So much for the hopes of Americans desperate for a serious, substantive campaign about the crises racking the nation: from fentanyl to inflation, the rise of China to immigration. Instead, centre-left media and progressives on the X app are too busy creating a flimsy, identity-politics-tinged cult around Kamala Harris. At the same time, Team Trump is struggling to rise above the too-online, memetic right to pitch itself to the broad middle.
Let’s start with the left. Democrats were relieved once President Joe Biden bowed out of the 2024 race under fierce pressure from party donors and grandees. Biden’s coronation of his vice-president, Harris, was likewise greeted with elation and quickly ratified, since it forestalled a raucous and potentially ugly open convention.
It was reasonable for Democratic partisans to rally around the Harris flag. Biden’s age and mental incapacity had placed an immovable obstacle on his path to re-election. Harris didn’t have that problem. But the party and – let’s be honest – the media needed to shift the narrative that had long followed Harris, a historically unpopular veep, in order to sell her as the next commander-in-chief in only a matter of months. They settled on Harris as the prosecutor #GirlBoss who claps back at the Trumpian weirdos.
Soon the airwaves and newsstands were flooded by adulatory coverage far out of proportion to Harris’s actual achievements. New York magazine hailed “Kamalot” on its cover, featuring Harris seated atop a giant coconut (in reference to her catchphrase, borrowed from her mother: “Did you just fall out of a coconut tree?”). Axios ran interference on her failed stint as Biden’s point woman on the migration crisis, questioning the Trump campaign’s characterisation of her as the administration’s erstwhile “border czar” – her work was focused on the push factors in Central America, if we’re being pedantic – and then going so far as to amend its own earlier stories in which the outlet referred to Harris as… the border czar.
Then came the star-studded Zoom rallies mobilising “White Dudes for Kamala” and “White Women for Kamala”. Featuring a sea of pixelated white faces upspeaking sentences such as “BIPOC women have tapped us in as white women to step up, listen, and get involved”, these events instantly recalled the heavily racialised politics that even many progressives hoped they had left behind in the year 2020. Smarter people on the left, who know this identity rhetoric is electoral poison, console themselves by claiming that this time around, it’s mostly tongue-in-cheek or consciously self-parodic; anyone tempted to believe that should watch the footage.
It’s worth recalling why it was that, in the 2020 Democratic primary, Harris garnered a grand total of 844 popular votes and zero delegates after splurging $40m, much of it raised from big donors. Or why it was Biden – the old-school candidate who was the most out of touch with the police-defunding, check-your-white-privilege spirit of the 2020 left – who ultimately clinched the nomination.
These inconvenient facts are important because American elections are won at the margins and mostly in a few deindustrialised states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Voters in such places are too battered by economic precarity, pointless wars and the general dysfunction of US life to be won over by appeals to aspirational diversity rhetoric.
Voters tried that in 2008 and 2012 with Barack Obama, and got the Affordable Care Act (good) plus bank bailouts, foreclosures for ordinary homeowners, a Wall Street dominated cabinet, and a continuation of George W Bush-style interventionism (not so good). By 2016, some of the same communities would rally behind a reality TV star who promised to “make America great again”. Thus, the all-important Rust Belt Obama-to-Trump voter was born. Biden clawed back some of these ex-Democrats to win in 2020, and, as president, he would go on to adopt, and even improve, crucial aspects of Trumpian populism on free trade and manufacturing revival.
Can Harris pull off the same thing? Early signs aren’t promising. The former prosecutor lacks political-economy chops. Meanwhile, her team of advisers is stuffed with Big Tech lawyers and lobbyists who are no fans of economic populism. Pushing an aspirational message congenial to the laptop class while relentlessly framing the other side as “weird” might be enough to ensure a popular-vote triumph – but not an electoral college win.
Which brings us to the GOP. After a boisterous convention, the party has spent the past week battling the “weird” charge. Vice-presidential nominee JD Vance’s 2021 harangue about “childless cat ladies”, as well as more recent jokes about his preference for fun-size candy and beverages, have especially caught the national glare. This was to be expected once the campaign got underway in earnest, and Republicans are retaliating by spotlighting aspects of Harris that the other half of the country finds “weird”, such as her 2020 support for defunding the police and her dutiful pronoun declarations.
But so far, the Trump campaign has failed to redirect these culture war flashpoints into a winsome message that could appeal to the majority. L’affaire childless cat ladies is instructive. Instead of doubling down on the meanness or offering a word salad in defence, as Trump himself did on Fox News recently, Trump-Vance should have used the opportunity to launch a conversation about the structural barriers to family formation and childbearing.
Because declining fertility is an American crisis (indeed, a crisis of the developed world at large). You don’t have to listen to Vance or Tucker Carlson to discern it. American women themselves are saying it. As The New York Times noted, US women reported a desired fertility rate of 2.7 children in 2018, but they were only able to achieve 1.8 that year; the figure has slipped still further since, to 1.66 in 2021, according to the World Bank.
Conventional conservatism, of course, would blame this on a failure of individual virtue – millions and millions of individual women failing to do their part for the species, no doubt under the influence of feminist ideology. But the whole point of populist politics is that such cultural developments rest upon a substratum of material realities.
What might be discouraging women from having the number of children they tell pollsters they want? How about America’s cruel, for-profit health system, which slaps even couples with insurance with four- or five-digit bills just for giving birth? How about the housing crisis? Or a deindustrialised economy that renders too many men unemployed and unmarriageable? Or the lack of decent paid family leave for millions of working women? These are the sorts of themes the Trump campaign should be hammering non-stop to shift the conversation away from “weird”.
Those who dominate the online right, of course, prefer to use actual problems to dunk on their perceived social enemies: childless women working in offices and the like. But even in 2024, online isn’t real life. There aren’t enough edgelords to propel Trump-Vance to victory where it matters, just as armies of “White Dudes for Kamala” professing allyship don’t suffice to win her Northampton County, Penn. One of the two camps will win come November, but only just – it will be a win without the strong mandate needed to pull the nation from a generational rut.
[See also: The myth of progressive Catholicism]
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