To thine own self be true…
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Not that she asked, but a spate of Kamala Harris advice columns have materialized in the month since she became the Democrats’ standard-bearer. The attitude of most of the members of this unsolicited advisory council has been along the lines of: “Our fate — meaning not just ‘our’ fate but the fate of democracy and the planet — is in your hands and I just know you’re going to screw it up, and leave us to the tender mercies of that narcissistic psychopath you’re running against, unless you do p, q, and r, and say x, y, and z.”
Among the more provocative of the messages to Kamala I’ve read is an exceptionally thoughtful, forceful, and well-written column by my WhoWhatWhy colleague Claire Berlinski, appearing last week on this site. It contains many points and premises with which I am in violent agreement, but I have found myself questioning the “therefore” part of Berlinski’s argument and, consequently, the advice she offers to Harris and the Democrats on how to present themselves to the voting public.
Groupthink of the Gatekeepers?
Let me begin with Berlinski’s premises, with which, as I said and with one exception, I take no issue. She is deeply concerned about the hazards of groupthink, the tendency of politicians and, though she does not mention them, business leaders to surround themselves with like-thinkers, who too often serve as witting or unwitting blinders to hard realities and challenges.
History has shown us just how prevalent such tendencies can be in the White House, where Richard Nixon was certainly not the only Oval Office occupant to develop some degree of a bunker mentality or draw up, mentally if not physically, an enemies list. The president tends to need, seek, and get a tight circle of awe-struck defenders, who may naturally develop an us-versus-them mindset and see their role as bolstering rather than questioning presidential instincts and decisions. We need look no further than the Trump administration, where the churn levels were historically high, to see how risky it can be for the supporting cast members to speak their minds and challenge the top dog’s positions.
In the case of Harris — still just a candidate for the top job but surrounded in a double sense now by both her vice presidential and campaign staffs — Berlinski worries that the groupthink is manifesting as a kind of we’re-on-a-roll liberal confirmation bias, assuring Harris that all will be well if she just keeps on keeping on. Essentially the message is “Just you be you — look how well it’s working!”
Stop the Steal 2.0 and the Landslide Imperative
But the fact is that, as Berlinski takes pains to note, however well it’s working and however splendidly the DNC, the pick of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as running mate, and the first month of campaigning have come off, the race remains essentially a toss-up, if not nationally then in the swing states where it counts. Donald Trump, despite his best efforts, has not in fact “imploded.” The country is so polarized, and Trump’s MAGA faithful so committed, that his “floor” has been rock solid and seemingly impervious to serious erosion even by what would normally be politically seismic events and developments.
Not only that but Trump and his MAGAs are absolutely primed to challenge — in the courts, statehouses, and most likely the streets — any defeat short of a thunderous Harris landslide (and perhaps even that) as illegitimate, fraudulent, rigged, stolen. So the imperative for Harris and the Democrats, as Berlinski sees it, is not merely to win, but to win big. Very big. And the question thus becomes how in the world can they possibly do that?
What Profits a Candidate…?
Berlinski’s answer is where we part company. She writes: “You must win an overwhelming victory. That means putting aside all of your policy preferences and ridding yourself of everything that makes Americans dislike you.” (emphasis added)
In her view, Democrats and the Harris campaign have to break through their groupthink and out of their convention-fueled party-till-we-drop mode to “grasp that Trump’s criticism of your party has been successful because it is often correct.” They must see their true image in the mirror as the party of the “out-of-touch elites who are prone to espousing policies that infuriate Americans.”
Which leads ultimately to this advice to Harris: Course correct in a big hurry by forgetting your “pet policy preferences” and “signaling, right away, that you’ll be running way, way, way to your natural right.”
Well, where’s the fun in that!? So much for the “joyful warrior!”
But perhaps it is idle to talk of fun and joy when so much is at stake, and Berlinski’s argument is a serious — and as I noted at top, a thoughtful — one. She astutely recognizes that — odious, dangerous, and off-his-rocker as he so obviously is — “many Americans just can’t see the problem with Trump — yet they do see the problem with you [Harris]. I don’t know why.”
