The lessons Kamala Harris learned from Hillary Clinton

The vice-president’s campaign isn’t aimed at pleasing liberal feminist columnists.

Photo by Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

In November, Kamala Harris may be the first female president of the United States. Her campaign seems to have learned a lot from the woman who, if a majority of Americans had gotten their way, would have been the first female president of the United States: Hillary Clinton.

It seems Harris has learned all the right lessons, while her opponent is doubling down on an outdated playbook. Harris is a candidate with her own style and priorities, but it’s hard not to see this campaign through the prism of Clinton’s 2016 run – and to take note that one thing the Harris team seems to have learned from Clinton’s loss is to emphasise universality, not identity.

Much in America has changed since Clinton’s race, and even since Joe Biden’s in 2020. In 2016, Clinton was following eight years of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president whose historic election was met with overwhelming enthusiasm from liberal voters and feel-good self-congratulation from more moderate ones. Clinton was a highly qualified candidate also running a historic campaign, and her opponent, Donald Trump, seemed easily beatable. Feminism had moved from the left corners of politics and the internet into mainstream culture, and a Clinton win felt in many ways like the culmination of years of women’s rights activism. The Clinton campaign slogan, “I’m With Her”, emphasised the overwhelming sense on the left that the future was indeed female. And many voters, myself included, were excited – but also somewhat complacent, given that a Clinton win seemed almost inevitable.

We all know what happened next. In the wake of a Trump victory, many politics-watchers were stunned that his brand of unvarnished misogyny hadn’t so much as backfired as inspired. His followers, with their Hillary nutcrackers and “Trump that bitch” T-shirts, were less a fringe minority and more the crudest embodiment of a conservative ethos that had shockingly wide appeal.

And so Democrats adjusted. In 2020, as the nation was limping through the Covid pandemic and as racial justice protests erupted from coast to coast, the party nominated the ultimate moderate white guy, Joe Biden. Kamala Harris ran in 2020 as well, but her timing was off: she was a career prosecutor running at a moment of peak backlash to law enforcement. An attempt to rebrand herself as a progressive prosecutor didn’t quite fit. The lesson Biden, and the Democratic Party writ large, seemed to have gleaned from Clinton was that a woman couldn’t win, and that the path to victory was straight down the white, male middle.

Now, thankfully, there has been another shift. Democratic voters are again hopeful that a woman can win the White House – or at least hopeful that this woman has a better chance than her predecessor, who was dogged by what seemed like age-related cognitive decline. Harris might not have been the candidate Democratic voters would have chosen if there had been an open competition. But with just months to go before election day and an incumbent who seemed to be on a march toward inevitable defeat, the party wisely rallied around its number two: the Democratic National Convention taking place this week in Chicago is a coronation, rather than an intra-party power struggle. And Harris has risen to the occasion.

This year is blessedly not 2016 or 2020. No one is under the impression that Trump cannot win, or that his blatant racism and misogyny are widely seen by all voters as disqualifying. But some of the identity-based movements of the last few years have also moderated following a period of excess.

We are, to some degree, in a moment of backlash against gender equality, racial justice, and what detractors have deemed “wokeism”. But we’re also in a moment of necessary recalibration. Slogans like “defund the police” have disappeared from mainstream progressive discourse. Not a lot of women are posting Instagram photos of them sipping mugs labelled with the words “male tears”. At the same time, the goals of these movements, including the restoration of abortion rights and better policing, remain at the forefront of Democratic politics. Many political scientists and liberal public policy shops emphasise that universalist policies that benefit marginalised groups but aren’t sold as exclusively catering to them are more popular and more durable than those targeted at specific groups on the basis of race or gender. Democratic politicians seem to be increasingly embracing this winning strategy. It’s not that Americans need to be sold the false notion of colour blindness or the idea that gender doesn’t matter. But ideas of equal rights and opportunities remain far more resonant than policies justified by the unearned privilege of one group over another.

This is perhaps one reason why the Harris campaign talks in broad strokes about freedom, and then drills down into actual examples of Republicans constraining basic liberties. This is most obvious when it comes to abortion and other reproductive rights. Abortion is an issue that primarily affects women, but constraints on basic personal freedoms affect all of us. Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz emphasises this when he talks about the fertility struggles he and his wife faced, and how they turned to fertility medicine to have their daughter. The broader takeaway is that the Harris/Walz team is prioritising abortion rights because abortion is key to the fundamental freedoms all Americans cherish – not because Harris is a woman and abortion is a women’s issue. This is good news for feminists, who have for decades argued that reproductive rights aren’t some fringe interest, but central to the wellbeing of all people. It’s also smart politics, and does seem to be in reaction to the 2016 impulse to center race and gender in policymaking in a way that too often resulted in simplistic and alienating rhetoric.

Identity, of course, is still front and centre, it’s just that Harris isn’t putting her own female, black and Indian American identities at the fore. Her choice of Walz as vice-president is evidence of a clear effort to appeal to working-class white men, a constituency that will no doubt be won by Trump, but which Democrats do need some support from. Young men, too, have been tacking right since 2020, a trend Democrats need to reverse. By speaking directly to these guys – or at least by refusing to speak in a way that seems to come at their expense – Harris and Walz are trying to send the message that their campaign isn’t about putting some groups ahead of others.

That this is necessary at all is slightly annoying to feminists like me who frankly think a lot of men and white people need to get over themselves – being told to check your privilege is silly and irritating, but not in the same universe as the physical dangers posed by abortion bans and racist policing. That so many men seemed threatened rather than excited by the prospect of a female president in 2016 strikes me as cowardly and small, not an anxiety worth soothing. But Harris is here to win in a complicated and pluralistic nation in which nearly half of voters are men; she’s not here to speak to the desires of liberal feminist columnists or even the college-educated city-dwelling often too-online progressives who tend to make up Democratic campaign staffs. A Harris-Walz camo campaign hat may not sway those for whom Audre Lorde is a household name, but it may actually get the feminist candidate into office.

This stands in sharp contrast to the Trump campaign, which seems to be taking the opposite tack and becoming more identity-focused. For eight years, Trump has arguably been the peak identity politics candidate in America – it’s just that the identity he’s obsessed with is that of the white man, a character so pervasively assumed to be the norm that he becomes the unremarkable everyman, the benchmark of “normal” by which everyone else is calibrated as different. This time around, the Trump campaign realises that the disaffected white guy vote may not be enough to win, and they’re gunning for the votes of disaffected black and Latino guys, too; this is why Trump keeps talking about things like the “black jobs” he created while in office. Yet it’s notable how Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance so often talks about the “working man” instead of working people: the Trump/Vance campaign are not trying to pretend that they are for everyone. They are clear that in a Trump/Vance administration, there will be winners and there will be losers, and among the winners will be men who want to be back on top.

Toward the bottom of the Trump/Vance loser pile will surely sit Vance’s reviled childless cat ladies, among other women. It’s heartening to see the Harris campaign reject the misogynist insults – and to rightly identify the obsession with female fertility and masculine dominance as weird – without promising that a female president will turn a centuries-old patriarchal hierarchy on its head. In other words, when it comes to Harris, the lesson of the Clinton campaign has led to a new message directed to all voters: that you can be with her no matter who you are, and that the future can be yours, too.