On Thursday night, Kamala Harris took the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; it was the culmination of an exciting week for Democrats. Harris was upbeat—as she has been throughout the month since she became the presumptive nominee—and performed the “joy” that has become a selling point of what has been, by necessity, a hastily thrown-together campaign. In front of a raucous crowd, she hit all the notes—emotional and proud when discussing her mother, serious and forceful when discussing her reasons for becoming a prosecutor, and clear in her attacks against Donald Trump. Anyone who was justifiably worried about how this campaign might look after Joe Biden dropped out of the race can rest easy. The animating force of the Harris-Walz surge has been not “Freedom,” the chosen campaign slogan, but, rather, relief. Democratic voters have stopped worrying about Biden’s fitness and the divisions within the Party; they finally see a possible end to Trump’s seemingly indefatigable political ambitions. The Convention felt like the laugh of exhausted elation that comes after you realize a crisis is finally over and you can just go home.
Of course, such elation is still premature. The election is close, and the polls might prove stubbornly rigid in the coming week. On Tuesday night, Michelle Obama, who provided the standout performance of that entire event with a rousing, twenty-minute speech, cautioned as much, saying, “If we see a bad poll—and we will—we need to put down that phone and do something.”
So what could go wrong?
In a Wall Street Journal column written after Harris selected Tim Walz as her running mate, Peggy Noonan wrote, “I believe this means she’s not going broad but deep. She doesn’t intend to win this by going an inch to the right but through left-wing turnout—the young, minorities, those who haven’t steadily voted in the past, if ever.” Noonan’s assessment strikes me as correct: Harris hopes to excite the base and turn out every pro-choice woman in America, along with the young people and minorities who, according to polls, had soured on Biden.
How this deep-not-broad strategy might play with the much theorized swing voter is unknown. In the past two weeks, Harris has started to lay out an economic plan that focusses on mostly popular measures, such as enforcing price-gouging laws, building new housing, reintroducing the COVID-era expansion of child tax credits, lowering prescription-drug prices, and giving a twenty-five-thousand-dollar credit to first-time home buyers. This week, it was widely reported that Harris would be adopting the Biden Administration’s proposal of a twenty-five-per-cent tax on unrealized capital gains for families who have a net worth over a hundred million dollars. This probably won’t be too much of an electoral problem; most people do not have a hundred million dollars. But Harris has also proposed increasing taxes for individuals making more than four hundred thousand dollars a year to a high of nearly forty-five per cent, and changing the way investments are taxed for people making more than a million dollars a year. Are there enough people who make that much money—or aspire to do so in the near future—who might tip a close election in Pennsylvania, Arizona, or Nevada? Is there a scenario in which a post-election analysis finds that, despite all the great vibes and joy, Harris quietly lost crucial ground in the upper-middle-class suburbs of Philadelphia and Detroit?
Maybe. Harris has rejuvenated Democratic voters and has campaigned with remarkable effectiveness in a very short period of time under extraordinary circumstances. But most of that work has been aimed at lifelong Democrats—a sensible emphasis, given that any new candidate, even the sitting Vice-President, needs to prove herself to the base.
In the days leading up to the D.N.C., many in the media pointed out that Chicago would give Harris the opportunity to “define herself.” What that means depends on whom you ask, I suppose, but there was a sense, one I shared, that Harris would have to become something other than simply a younger and more enthusiastic face for the politics and policies of Biden. Harris, for her part, filled in the biographical part of that work last night by starting her speech with her mother, Shyamala, a breast-cancer researcher who passed away in 2009, and the reasons that led her to become a prosecutor. But swing and independent voters have expressed uncertainty about what Harris stands for—a recent poll found that thirty-six per cent of registered voters said they did not know—and she would need to give them some idea.
One of the strange things about the Harris campaign is how its piecemeal approach to policy has erased any standard categorization of her position within the broad spectrum of Democratic politics. Economists might protest particular proposals, and pundits like me might plead for some coherent vision to unite them, but Democratic voters don’t seem to care: they evidently believe that the campaign knows what it takes to win, and, if these are the requisite policies for doing so, then that’s fine with them. Harris has still not laid out much of an immigration plan, for example, relying, instead, on the oft-repeated charge that Trump tanked the bipartisan immigration bill. Fair enough, but what is her vision for legal immigrants like her parents? How will she handle mass deportations? Will she do what she has seemingly done on economic policy, and simply choose the option that polls best? And how will she respond when pressed in a debate to lay out specifics?
Of course, such points are best litigated by a lucid opponent who can scare the electorate with dark visions of a future in which the stars and stripes are replaced with the hammer and sickle. But the current version of Trump is too erratic, too deflated, and has lost the ability to keep up any sustained attack. (Watching Trump in the weeks since the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, I sometimes get the sense that he doesn’t actually want to be running for President anymore; this would be an understandable reaction to a traumatic experience.) His low energy has given the Harris campaign an unexpected cushion. A better Vice-Presidential nominee might have picked up some of the slack, but J. D. Vance has been plagued with bad favorability numbers and lacklustre crowds at his events, many of which have been held in districts full of people who might care about Harris’s proposed policies and who could potentially swing the election. You can groove a few more pitches right down the middle of the plate if you’re confident that the guy in the batter’s box can’t make you pay. An energized Trump might have seized on any proposed tax increases and taken the case to rallies in suburban Pennsylvania or Arizona, but this Trump will likely watch the pitches go by and then start insulting the umpire over some completely unrelated thing.