I don’t know why either but I think it’s a fair and accurate, if baffling, assessment of the playing field, and it means that revulsion to Trump alone, though it might be just enough to eke out a victory, won’t produce the requisite landslide.
Instead, in Berlinski’s view, Harris must neutralize her negatives and come to appeal broadly to those crucial voters outside her base who are currently undecided or weakly for Trump. She can, Berlinski posits, do this by easing off the joyful warrior soundbites and slogans, and making what is essentially a dual case: that Trump is very dangerous and that she is not.
This will require, on the one hand, a clear and convincing explication of Trump’s assault on democracy and just how far down the road to “authoritarian capture” we’ve already traveled; and, on the other hand, assurance that Harris and her party are not in any way to be feared as captives of a progressive agenda, with plans to impose it willy-nilly on the whole country.
Specifically, this approach would have included selecting a solidly centrist, if not right-centrist, running mate — certainly not a perceived denizen of the left like Walz.
And it should yet include promising to give Cabinet posts to several sane Republicans (Harris, shortly after publication, pledged to appoint one).
And, more broadly, enlisting, with whatever offers it takes, the host of Trump-despising Republicans — ranging from the likes of Liz Cheney to former staffers like Gen. Jim Mattis, John Kelley, and (gulp) Bill Barr — to get on board and tell disaffected and potentially disaffected Republicans, from bitter experience, just how odious and dangerous Trump is.
And giving everything “woke” such a wide berth that there won’t be so much as a whiff of woke for Team Trump to work with.
And bringing on some Joe-the-Plumber-type swing state white dude as an advisor to vet Harris’s proposals and restrain her natural liberal impulses.
That’s quite a pharmacopeia. While some of these prescriptions are sensible — of course more Republican endorsements would be a boon! — and reasonably likely to be followed, the whole cocktail strikes me as a very stiff drink. It would entail a radical transformation on the fly and a fundamental (if temporary) abandonment of identity.
I don’t think Berlinski would disagree, but I suspect she would counter with “Well, how else does Harris shift the dynamic enough to win that landslide?” Touché!
Which brings me round to question the whole landslide premise. To be clear, I do not for a moment doubt that a close election, with Trump on the losing end, will lead straight to post-election turmoil of the most dangerous order. I myself have made the same prediction in several previous columns and I won’t deny I’m scared shitless for our country.
But does that consequence, which would seem at first blush to make a Harris landslide necessary, make it achievable — by any means? And is reaching for that elusive brass ring worth the high risk of falling off the horse?
On a Roll
Let’s think this through again. There is at least a fair chance that the current dynamic and trend will carry Harris to victory — or what, in the “normal” elections of the pre-Trump, pre-Stop the Steal era, would have been victory. The Democratic base, which was steadily eroding and wallowing in epic indifference and defeatist resignation right up to Joe Biden’s withdrawal on July 21, has responded to the Harris candidacy with a 10,000 volt jolt of enthusiasm. And so have crucial Democratic-leaning voters.
Trailing Republican and Republican-leaning respondents 59 to 55 percent in “enthusiasm about voting this year,” when Gallup last polled the question in March, Democrats and Democratic leaners surged 23 points to a 78 to 64 percent enthusiasm advantage when polled by Gallup between August 1 and August 20 (notably, before the rousing Democratic convention).
It is impossible to overstate the significance of this shift: When it comes to all-important turnout numbers, a lot of “unenthusiastic” voters may well stay home; virtually all “enthusiastic” voters vote. This is one of the ways that, come Election Day, voters can make fools of the pollsters.
And bear in mind that, in hyperpolarized 2024-edition America, base voters and leaners outnumber undecideds by something like 20 to 1. So, in terms of bottom-line electoral results, enthusiasm-driven GOTV takes priority over hopeful appeals to the fence-sitters. Both campaigns seem to recognize this reality, with Trump’s playing all but exclusively to his base.
There are other statistical and observational indicators of the post-Biden sea change. Harris’s favorability margin, which had flirted with a brutal minus 20 percent for much of the year, dramatically closed to less than 2 percent (47.1 favorable, 48.8 unfavorable) after she morphed from vice president to presidential candidate.
