Vice President Kamala Harris
By David Leonhardt | The New York Times
What next?
With President Biden having dropped out of the race, I’m devoting today’s newsletter to four big questions about what happens next. My colleagues and I will also give you the latest news about the campaign.
Four questions
1. Is the Democratic nomination race already over?
It may be. Vice President Kamala Harris appears to be in a commanding position.
Some top Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, favor a competition to choose a new nominee. And an open process would have some big advantages. It would test whether Harris was a stronger politician than she had been during her failed 2020 campaign. If she won the competition, she would emerge from it looking like a winner who was more than Biden’s No. 2.
But a competition obviously requires more than one competitor, and Harris was the only top-tier Democrat to declare herself a presidential candidate yesterday. Many other Democrats endorsed her in the hours after Biden’s withdrawal.
Her list of backers include both progressives and moderates in Congress, as well as Biden, members of the Congressional Black Caucus and two governors who had been considered potential presidential candidates themselves: Gavin Newsom of California and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. The party’s nominating delegates from three states — North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee — unanimously voted yesterday to endorse Harris.
Overall, the hours after Biden’s exit went about as well as Harris could have hoped.
2. What will the Harris-Trump polls say now that they’re not hypothetical?
Polling experts frequently caution against trusting hypothetical survey results. People don’t always know how they will respond to a scenario that hasn’t yet happened, such as a sitting president’s departure from a campaign.
That said, the recent hypothetical polls about a race between Harris and Donald Trump have suggested he leads her, although more narrowly than he led Biden. A CBS News poll conducted this month, for example, showed that Trump had support from 51 percent of likely voters, compared with 48 percent for Harris.
As new polls emerge in coming days, it will be worth watching whether a Harris-Trump race effectively starts as a tossup — or something else.
3. How will Trump campaign against her?
For starters, Trump will emphasize the same unpopular parts of Biden’s performance that were already the central message of Trump’s campaign, including inflation and immigration. Given that Harris helped oversee Biden’s immigration policy, that subject will continue to play a central role.
But there are some uncertainties about how Trump and his aides will campaign against a Harris-led ticket. Among the questions: Will Republicans emphasize the candidates’ obviously different racial and gender profiles, much as Trump used gender-based messages against Hillary Clinton in 2016? Or will Trump tread more carefully now that he hopes to win a meaningful share of Asian, Black and Latino voters?
It does seem likely that Trump will emphasize some of Harris’s most liberal past positions, including her support in 2020 for Medicare for All, a policy that would effectively eliminate private health insurance.
4. How will Harris campaign differently from Biden?
Harris has one huge advantage over Biden: She isn’t 81 years old. She is an energetic campaigner, with a strong history as a debater.
She has some other advantages, too. Harris is more comfortable criticizing the Republican Party’s unpopular position on abortion than Biden has been. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, points out that recent polling data suggests she is also better positioned than Biden to hold onto support from some groups that have historically supported Democrats but soured on Biden, such as younger voters and voters of color.
At the same time, Harris is starting with some disadvantages relative to Biden, Obama and other recent nominees. Nate notes that the same polling data suggests Harris is weaker than Biden among voters over 65 and white voters without a college degree.
Above all, Harris has little track record of winning the type of swing voters who decide presidential elections. She comes from California, a liberal bastion. In her only Senate campaign, which she won, no Republican even qualified for the general election. Harris beat another Democrat.
If she is the nominee, I think the biggest question is: How she will appeal to swing voters in states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin?
Many of these voters are working-class Americans dissatisfied with the country’s direction. Many do not follow politics obsessively. Most are less liberal on social issues than prominent Democratic politicians, including Harris. Many have been attracted to feisty populist and patriotic messages, from both Trump and from Democratic Senate candidates. (Harris is likely to choose a running mate with a stronger history of winning swing voters.)
Harris will no doubt devote much of her campaign to an anti-Trump message. But a message organized almost entirely around Trump seems less likely to succeed than one that also focuses on her vision of the future — including how it differs from Biden’s vision and why even voters who are often skeptical of the Democratic Party should support Harris this year.
Source
Read Full Post »
