation-funded grant metrics for media hits for pushing Democrats leftward. And just as in 2020, they would have pushed Harris. Just like interest groups are (successfully!) pushing the contenders for the vice presidential nomination to change positions now.

A bellwether of Democratic Socialists, the editor of The Nation Magazine, gave voice to leftist frustration by asking, “where's pressure on Harris to not just run on Trump being a criminal & coconuts & decency or whatever?”

No competition means no pressure. And, if Harris pushes back, the purity test groups have no leverage.

Nixon to China, Unburdened

Without having to hold down the left flank for primary votes (or delegates), Harris is free to do whatever is needed to win. She can “say the words” Biden would not: America is producing more energy, including oil, than any nation ever.

For a flavor of how this would actually work, check out this video recommended by a moderate faction leader in her native SF. Harris mocked the impracticality of San Franciscans who “are progressive minded” that she “agrees with conceptually” but do not address reality - who do not address the reasons “I have three padlocks on my door.” You can check out this video starting at 11:12.

Harris is now free to do that again - to pull off a "Nixon to China" move, a metaphor:

to refer to the ability of a politician with an unassailable reputation among their supporters for representing and defending their values to take actions that would draw their criticism and even opposition if taken by someone without those credentials.

Or, more bluntly: she can pivot.

Trump to Evangelicals

Unfortunately, the Nixon to China - or Harris to the Middle - move is even more necessary because Trump is doing something similar to his right flank. The Former Guy got Republicans to remove abortion specifics from the Republican platform, and then disowned Project 2025 in a forceful way, starting by invoking his “great common sense”:

“some on the severe right came up with Project 2025 … they’re sort of the opposite of the radical left, you have the radical left and the radical right … read some of the things and they’re seriously extreme.”

Trump’s mocking tone evokes the Harris frustration with the far left in San Francisco. We need that front and center to win more swing voters. As that video from 2013 shows, Kamala can pull it off by invoking her progressive credibility (raised in Berkeley, CA by liberal activist parents) then pivoting to why she must tell tough truths to those on her own side. In telling her own political story, Matt Yglesias suggests a specific election:

She can remind people that she challenged the incumbent DA in San Francisco from the right to win her first election — that she is well aware of the excesses of big-city liberalism and has in fact fought against them

Day One

Kamala’s initial campaign appearance on her first full day as a candidate was at the Delaware campaign office. And it held some positive themes for voters in the middle: patriotism and bipartisanship.

She kicked off with patriotic themes:

We are all here because we love our country … we believe in opportunity, in freedom, in justice.

And the first thing she invoked about Joe Biden - after his economic successes - was bipartisanship:

He brought together Republicans and Democrats and passed historic legislation … I would sit with Joe in the Oval Office as he would bring members of both sides of the aisle, and talk. And listen. And help them see what they may have in common, and how we can actually work towards solutions.

That message works, and is true to who Kamala is.

Let’s get to work to make the (true) message stick. For the People in the middle.

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Kamala is Moderate