Is Kamala 2024 Clinton 2016?
Republican Endorsements, Running to the Right on Foreign Policy—Where Have We Seen This Before?
You always got the sense that the Democratic Party resented having to learn anything from losing in 2016.
There’s no doubt that all the excuse-making that followed—blaming Russia, James Comey, the media, anyone but Hillary Clinton and her campaign—was the party’s desperate attempt to avoid taking responsibility for letting Donald Trump win and to assuage anger from their rank and file, lest they hold the party leadership accountable.
But tell a lie incessantly enough, and you start to believe it. And you can’t help but feel that Democrats really do believe that they ran a great campaign that would and should have won, if only it hadn’t been for the dastardly villains who pulled the rug out. This year, they seem determined to prove that thesis.
At first, there were hopes that Kamala Harris’s ascension to the Democratic candidacy was going to bring some kind of new, exciting vision to the election fight, possibly combining Joe Biden’s early, halting economic populism with the personal charisma, optimism, and history-making aspects of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. Gone was the “basement strategy” of hiding the candidate from unscripted media. So were the by now stale warnings about Republicans threatening democracy and dictatorship, in favor of the new, deflating label of “weird.” Harris’s slogan of “we’re not going back” suggested she’d lead the country not just out of the morass of Trumpism, but in a different direction from Biden’s disastrous last two years.
So much for that. For weeks now, it’s been clear the Harris campaign has decided that it’s going to rerun the Clinton 2016 strategy on the off chance that that year really was a fluke, and that Trump really is so hated that Americans will have no choice but to vote for his opponent. It didn’t work in 2016, but this time . . .
What does that look like in practice? It looks like dropping the “negative” label of weird and performing civil disagreement instead. It looks like giving up on exciting the party’s progressive flank—actively thumbing your nose at them, in fact—and explicitly pivoting to trying to win over Republicans instead. It looks like rolling out white papers and policy positions that few will read, while rarely talking publicly about what you would actually do when given the chance at a public forum. Like running to Trump’s right on immigration and foreign policy, even calling Iran, absurdly, the country’s most dangerous adversary and suggesting you might launch a preemptive strike on it.
Okay, Democrats would say, but what about some of Harris’s policy announcements? Like her housing platform, for instance, which pledges to build three million homes and to give first-time homebuyers a grant of up to $25,000? Or what about her recent announcement that she would expand Medicare to cover home care services, vision, and hearing? Doesn’t that point to a different, more progressive policy–based direction than Clinton’s 2016 run, even if she barely talks about it?
The answer to which is, not really, because this platform is actually a major step backward from the Biden years. It’s true the sitting president often seemed reluctant to run forcefully on the populist agenda he had taken up as a way to make nice with Bernie Sanders voters, but that agenda was fairly ambitious: among other things, it featured universal pre-K, free community college (for two years), childcare subsidies, paid leave, Medicare expansion, and a more generous child tax credit. Everything but the last two are now out in Harris’s day one agenda.
Even her Medicare expansion is something of a step back from previous Democratic standard-bearers’ ambitions: Biden had promised to expand Medicare to dental, too, and lower its eligibility age to sixty, while even Clinton had offered to let people over fifty buy into the program (something her husband, nearly twenty years earlier, proposed).
Beyond that, Harris has no real health care policy for those who aren’t sixty-five years old, which leads to scenes like the ones in the past week’s Univision town hall, with desperately poor and struggling people asking her how she’d fix the country’s dysfunctional, greed-centered health care system or help them get insurance, and Harris replying with long nonanswers or offering that she wouldn’t let their medical debt count against their credit scores.
Harris says she backs raising the minimum wage but stubbornly refuses to say how high she would raise it. And neither she nor her running mate talked about doing so in their respective debates, unlike Biden. That’s not even to go into her campaign’s courting of the crypto industry and corporate America, her abandonment of Biden’s higher capital-gains tax hike, and her apparent flirting with dumping Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan while she pals around with the corporate forces Khan is suing.
The result of all this has been predictable: several high-quality polls now show the race has tightened in the battleground states, with Harris narrowly leading or even losing to Trump in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Nevada, while severely underperforming with key Democratic voting constituencies.
It is certainly possible Harris could pull off a victory with this lazy and complacent strategy—Trump is extremely disliked and unstable, and his policy program is extreme and alienating. But it is a major gamble that failed once in recent memory, and one where the Democrats are, as always, using the lives of working people and the most vulnerable Americans as collateral.
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