On the night of December 7, 1941 – Winston Churchill recorded the next day in his diary – he had “slept the sleep of the saved.” With the United States’ entry into World War II now assured as the result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Churchill knew, the tide of the war, until then desperate, had suddenly changed.
Democrats across America seem to have slept the sleep of the saved this past Sunday night. Although seemingly inevitable since his disastrous debate appearance on June 27, President Joe Biden’s sudden withdrawal from the presidential race achieved something of the timing of Pearl Harbor vis-a-vis Republicans. While the three weeks it took to occur seemed excruciating for voters and party leaders desperate to turn the tide against Donald Trump, in retrospect it probably could not have happened any better.
The opposition party just completed its four full days of virtually uncountered prime-time TV programming (some of us, of course, did watch the major league baseball all-star game, instead), consumed with over-confidence as to its own invincibility – allowing Trump to shine a spotlight on some of his least appealing traits and to ask those few undecided voters whether they really want to elect a president who babbles on about Hannibal Lecter and Crazy Nancy – while expending all their ammunition shooting at Biden instead of whomever (almost certainly Vice President Kamala Harris) they will actually face in November. In a series of deeply-reported articles from inside the Trump campaign’s high command, the journalist Tim Alberta has documented how Trump’s strategy – and his stable, nearly year-long lead over Biden – has been constructed almost entirely on the premise of a Hulk Hogan-like Tough Guy running against an almost-cartoonishly superannuated spent force. As Trump himself groused on social media – as if this were actually some sort of unfair sneak attack – “Now we have to start all over.”
So do we all – although, in most ways, the remainder of this campaign is probably less like starting over than simply resetting to where we have always been. The country’s views on Donald Trump have been largely settled for nearly a decade now – his base of nearly half the country is not going away, and a narrow majority of Americans are never going to accept him. A very small number of voters have teetered between these two extremes, hating Hillary Clinton almost as much; enjoying the economic boom Trump inherited from his predecessor, Barack Obama; deciding enough was enough with Trump’s chaotic handling of the COVID-19 crisis; turning back to him as memories faded of January 6, 2021 (this being America, a phenomenon that started on January 7); the halcyon days of his economy seeming rosier in retrospect than the trials of the post-pandemic era under Biden. While European readers may be aware that the US under Biden currently enjoys the best economy in the developed world, Americans, in contrast, neither know nor care about European economies.
The Democrats’ electoral path
All of this has to be understood within the context of the US electoral system. The electoral college apportions votes for winning states in a way not dissimilar to tennis: You can win more total points than your opponent but still lose a tennis match because of how those wins are distributed between games and sets. Likewise, Clinton won the 2016 popular vote by a comfortable 2.9 million votes, or just over 2% of the total cast, but still lost the electoral college. Biden, garnering more votes than any president in history, won by closer to 5% in 2020, allowing him to capture a clear electoral vote majority – but a shift of merely 20,000 popular votes across three swing states, barely denting his popular mandate, would have handed the electoral college victory to Trump again. Running neck-and-neck with Trump, as Biden largely has done throughout 2024, is, in short, inadequate to win the election. And lately – in fact, ever since Trump was first indicted, and then convicted – Biden has fallen short even of that. This had narrowed his path to victory to a slim chance of carrying by the barest margin three particular states (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin) that would give him the barest minimum electoral vote total to win (270 out of 538). Not very promising.
And then came the debate
Does swapping out Biden improve Democratic chances? Well, it cannot make them any worse. The question is whether it makes them any better, and my argument is that, all by itself, the answer is no.
We will know more, of course, in coming weeks, as the race gels. Post-debate polling indicated that Harris did slightly better than Biden – but, basically, so did all the lesser-known alternatives, who shot up to the same levels against Trump, despite far-lower name-recognition, which, in all cases, was basically where Biden was polling pre-debate: slightly behind but within the margin of error. In short, one could argue, it does not matter who runs against Trump: Almost as many voters would choose the head of lettuce that outlasted short-lived British Prime Minister Liz Truss as would vote for Trump. Almost.
And that’s the key challenge: Can Harris – or anyone else – bring the extra few percentage points needed not just to win the popular vote but also to clear the higher hurdle for Democrats today, the electoral college? There are reasons to argue both sides.
As noted, the race has been remarkably stable and Trump’s support, if anything, has only gone up. No other Democrat possesses Biden’s unique reservoir of good will from decades in the public eye that included a string of personal heartbreaks and his rescuing the country from the turmoil of the Trump years. Harris, in particular, is largely inexperienced on the national stage and ran a terrible, and ignominiously brief, presidential campaign four years ago. She’s saddled with the unpopular record of the Biden-Harris Administration. And, of course, while Republicans would not put it exactly this way (well, OK, Trump eventually will): she’s a Black woman.