By way of comparison, Trump sits at minus 9 percent (44.0 favorable, 53.0 unfavorable), Biden at minus 15.7 percent (40.4 favorable, 56.1 unfavorable). For good measure, Walz is plus 4.5 percent and Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance minus 10.5 percent. Viewed relatively and taking into account the impact of polarization, those are very good numbers for Harris and Walz.
And out of CNN’s focus group of eight previously undecided voters, queried on camera following Harris’s closing speech at the DNC, six said they’d now be voting for Harris, one for Trump (it turned out, much to CNN’s chagrin, that he had been an enthusiastic Trump supporter all along), with one remaining undecided. Granted it’s a very small sample, but it suggests that the appeal and impact of the convention were not confined to the choir.
And new registrations of key Democratic voting groups — women, young voters, voters of color — have been surging explosively. Such late-registering voters are known to have especially strong turnout — they register for the specific purpose of casting a vote.
There's a surge in voter registration among key demographics ahead of November's election. According to the data firm TargetSmart, registration is up more than 175% among young Black women.
"175% is almost tripling of registration rates among this specific group. You just don't… pic.twitter.com/34NcsylGnH
— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 27, 2024
And, for what it’s worth, there’s crowd size: Harris and Walz having been playing to the kind of overflowing and jacked-up crowds that Biden simply could not muster and that, increasingly, are fond memories for Trump.
Finally, there’s the record-breaking infusion of grassroots financial support, including massive numbers of new donors.
Graciously Accept Trump’s Help
Meanwhile, Trump has stewed and spewed, seemingly more caustic and unhinged every day, and now taking on the US military (never a good look for any candidate for anything, let alone commander in chief) over his disgraceful Arlington National Cemetery gravesite photo-op and the thuggish behavior of his staff.
There has been no sign that this self-defeating course will alter or that Trump is taking, or can take, any good advice on how to comport himself.
Harris’s task, as I see it, is to hammer Trump when he deserves to be hammered — i.e., when he breaks new ground on stupid and vile — while making sure she doesn’t take his bait and fall into his crude racist and misogynistic traps.
Harris and Walz, for their part, more than survived their first MSM interview, for which the media had been clamoring. There will likely be more to come, along with one or more debates. Harris’s task, as I see it, is to hammer Trump when he deserves to be hammered — i.e., when he breaks new ground on stupid and vile — while making sure she doesn’t take his bait and fall into his crude racist and misogynistic traps. To “shrug him off,” as Karen Tumulty put it in The Washington Post, quoting a Harris campaign official as asking “Why would we step in this man’s way?” Along with that to continue presenting and defining herself on her terms, meeting the media halfway but not letting it run her campaign.
She and her campaign seem to get this.
Yes, the polls remain uncomfortably close (though it should be taken into consideration that the methodological tweakings applied by pollsters pretty much industry-wide, to “correct” for their big miss to the left in 2020, may well be overrepresenting Trump’s strength), and nothing is in the bag.
But, so far at least, Harris seems to be very much on her game (and Walz on his), relatable and authentic, at least by the bar we have come to set for candidates for high office in the high-production, soundbite, social media age.
So the question is: Why would a candidate in that position suddenly shake up their whole campaign, tack “way way way” to their right (or left, for that matter) and abandon the slogans, memes, and soundbites — a war they are, amazingly, winning bigtime — in favor of speaking to voters, in Berlinski’s words, “as if they were adults?”
Let me say here that I’d like nothing better than to see a return to the politics of yore — to long-form discussions, FDR’s fireside chats, even Elizabeth Warren’s “plans.” I loathe soundbites, quick hits, the dumbing down and TikTokification of political discourse! I’m just way way way more skeptical than Berlinski that — right here, right now — moving away from all that stuff would work.
Biden failed miserably to make the case that Trump is a danger to democracy, that once the proto-fascists take power our elections would become shams. And I do not believe it was because the old man was addled. I think it’s because it’s a dark and difficult case to make without sounding nearly as unhinged as Trump — too speculative, too complex, and too many evidentiary pieces to tie together. I don’t think Harris would be successful in making it; I’m not sure even FDR would. Trump and Vance as “weird” and creepy (with a side of dangerous), a case that just about makes itself to high- and low-information voters alike, seems to be doing the trick so far.
