Ours is a surreal moment in US politics. In a matter of weeks, the Democratic Party has engineered a near-seamless transfer of political power from President Biden to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, thereby reviving the party’s prospects in all seven of the swing states that will determine the 2024 presidential election. Anxious but hopeful Democrats now believe the contest with Donald Trump is Harris’s to lose. Barring an unforeseen economic shock or a new foreign-policy crisis, she is now poised to ride what all political insurgents covet: the sheer momentum that comes with swiftly defying low expectations.
This is a remarkable feat, regardless of one’s partisan leanings. Harris has turned her apparent weakness—being perpetually discounted since her humbling 2020 primary flop—into an asset. Indeed, fresh off the awards-show theatrics of the Democratic National Convention—an overwhelming display of how much progressive politics has fused with popular culture in the last 20 years—the Harris campaign is at once brimming with the confidence of a popular incumbent and the spiritedness of an underdog.
This Compact article lines up exactly with my take on where Harris and the Dems are in this moment. If you read the whole thing, you’ll see how it provides a template by which to evaluate where the party is going and the crosspressures that Harris will have to navigate. The Dems are a big tent with many constituencies, but one or the other of them plays a dominant role. Until recently it’s been the Aspen Institute/Neoliberal crowd, with the Bernie/AOC/Jayapal populist wing playing a more influential role since ’20. Harris seems to be on board with Biden’s populist shift and wants to continue it. Will she?
I’m assuming she’s going to win, so the most interesting question for me is how she’ll manage all the competing pressures on her about how to position the party both on policy and in public perception going forward. As I’ve been writing in previous posts here, what’s at stake is whether the Dems will see this moment as an opportunity to build a dominant, populist-oriented, ruling majority going forward. I think it’s possible, and the signs so far are that Harris seems to get this.
Or am I just being too optimistic to even consider this as a possibility? Maybe. Should I just look at the Dems the way I do my woebegone Seattle Mariners? Are the Dems, like the Ms, just interesting enough to keep you hopeful and engaged, but then will disappoint you in the end?1
I think it’s better for the soul to hope for the best no matter how often you’ve been disappointed. Being street smart and cynical is tiresome, and all it means is that you accept the conventional wisdom, which isn’t smart at all—it’s worth about twenty-five cents.
Being street smart is simply a projection of the past onto the future, which, imo, is a fundamental, rear-view-mirror misreading of how history plays out. The smart money was on Lincoln losing in 1864, and nobody expected him to get shot a few weeks after Appomattox. What’s important are the discontinuities and surprises, the unpredictable qualitative shifts, not the quantitative projections based on statistical probabilities. Nate Silver isn’t at all interesting to me; he’s tediously predictable.
So I believe that, as in 1864, it is not hyperbole to say that we are now at a similar inflection point in our history. And I believe that Americans’ better angels usually win the day in such moments, even if they only show up at the last possible moment.
Note 1. For those of you who are not Seattleites or baseball fans, the Seattle Mariners are the only team in Major League Baseball never to have appeared in the World Series.
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