Elaina Plott Calabro: The White House’s Kamala Harris Blunder: ‘In another version of the Biden presidency, this would indeed be Kamala Harris’s moment…. Harris’s staggering unpopularity with voters—both she and Biden have approval ratings below 40 percent—is by no small measure of her own making… <https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/07/kamala-harris-profile-biden-debate/678899/>
Douglas MacKinnon: Democrats have a Kamala Harris problem: ‘The Democratic Party is going to have to find the courage to say the quiet part out loud regarding Vice President Kamala Harris: Fewer and fewer Democrats want her on the 2024 ticket with Joe Biden or, most especially, as the presidential nominee should Biden drop out of the race…. The vice president continues to be mocked for various “word salad” answers to serious issues…. In the future… judging… candidates purely on their merits will become more acceptable. But at the moment…“merit” matters little…. What is a potentially panicked Democratic Party to do?… Convince Harris… she should withdraw… <https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4459705-democrats-have-a-kamala-harris-problem/>
John Burn-Murdoch: Democrats join 2024’s graveyard of incumbents: ‘Governments across the world are struggling in this period of economic and geopolitical turmoil…. The economic and geopolitical conditions of the past year or two have created arguably the most hostile environment in history for incumbent parties and politicians across the developed world. From America’s Democrats to Britain’s Tories, Emmanuel’s Macron’s Ensemble coalition to Japan’s Liberal Democrats, even to Narendra Modi’s erstwhile dominant BJP, governing parties and leaders have undergone an unprecedented series of reversals this year. The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records…<https://www.ft.com/content/e8ac09ea-c300-4249-af7d-109003afb893>
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What is the purpose of this post? To me it's a waste of Internet electricity. She ran a good campaign and to all of our dismay, she lost. It's time to move on!! Please no more revisionist history (with apologies to Malcolm Gladwell).
I first met Kamala Harris in the the mid-aughts, when I served on the board of my local Young Democrats group alongside her niece. She was incredibly kind and encouraging, the few times I got to talk with her at length. I was an early donor to her 2020 campaign, which I think floundered because her biography ran up against the anti-policing fad that had seized the party. I think if she'd pursued, and been able to capture, the "moderate lane" for that year, she could've won, and would've been an excellent president. But it was very hard to lean into the moderate vibe, given her San Francisco base and the mood of the party at the time.
I think she also ran an excellent campaign given the bad hand she was dealt. If you look at the difference between her vote-share and Biden's, in _non_ swing states, there was a shift of 6-7 points. (For instance Biden won about 81% of the San Francisco vote; Harris "only" got 75%.) In the states where her campaign was focused, that shift was only about 3 points. That is, her campaign managed to move 3-4% of the voters, which is impressive given the polarization and the power of the right-wing noise machine. It just wasn't enough. (Also, the shift against incumbent parties in other democracies has been much bigger than 6-7 points -- in many places it's been as much as twenty points. Partly we can chalk that up to Trump being a uniquely _bad_ candidate; if Nikki Haley had been the nominee, she probably would've won something like 56% of the popular vote.)
I'm deeply saddened that millions of people made such an ill-informed, self-destructive choice.
As Noah Smith wrote today, people hate inflation more than they hate unemployment.
They are morally in the wrong -- from a utilitarian perspective, it was the _correct_ choice for the Biden administration and the Fed to ensure we did not have a protracted period of unemployment meant that overall GDP was higher, and relatively few people were deeply immiserated. The long slow recovery from 2008 left trillions of dollars of potential production unrealized, and we are all poorer for it. A little inflation is a small price to pay for averting that kind of epochal catastrophe.
But it turns out that, politically speaking, it is _much better_ to ruin the lives of 8-10% of the population -- many of whom don't vote anyways -- than it is to spread the pain across the broad majority of the population. Even though the economy had recovered, and by 2024 real wages had surpassed their 2019 level, the way people _feel_ is that they earned a big raise, but high prices snatched it away.
(I'd also add that feckless, red-tape-bound, anti-building-anything-anywhere governments in blue cities -- especially New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles -- bear some blame for the Democratic brand being in the toilet. Housing is the single biggest element of any inflation index, and housing is expensive because we haven't built enough of it in the places people wanted to live, for fifty years. Harris may have finally turned the party generally towards embracing this as a policy problem, but we're a decade late for it to have helped this year.)
What is the purpose of this post? To me it's a waste of Internet electricity. She ran a good campaign and to all of our dismay, she lost. It's time to move on!! Please no more revisionist history (with apologies to Malcolm Gladwell).
I first met Kamala Harris in the the mid-aughts, when I served on the board of my local Young Democrats group alongside her niece. She was incredibly kind and encouraging, the few times I got to talk with her at length. I was an early donor to her 2020 campaign, which I think floundered because her biography ran up against the anti-policing fad that had seized the party. I think if she'd pursued, and been able to capture, the "moderate lane" for that year, she could've won, and would've been an excellent president. But it was very hard to lean into the moderate vibe, given her San Francisco base and the mood of the party at the time.
I think she also ran an excellent campaign given the bad hand she was dealt. If you look at the difference between her vote-share and Biden's, in _non_ swing states, there was a shift of 6-7 points. (For instance Biden won about 81% of the San Francisco vote; Harris "only" got 75%.) In the states where her campaign was focused, that shift was only about 3 points. That is, her campaign managed to move 3-4% of the voters, which is impressive given the polarization and the power of the right-wing noise machine. It just wasn't enough. (Also, the shift against incumbent parties in other democracies has been much bigger than 6-7 points -- in many places it's been as much as twenty points. Partly we can chalk that up to Trump being a uniquely _bad_ candidate; if Nikki Haley had been the nominee, she probably would've won something like 56% of the popular vote.)
I'm deeply saddened that millions of people made such an ill-informed, self-destructive choice.
As Noah Smith wrote today, people hate inflation more than they hate unemployment.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americans-hate-inflation-more-than
They are morally in the wrong -- from a utilitarian perspective, it was the _correct_ choice for the Biden administration and the Fed to ensure we did not have a protracted period of unemployment meant that overall GDP was higher, and relatively few people were deeply immiserated. The long slow recovery from 2008 left trillions of dollars of potential production unrealized, and we are all poorer for it. A little inflation is a small price to pay for averting that kind of epochal catastrophe.
But it turns out that, politically speaking, it is _much better_ to ruin the lives of 8-10% of the population -- many of whom don't vote anyways -- than it is to spread the pain across the broad majority of the population. Even though the economy had recovered, and by 2024 real wages had surpassed their 2019 level, the way people _feel_ is that they earned a big raise, but high prices snatched it away.
(I'd also add that feckless, red-tape-bound, anti-building-anything-anywhere governments in blue cities -- especially New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles -- bear some blame for the Democratic brand being in the toilet. Housing is the single biggest element of any inflation index, and housing is expensive because we haven't built enough of it in the places people wanted to live, for fifty years. Harris may have finally turned the party generally towards embracing this as a policy problem, but we're a decade late for it to have helped this year.)