Add to that advised change of pitch and style a radical change in political hue (“way way way to the right”) and what’s left of the Harris that so many voters have so enthusiastically embraced?
Keep Trusting Yourself — You Know What You’re Doing
I attended a performance of Hamlet last Thursday night, a play that has never lost its relevance. The king’s counselor, and advice-giver extraordinaire, Polonius (played brilliantly in this production by a female actor as the mother, rather than the father, of Ophelia and Laertes) gives her departing son that famous piece of her mind culminating with “This above all: To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
There is real danger in trying to be what one is not, in moving sharply away from what you have been and are, in trying on a new political suit or voice. Ask the suddenly “severely conservative” Mitt Romney. Something vital and ineffable is lost. More often than not, you wind up looking muddled, confused, and convictionless. Most importantly, you piss off and turn off the enthusiasts who like you just the way you are. Which is why you’ll rarely if ever see a candidate do that unless they are in deep trouble (and it usually doesn’t work).
Harris, unlike Biden, is not in deep trouble — things are trending her way and why blow against that wind? — unless her imperative is to win in a landslide.
Sure, to get a landslide she’d have to throw all the balls in the air, lunge for the brass ring, and do a whole lot of praying. But I suspect a landslide is out of reach no matter what she does. Trump’s floor is just too solid.
What Harris does have are a growing number of pathways to Electoral College victory.
What she does have is the able assistance of Trump, who likely sheds a few more voters every time he opens his mouth, desecrates a national shrine, or takes to X or Truth Social to spew more insults and wild conspiracy theories (we might as well add in little things like Trump’s distinguished running mate telling Trump’s opponent that she “can go to hell”). These do add up and may well be enough for a win.
What she does have is momentum, a precious +14 point enthusiasm gap, and a campaign that seems to possess the smarts to exploit events and manage perceptions to her advantage (though Gaza and Arlington/Afghanistan loom as potentially serious challenges). To put it very simply, she’s been on a roll.
These are powerful pluses, not to be squandered.
You can run on Biden’s record (with a couple of codicils). You can laugh and exude joy (and still be tough as nails underneath). You can offer a positive and hopeful vision of America’s future, in stark contrast to Trump’s lurid and apocalyptic one. Keep trusting yourself. You’ve caught lightning in a bottle. You can KISS. You can be you.
Yes, by all means, reach out and do what you can, within reason, to snag some more Republican endorsements. Yes, run your ideas and pitches by some swing-state voters (aka a focus group) for fine tuning. Yes, don’t be any more woke than absolutely necessary; don’t talk about firsts and glass ceilings; don’t pick identity politics fights, which will cost you.dearly. Yes, barnstorm rural America (check!). Yes, sidle an inch or so to the right, just enough to make a mockery of Trump and Vance’s idiotic caricature of you as Comrade Kamala, and show the anxious out there that you are not dangerous. Much of Berlinski’s advice — taken in moderation and small doses, as you seem to be doing — is sound advice.
But — and I know you didn’t ask me either! — for heaven’s sake don’t kill the vibe. Don’t run way way way to your natural right. And don’t get neck-deep in the democracy-in-danger weeds (others can make, and are making, that case), at least not as long as Trump is doing such a good job of burying himself. Just give him a little help, now and then, in his digging.
You can run on Biden’s record (with a couple of codicils). You can laugh and exude joy (and still be tough as nails underneath). You can, without sugarcoating the dangers of the world, offer a positive and hopeful vision of America’s future, in stark contrast to Trump’s lurid and apocalyptic one. Keep trusting yourself. You’ve caught lightning in a bottle. You can KISS. You can be you.
You won’t, in all likelihood, win a landslide. You will, assuming you win, in all likelihood have to deal with a post-election MAGA shitstorm. You will have your work cut out for you. One can only hope that you, the Biden administration, honest county- and state-level administrators of elections, judges, legislators, and the American public prepare for it and once again, as they did in 2020-21, come through in the clutch.
Major challenges surely await. The first, which has become a meme, is FWTFE — First Win The Freaking Election. For what it’s worth, my advice to Harris and the Democrats on how to do that is more Polonius than Berlinski.
