This Is the Best Possible Way for Kamala Harris to Launch a Run for President

She exists in the context of all in which she lives and what came before her.

Dear readers,

The Democratic Party appears to be rapidly coalescing around Vice President Kamala Harris to be the new presidential nominee. As you know, this was not my preference¹ — my first choice is Gretchen Whitmer, who has demonstrated appeal to swing voters in the Rust Belt and could more easily distance herself from unpopular aspects of the Biden-Harris record. But Whitmer isn’t running. I think Harris is clearly a stronger candidate than the much-diminished Biden we saw in last month’s debate, and I think she stands a decent shot of beating Donald Trump in November. The shift from Biden to Harris is a positive shift for the party.

I also think the bizarre and truncated process by which she is rising to be the Democratic nominee happens to represent the best possible way to re-introduce Harris to the American public.

She is not an especially popular politician, but there’s time for her standing to improve. In recent focus groups Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell has conducted with swing voters, group participants “have a negative impression of Kamala Harris, but it’s an impression, not locked in. Mainly [they] don’t know what she does.”

To date, we have had a nearly substance-free presidential campaign whose dominant themes have been Biden’s extremely advanced age and Donald Trump’s legal and ethical lapses. Bringing in Harris as a last-minute substitution encourages voters to focus on her as a counterfactual to these two very well-known men, a frame that highlights some of her positive characteristics.

• Age. At 59 (60 on Election Day), Harris is an appropriate age to enter the presidency. She is energetic, looks to be in good health, generally does not appear confused or lost, and is able to get through a meeting without falling asleep. And now that Biden is out of the race, she will be running against the oldest person ever to be nominated for president by a major party — Donald Trump, age 78.

• Communication. Despite her penchant for goofy aphorisms, Harris’s speech is a model of clarity when compared to barely-audible Joe Biden and incoherently-rambling Donald Trump. Democrats have been running this campaign for months without a candidate who is capable of appearing across a variety of media to present a succinct case about why the well-known and widely-disliked Republican candidate should not be made president again. Now, they have a candidate who can do that.

• Issues. Before many voters could consider the policy issues at stake in this campaign, Biden was simply failing to pass a threshold test of whether he appeared to be up to serving as president — even before the debate and especially after it. With that problem taken off the table, Harris has the opportunity to turn this campaign back into one about policy issues and whose vision for government is best. This is not a slam dunk — Trump has major advantages on issues related to inflation and immigration that will persist against Harris. But Harris is better positioned to press Democrats’ areas of issue advantage — notably health care and abortion rights — on which Biden had ceased to be an effective messenger.

And there are some potential pitfalls that Harris can avoid because of the truncated campaign she’ll be running.

• Ideology. Harris made some weak strategic choices in the 2020 primary campaign, running hard to the left in a fruitless effort to pursue voters who were going to back Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. But over the next 105 days, she doesn’t have to run a campaign aimed at proving her ideological purity to Democratic primary voters. Harris’s biggest political liability is that she may be seen as too politically extreme, and she can reposition herself toward the center without penalty, if she is willing to do that. Maybe she’ll even reconnect with her popular image as a tough-but-caring prosecutor.

• Organization. Harris does not have a good reputation for building effective, cohesive staff organizations. Now, she doesn’t have to — she simply inherits the Biden operation, which has not (at least until the crisis of the last few weeks) been beset by the kind of infighting that characterized her 2020 campaign or the first year of her vice presidential office. It’s worth noting Harris played the last few weeks very well, with no leaks and no outward indications that she was angling to replace her boss as the Democratic nominee. Maybe she even runs a tighter ship these days than she used to?

• Likability. Harris benefits from a truncated campaign where there isn’t enough time to expect her to woo voters into falling in love with her. She only needs to run in a general election, and only for a few months, and only against Trump, who is unpopular, so the bar is lower. It’s less necessary than usual to get voters to “like” her — she simply needs to show that she is a serious and responsible choice who swing voters can find acceptable, as they look for an alternative to Trump, or perhaps a way not to vote for Trump. If she’s a little stilted — which she definitely can be, and it’s too bad, because she seems quite fun in her moments of relaxation — there just won’t be enough time for that to wear too thin.

In her first day as the presumptive nominee, I’ve been struck by the level of enthusiasm and joy that normie Democrats around me are expressing about her. I think Ross Douthat is right that this is mostly a manifestation of relief at Joe Biden’s decision to step aside, but I disagree that this makes the enthusiasm “fake” — I think the mere act of being Not Biden is generating a great deal of very real goodwill toward her.

Photo: Diep Vi Hoa via Getty Images

The big question for me is whether she can take that goodwill — and the gobs of money it is helping her raise and the forbearance it will let her receive from base Democrats if she chooses to run toward the center — and turn it into a campaign that is laser-focused on winning over “double-hater” swing voters in the Rust Belt. And honestly, while the example I’m about to discuss is a small thing in itself, I’m nervous about the instincts of a campaign that, as one of its first acts, rebranded its rapid response Twitter account with a reference to the lime green cover of the new hit Charli XCX album, “brat”.

Yes, it’s exciting to have a nominee who excites young voters more than Joe Biden did; yes, it’s good that cool young people are talking eagerly about Kamala Harris on TikTok; and yes, youth enthusiasm can be fueled by endorsements like the one Kamala got from Ms. XCX almost instantly after she announced her candidacy.² But Harris’s 2020 primary campaign was maybe the most relentlessly too-online campaign in a primary field that was overall too online and too focused on the interests of left-skewing young voters. And so I will feel better if and when we get a clear sign that the cute, meme-y messaging aimed at progressive youth — at people who are likely to be interested in the idea that “kamala IS brat” — is taking a backseat to messaging aimed at the interests of Michigan residents over 50 who have never heard of Charli XCX.

They, after all, are who’s going to decide the outcome of this election.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. The New York Times ran a piece this morning that includes my thoughts about a variety of possible Democratic presidential nominees, though of course by the time the piece had run, Kamala Harris had pretty much gotten it in the bag.

2. I’m writing this dispatch to you from the Fire Island Pines, where a group of men appeared out at a bar in matching lime green kamala/brat crop tops mere hours after Kamala’s announcement and Charli’s tweet. A video of them has over 200,000 likes on TikTok. Look, I like Charli XCX too; this content is relevant to my interests, and to the interests of the people around me. But I think a lot of people — around me, and also inside the Harris campaign — could benefit from re-reading Matt Yglesias’s recommended Post-It that says “the median voter is a 50-something white person who didn’t go to college and lives in an unfashionable suburb.”