Charles Lipson: Kamala Harris was a shocking candidate — but Democrats are ignoring the bigger reason for their defeat
The reckoning they face is urgent. By 2028, they won’t have their biggest asset: Donald Trump
Losing parties always search for explanations. When they lose big – when they lose the White House and both houses of Congress – that search becomes a full-scale reckoning. What went wrong for Democrats? How can they correct it?
Those questions aren’t lacking for answers. The problem is sorting out the ones that really matter.
The easiest answer – and surely part of the explanation – is “we need a better candidate”. Kamala Harris was truly dreadful. But that only raises another question: how did the Democrats end up with such a clunker?
The mainstream media did their best to cover for her, less because they liked Harris and more because they hated Donald Trump. That’s why they ignored her obvious defects for some six weeks after party leaders ditched Joe Biden and anointed Harris as his replacement. She was hoisted aloft by fawning journalists and broadcasters. When their hot air was finally exhausted, Kamala crashed. Even spending $1.5 billion and saturating the airways with slick commercials wasn’t enough to persuade centrist, independent voters.
Harris was sunk by several problems. The first, and most fundamental, is that she was the second-ranking official in an unpopular administration. She was inextricably bound to its failures. When almost 80 per cent of voters say that the country is “on the wrong track”, the burden is almost insurmountable.
That burden was even heavier because the vice-president’s chief responsibility was immigration – and it was a disaster. She repeatedly assured the public that the border was closed and safe. It was neither, and voters knew it.
Second, Harris couldn’t offset those liabilities by pointing to any significant accomplishments, either as vice-president or as a US senator. She said almost nothing about those years and referred only to her earlier record as California attorney general.
Third, Harris lacked a qualification essential for candidates at every level: she was unable to set out, clearly and extemporaneously, what she stood for. That was really a two-fold problem. One was her constant word salads. The other was her inability to explain why she had changed her positions on so many key policies, abandoning those she advocated as a Left-wing candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2019-2020. Without a convincing explanation, voters didn’t know what policies she would pursue as president. It was not enough to say, “I’m not Trump, and I’m not Biden”.
Botched interviews
Harris’ inability to speak coherently off-the-cuff also meant she could not take advantage of the changing media landscape. It was simply too risky to appear on podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, even if that meant foregoing an appeal to younger voters. She even botched her interviews on three friendly, old-media sites: CBS’s Sixty Minutes, The View, and Late Night with Stephen Colbert.
Her answer to Sunny Hostin’s softball question on The View was the low point of the entire campaign. Asked where she differed with any of President Biden’s policies, she seemed surprised by the obvious question and said she couldn’t think of any differences. Uggh. She had a chance to correct that error on Stephen Colbert’s show and still came up empty.
When your candidate is that bad, it’s not hard to explain why you lost. But that’s only part of the answer, and Democrats will lose again if they stop there. A bad candidate for president doesn’t explain why they lost the Senate or failed to retake the House, which they were expected to win. It doesn’t explain why they were stuck with such a bad candidate in the first place.
And it doesn’t answer their most difficult question: should they stick with their current progressive policies, including racial-identity politics, or move back to the centre, closer to Bill Clinton’s centre-Left positions? It’s an urgent question because, in 2028, they won’t have their biggest asset in the last two elections: the antipathy of nearly half the voters to Donald Trump.
These questions about the Democrats’ future are intertwined. All involve progressive identity politics, which have been the beating heart of Democratic Party politics since Barack Obama’s presidency.
It was identity politics that led candidate Biden to choose Harris as his running mate in the first place. He first pledged to pick a woman and then effectively limited his choice to a black woman. There were only two frontrunners, and he chose the wrong one. A better choice would have been moderate Rep Val Demings, the former police chief of Orlando, Florida. She was far more competent and articulate than Harris and would have signalled that Biden would adopt centrist, unifying policies.
Biden repeatedly said he was committed to those policies but, as it turned out, he wasn’t. What he was really committed to was the party’s traditional programme of big spending, which resulted in the highest inflation in 40 years, a series of progressive social policies, and few restraints on the mammoth federal bureaucracies, stocked with civil servants who support the Democrats’ agenda.
State-building
The Democrats’ deepest problem is whether they intend to change those deep-rooted positions. This is compounded because they have already fulfilled the core agenda they have pursued since Franklin Roosevelt. The modern Democratic Party is built around that agenda. They have succeeded in centralising government in Washington; building a huge administrative state; inflating the role of the president; and deflating that of Congress and the states.
The biggest step in that programme was Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The last piece was state-funded health care, passed under Barack Obama. Having passed that entire agenda, the Democrats’ biggest question now is: “What’s next?”
Trump has his own answer: roll back much of that regulatory state. That’s the task he has assigned to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who will need extensive help from Congress. They are certain to meet entrenched resistance from Congressional Democrats, establishment Republicans, liberal judges, mid-level bureaucrats, and other winners in the current system.
If Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy manage to make real headway, the Democrats will run on overturning their efforts. But they will have to say how they will pay for massive new programmes and explain why so many existing programmes have failed.
Those failures are particularly evident in K-12 schooling, transfer programmes for the poor, and lawless urban neighborhoods. So far, the party’s only answer is: “spend more”.
Why not abandon unpopular programmes and edge back toward the centre? Because existing programmes benefit key Democratic constituencies, such as teachers’ unions, and are administered by another party stalwart, government bureaucrats. Big corporations also benefit from special carve-outs and will fight to keep them.
But Democrats who want to reshape the party face another problem. No leaders. The current crop – Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Barack Obama – have been permanently damaged by defeat and are now busy blaming each other. A new leader won’t emerge until the party wins back Congress or settles on its next presidential candidate.
That leaves mostly state-level party organisations, led by governors and senators who want to control the party’s direction and clinch the next nomination for themselves. That fight will pit leaders from “deep blue” progressive states like California, Illinois, and Massachusetts against their peers from Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Georgia, all closely-divided “purple” states.
The Democrats could still win the presidency in 2028 without changing course if there is a recession or some other major shock. Without that, the Democrats’ future depends on new leaders and new policies. That future boils down to a basic choice: will Democrats continue down the same progressive path or move back to the centre?
Charles Lipson is the Peter B Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago. His latest book is Free Speech 101: A Practical Guide for Students. He can be reached at charles.lipson@gmail.com
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