There is also plenty of reason to think exactly the opposite. Harris will excite the young and minority voters who had soured on Biden for a variety of reason, restoring the Democratic base necessary to win. Concerns over Biden’s age and cognitive abilities were clearly depressing his support; now Trump is the crazy, old guy. Biden’s bowing out ironically has suddenly transformed him into the Second Coming of George Washington, who famously relinquished the presidency and set the tradition of (in stark contrast to Trump) peaceful transfer of power. And, while every opponent tries to run against vice presidents as responsible for the failings of the prior administration, that technique rarely works: Everyone knows the “Veep” is responsible for just about nothing – it will be hard for Republicans to keep asserting that Harris both has no real experience (while picking a V.P. candidate themselves with virtually none) and is responsible for everything voters dislike about Biden’s tenure (which will, by next month, be very little. See supra: Memories, short.).
The vice presidential dilemma
In fact, the last time a vice president took the fall for the unpopularity of his president was 1968 – the long-ago year that has drawn constant comparisons to this one: an unpopular president mired in an unpopular foreign war despite historic domestic achievements, a sinister and unpopular Republican nominee leading the race in an historic comeback, a violence-marred contested Democratic convention in Chicago… And, now, next to the George Washington comparison, the most-cited parallel with Biden – the late withdrawal of that unpopular incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson. Biden’s even more stunning withdrawal comes even later and, arguably, is even more crippling for Democrats.
But this is jamming the square pegs of history into a conveniently-round contemporary hole. LBJ’s vice president (and my personal political hero), Hubert Humphrey – chosen as the nominee largely by party insiders despite lacking any indication of popular support (in an era when that was not how nominees were chosen, anyway, and after the ostensible popular choice, Bobby Kennedy, had been assassinated) – did indeed go down to defeat at the hands of a man, Richard Nixon, whom most Americans seriously questioned and many vehemently hated. But his margin of defeat in the popular vote was only 0.7%, and Humphrey likely would have won had not racist third-party candidate George Wallace picked off five southern states that otherwise were still in the national Democratic column (this was the beginning of the realignment of the so-called Solid South away from Democrats to the GOP). Most importantly, most observers believe Humphrey, who was closing hard, would have won had the election gone on for just one more week.
The largely-forgotten reason for Humphrey’s late charge was that he finally, belatedly, separated himself from Johnson on the Vietnam War and resolidified the Democratic majority. If only he had done so sooner!
In short, it is hard for a vice president to be tagged with the failings of his or her president – unless the campaign lets it happen. The lesson of the LBJ withdrawal in 1968 is not that it sets up the vice president for a fall, but rather that the vice president must establish herself as her own man. Er, woman.
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There is no issue today quite as salient as Vietnam. In fact, the most salient issue so far has been age, on which Harris immediately separates herself from both Biden and Trump simply by not being aged to begin with.
The problem for Democrats is that basically anyone does as well – but only as well – as Biden (at least, pre-debate Biden). So, while there’s a floor, there is also a ceiling for Democrats and the anti-Trump vote, and that’s not quite good enough to win. This is partially due to the unshakeable core of Trump’s support – but it is also a long-standing problem for Democrats generally: Large majorities of Americans agree with Democrats on the vast bulk of issues, especially economics (most favor tax increases for the rich, previously a subject Democrats were loath to touch) and the technological future, but also on such cultural cleavages as abortion, gay marriage, civil rights, and the embrace of foreign dictators.
But Democrats have been unable to turn their policy advantage to a permanent governing advantage because most Americans perceive Democrats themselves as out-of-touch on the issues that matter most immediately. The Trump campaign now wants this election to be fought on three of those issues: immigration, inflation, and crime (more-or-less the perennial GOP Holy Trinity). This sudden moment of generational shift provides an opportunity, however, if Democrats can but seize it.
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The question is whether Harris, unlike Humphrey, can break sufficiently with the past and her party’s perceived baggage, sufficiently soon, to regain the high ground on which most Americans agree.
Shifting the ground
Harris, in fact, is the rare Democrat who can turn the crime issue to her advantage due to her experience as a prosecutor and California Attorney General. If anything, her weakness with Democrats in 2020 was that she was perceived as too conservative on the issue for the party’s progressive base. Good for her in a general election! The Trump campaign is already planning to use that against her to try to alienate black voters and suppress the Democratic vote. I hope they invest heavily in that effort: As a resident of a swing state – Pennsylvania – I cannot tell you how many crime ads I saw run against Biden in 2020, for the same purpose. Last I checked, Biden won Philadelphia by a huge margin and, with it, the state and the electoral college. Trump will have a hard time arguing simultaneously that white voters should vote against her because she is black and black voters should vote against her because she is anti-black. Meanwhile, most Democrats are looking forward to drawing the contrast between a former prosecutor and a current convict.
