Why is America still talking about Kamala Harris?
By my count, there are currently 19 people who we can reasonably expect to see running for the Democrats’ nomination in 2028. That is not exhaustive; everyone and their chief of staff in Washington DC wants to be president. But here is my list for now: JB Pritzker, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Wes Moore, Josh Shapiro, Tim Walz, Jon Ossoff, Ruben Gallego, Chris Murphy, Cory Booker, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Pete Buttigieg, Jon Stewart, Andy Beshear, Rahm Emanuel, Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, Stephen A Smith.
You get the point. I suspect your eyes started skipping names some time after “Josh”. Such is the fragmented state of the party vying to end Trump’s reign. Without a figure who can pass on a base as zealous as Trump’s (no one is gunning for Joe Biden’s endorsement, even if Barack Obama is dropping into a campaign every now and then), the Democrats have no party-familias to nominate a successor. Its hierarchy is a free-for-all.
Candidates will therefore do whatever is necessary to jostle into the prime position. One minute, Gavin Newsom is saying “I’m your new daddy” to a Fox News presenter. Then Rahm Emanuel, whose nameplate in Obama’s White House genuinely read “Undersecretary for Go Fuck Yourself”, is on Megyn Kelly’s podcast saying that a man cannot become a woman. Ro Khanna is popping up on Fox News almost as frequently as Trump’s sons. His ascension is a long shot, but I suspect if a white, centrist governor becomes the nominee, Khanna – Bernie Sanders’s old campaign manager – would be a good running mate to woo young progressives.
But look at polling for the Democratic presidential nominee and you might be surprised to see that it is Kamala Harris on top, with around 30 per cent of the vote. Remember her? She told voters to be joyous but offered them no reason to think anything would change. An establishment lawyer, confused by populism (much like Keir Starmer) she thought platforming celebrities like Beyoncé was enough to defeat Donald Trump. She was too unsure of what she actually believed in order to speak in clear sentences. None of her current allies seem to have told her this. A former aide recently told Vanity Fair that “it’s obviously a bad idea” for her to run. Instead of standing in the race for governor in California as many wanted, she has kept her sights on the top job.
You could put her polling success down to a few things. Harris has near universal name recognition, unlike her many competitors. She has been popping up around the country, unselfconsciously calling for the party to have a “No Bad Idea Brainstorm”, to which she would contribute policy ideas like packing the Supreme Court and granting statehood to the District of Columbia (the capital city has a unique and strange constitutional status). But most of all, the Democratic Party is addicted to trying the same tactic again and again and expecting different results.
Which brings us to the Democratic National Committee’s report into the 2024 loss. Democrats excel at providing metaphors for their own failure. Since the election, this report has been endlessly gossiped about. It was delayed, shelved, hidden, renamed an “autopsy” and then finally published unfinished on 21 May. The DNC Chair, Ken Martin, had originally said he wouldn’t publish the report because he didn’t want to obsess over the past. Now he says the reason was that it wasn’t up to scratch. It is riddled with statistical errors and spelling mistakes. Martin has thrown the author under the bus. Most pages have red annotations claiming the DNC couldn’t prove its assertions. There is no mention of Biden’s support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza, of the then-president’s age, or of Harris’s decision not to do Joe Rogan’s podcast. Immigration goes uncovered. The report is obsessed with the way the party spent money. Democrats can’t even agree on a method to find out why they lost – let alone the answer to that question. Why not write a proper report? Like Covid, the 2024 loss is a time most liberals want to forget.
There is a temptation for the party to focus on Trump’s unpopularity, his craven corruption and the ruptures in the Maga movement and to assume that victory in the midterms and 2028 is assured. That would be a mistake. Gerrymandering from both sides ahead of November shows zero-sum politics is not going anywhere. And even if the Democrats take the House, their Speaker will be the tepid Hakeem Jeffries. Some Democrats speak wistfully about the panache with which Nancy Pelosi once wielded the gavel. One Democratic heavyweight told me recently that they were worried Jeffries would spend two years trying to impeach Trump, a good way to tell his voters they aren’t welcome in the party.
The point is that the current crop coming through aren’t well adjusted to fighting Trump’s party. “They are the Conservative Party these days,” another Democrat once lamented to me. “They are clinging to the past. As if we can go back to 1994. They are watching as Paris burns.”
There are three years left for this circus to morph into a serious debate about how to win back voters who turned to Trump last time round. The chance to have a single diagnosis and a plan for the future has been squandered. Once those 19 names are whittled down, minds will probably focus. But for that to happen, the Democrats will have to come up with a theory for why they lost and why Trump won.
[Further reading: Donald Trump’s media sewer]