Michelle Obama noted, in her speech, that Trump would likely ratchet up the racist and misogynist attacks on Harris, in his search for a political opening. This is almost certainly true; Trump is an old dog with one trick. But Harris seems to have figured out that electoral identity politics might function best when the candidate says almost nothing about glass ceilings or representation. She rarely mentions that she would be the first woman elected President, Black, South Asian, or otherwise; the value of finally electing a woman is self-evident and obvious. (This stands in stark contrast to Hillary Clinton’s “I’m with Her” campaign, which Clinton evoked in her convention speech on Monday.) I am often frustrated by and even opposed to contemporary identity politics, but I still find myself deeply moved by the idea of a Black and South Asian woman raised by a single immigrant mother sitting in the Oval Office. Some of this, I admit, is personal. My parents were a lot like Harris’s parents, and my daughter learned to skateboard at the Berkeley elementary school that Harris attended as a child. But part of Harris’s appeal, which Gretchen Whitmer highlighted in her speech on Thursday night, is that many people can find part of their own stories in hers. As Whitmer said, “She’s lived a life like ours.” Whatever bigoted attacks Trump has planned, I do not think they can derail the power of her identities at this magnitude, even, perhaps especially, if the stakes are left unsaid.
If there is a vulnerability in Harris’s campaign, it’s what might happen in the world in the two and a half months between now and the election. A stock-market crash, a regional war in the Middle East, a drastic change in the war in Ukraine, some incident that leads to mass civil unrest in the streets of America—any of these could puncture the good vibes, and force Harris to channel a side of herself that we saw in her forceful questioning of Brett Kavanaugh when she sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, but which has been mostly absent during her time as the Vice-President. Its disappearance isn’t her fault; Vice-Presidents are generally not asked to address the nation at precarious moments.
The first signs of a test may have arrived on Wednesday night, when the Uncommitted Movement announced that the D.N.C. had denied the group’s request for a Palestinian American speaker at the Convention. What had felt, all week, like a happy, united front showed its first cracks, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, twenty-four hours before, had been lauded as one of the faces of the Party’s future, put out a statement on X: “Just as we must honor the humanity of hostages, so too must we center the humanity of the 40,000 Palestinians killed under Israeli bombardment. To deny that story is to participate in the dehumanization of Palestinians. The @DNC must change course and affirm our shared humanity.” Then, on Thursday morning, hours before Harris was to take the stage, the United Auto Workers, whose president, Shawn Fain, spoke at the Convention, put out their own statement calling for a Palestinian American speaker. “If we want the war in Gaza to end, we can’t put our heads in the sand or ignore the voices of the Palestinian Americans in the Democratic Party.”
The Convention ended without a representative from the Uncommitted Movement taking the stage. Harris, in her speech, said, “Now is the time to get a hostage deal and a ceasefire deal done.” She went on to repeat her commitment to Israel’s ability to defend itself while also decrying the “scale of suffering” in Gaza and the right of the Palestinian people to “realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.” From a purely rhetorical perspective, this was about a click to the left of where Biden has been, but it will likely not be enough to quiet the voices of protest in the Party and on the streets, which may escalate in the coming weeks as college students return to campus.
Manias can be thrilling but also myopic, as people push to keep the good times rolling. And, when they fade, a turgid unease can settle in. I do not think that Gaza alone will swing this election, but I do find myself wondering if some deep insecurity lies somewhere beneath the vibes. Can the Harris campaign keep taking the safest route with the hope that their candidate’s strengths as a communicator—and the spectre of Trump—will carry them through the inevitable problems that will arise? The Democratic National Convention was the end of a finely orchestrated first act that thrilled its core audience. But both the scale and the effectiveness of that production were helped by a party that did not get in its own way and by a marked lack of internal conflict. Nobody seriously threw their hat in the ring to challenge Harris; the left wing of the Party, represented by Ocasio-Cortez, got immediately in line; and the donors, small and large, opened their checkbooks. Just as important, Trump and Vance have not been able to mount any coherent attack against Harris and instead have complained about the referees as the polls have shifted in Harris’s favor.
It’s possible that all that good fortune can carry over for another seventy-four days until the election, but the world is not as easily controlled as dissent within the Democratic Party. If a crisis hits, I suspect that those voters on the more fragile edges of the Democratic Party’s coalition will pay a great deal of attention to how Harris responds to her first unscripted test. Trump is an extraordinarily weak opponent, but swing voters generally want more than “Well, the other guy is worse.” Perhaps they will see a transformed politician who has taken in all the positive energy of the past month and channelled it into a series of performances that have outdone even the highest expectations. But, if Harris stumbles, this campaign of sunny optimism and one-liners might start to show its seams. Let’s not forget that, just eight weeks ago, a Presidential campaign featuring a candidate who had mostly been hidden from public view fell apart in two hours on a debate stage. ♦