There is similar room for Harris to run to the right on immigration – and a need. This will be tougher, because, while she has prosecutorial chops on her resume, she also has the border, which Biden supposedly put her in charge of. Trump was already running primarily on this issue, and Republicans will hang this around Harris’ neck. I doubt, though, that many voters will blame Harris for Biden’s record on this (see above: Veep). But she will need to stake out her own ground. As a person of color and daughter of immigrants herself, she has a little more political latitude in taking a non-progressive immigration stance. She should do so, to guard her rear, and any position she takes will be less extreme – and, frankly, crazy – than Trump’s promises to set up concentration camps, restore family separation, and deport 20 million people. And with a secured right flank, she can go on the offensive on economic issues – like the fact that Trump’s goal of removing millions of tax-paying workers (yes, immigrants, even the illegal ones, are getting their wages docked for Social Security), eliminating taxes on tips, and potentially cutting the payroll tax will actually do little to help working Americans but will largely torpedo Social Security and Medicare for the rest of the century.
A new economic focus
And that takes us to the issue of inflation and Biden’s economic record. As I have written previously for Aspenia (“Tutto cambierà dopo il 2024”, Aspenia 4/2023), Biden will be remembered as perhaps the most economically consequential president since Franklin Roosevelt, repositioning America for the 21st Century much as Roosevelt did for the 20th. There is no doubt that inflation has been high under Biden – though lower than in the rest of the world, which there is no point in arguing to voters any more than telling children to eat their vegetables because children are starving in China. But Harris, unlike Biden, can promise voters something different on that score, other than that it is not as bad as you think.
For starters, I would criticize her boss for reappointing Jerome Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve, and promise not to repeat the mistake. This will score points with the progressive base (counter-balancing my suggested tough-borders approach); it will signal that she is not just four more years of Biden; and it will broaden the discussion of the causes of inflation from simply liberal government spending under Biden (which actually started under Trump) to the effect of Fed policies on home mortgages and other out-of-pocket costs to American households. Incidentally, it also has the double benefit of Powell having originally been a Trump appointee.
In fact, what ought to – and can – be a central Democratic message in this election is the pivot to a new American economy under a new generation of leadership, one that learns different lessons both from our difficulties of the last few decades and from the pandemic.
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While Democrats like to believe that they speak for (or, at least, “truly care” about) the downtrodden and oppressed – and still carry large majorities of the Black and Hispanic votes – their support has been eroding at the margins as working class minority voters join their White counterparts in sensing that the Democratic agenda does not really speak to their aspirational concerns.
Democrats are absolutely on-target in believing that a country can have an economic future only by leading in the industries of the future. But it is one thing to tell younger Americans that they’ll need higher education to thrive in that future, and this will involve largely working at a desk staring at a screen. It is quite another to tell that to 50-year-old blue-collar workers. Democrats’ policy prescriptions for the last several decades have been to forgive college loans and provide non-college workers in non-coastal areas with retraining intended to move them into higher-paying jobs in cubicles somewhere in Brooklyn, reporting to some patronizing 26-year-old. Maybe this is a good long-term, national, macroeconomic strategy; on the individual level, it is disastrous.
As president, Biden has pushed through legislation to promote greener energy, technology, and science generally – which will be recognized as landmarks someday if Trump does not destroy them all. But these will not do much for the economic insecurity faced today by millions of Americans and, even more so, these do not speak to their fears and concerns. Almost exactly a decade ago, I laid out a challenge for Democrats – or, really, either party – to develop policies that actually respond to the realities of an entirely new century. I am still waiting, and so is the rest of America.
The COVID-19 pandemic provided a glimpse of what the future can and will consist of – and, ironically, it is much more “progressive” than what our current politics, including most “progressives,” have focused on. The pandemic was a disaster for workers who could not work remotely – which meant, for the most part, people whose jobs did not already consist of sitting in front of a computer screen all day: higher-educated and higher-income Americans. It also, however, was deeply challenging to the idea that all economic activity could and should be offshored to remote locations where workers could be paid dirt; there is a new recognition that attenuated supply chains pose risks to corporations that depend on them.
Both of the foregoing combine into a growing awareness that a “remote” and “virtual” economy requires production, warehousing and delivery capabilities for physical goods closer to where they’re ultimately consumed. This means not just re-shoring manufacturing and other blue-collar jobs – something Trump talks about but did nothing on as president: It also means a new economic development focus on creating value loops within regions – in other words, raw materials that are reprocessed and manufactured into ultimate goods where they both originate and will be consumed – rather than a one-way global economy that exports capital from secondary and tertiary communities rather than investing in them: All the net growth in gross domestic product in the past two decades has come from a small number of coastal metros. Voters in these regions may regard this concentration of wealth-generation with pride; they should not, however, view it as comfort.
Republicans, especially under Trump, have turned to offering the voters disadvantaged by the current global economy the false promise of returning to a mythical past. But that is better than the shiny future Democrats offer that does not include them – and is thus the only thing that has kept the GOP and its retrograde policies politically alive. Liberals and progressives should be far better positioned, due to their inherent values, to promote a future that includes a vision for blue-collar voters and those outside globally-connected metros, one that replaces a top-down globalization that is laying waste to those outside the metropole. Ironically, however, they have failed to do so because their highly-educated Baby Boom leaders and constituencies have been too busy smugly promising to help others be more like themselves.
The coming new generation of candidates will be an improvement
A new generation of policies would be even better.
These, literally, cannot come soon enough. And now, suddenly, we have a chance to provide them.
