A strange consensus has emerged in the US presidential election. Since she became the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris has closed the policy gap between herself and Donald Trump. Identity politics has been expunged from her lexicon. She once wanted to ban fracking, and now says frack all the way. Harris has disavowed many of her past convictions: she has gone from a progressive to centrist, from a champion of decriminalising illegal border crossings to campaigning that they must stop.
Harris is not calling for a wall on the southern border, but she does want more border guards and quicker deportations. That’s not the only policy area where she and Trump are newly aligned. Both say they will scrap taxes on waiters’ tips. Both refuse to engage with why the government borrowed $380bn in August alone. Harris even has a Trumpian disdain for the media, largely avoiding sceptical or challenging interviews in favour of fawning outlets.
As for Trump, he is desperately trying to appeal to the pro-choice voters alienated by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs Wade with a promise to block a national abortion ban. His wife, Melania, writes in a suspiciously well-timed new memoir that a woman’s individual freedom “grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy”. Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, is denying that he once backed federal abortion restrictions.
Talking of Vance, he and Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, seemed almost brotherly during their vice-presidential debate on 1 October. They agreed with each other eight times, on issues from illegal migration to gun control. Like Harris, Vance has campaigned to bring back child tax credits. At the same time, he is courting the Democrats’ traditionally safe trade union vote by claiming Trump’s tariffs would protect manufacturing jobs.
Much of this can be explained by hard electoral logic: both sides must move towards swing voters, who feel poor and resentful about immigration, and unnerved by stories of women risking their lives to get reproductive healthcare. (For instance, in a swing state as abundant in natural gas as Pennsylvania, that means Harris must back fracking.) The consensus is not total: Harris has pledged to increase corporation tax; Trump wants to cut it. Trump and Harris appear to diverge on aiding Ukraine (though as Trump promises peace on day one, the Joe Biden-Harris administration is talking to President Volodymyr Zelensky about a diplomatic conclusion to the war). The greatest difference between the two is that Trump rejects the 2020 election’s validity and is already preparing legal challenges for after 5 November in several states. On many domestic policy issues, however, the candidates have converged.
Is this unacknowledged consensus in American politics durable? The answer comes down to whether you think Harris and Trump are genuine. Will Trump veto a national abortion ban? Does Harris want to secure the border? Will she maintain Biden’s pro-union policy? Is she actually a protectionist?
Harris’s platform is so opaque that it is hard to answer these questions, while Trump, whose rants expose his accelerating decline, spends more time relitigating personal quarrels and reeling off fake reports about Haitian immigrants in Ohio than detailing his plans for office.
Lack of clarity makes accountability difficult: a politician is not answerable for non-existent promises. It gives a would-be Harris White House the leeway to depart from the pro-union industrialism that has defined Biden’s Democratic administration. A “politics of joy” – that enthusiastically condescending phrase which Walz used in the debate despite its origin in Hubert Humphrey’s hapless 1968 Democratic presidential campaign – is not a promise about what Kamala Harris will do with power.
The Democratic campaign’s implicit offer seems to be Bidenism with a president who can speak coherent sentences. One theory percolating in Washington is that Harris could leave some senior Biden figures in place in order to avoid years fighting the Senate to have her own people approved. But there are already signs that Harris’s fidelity to Biden’s mission is tenuous. She has reportedly told corporate elites that she will sack the monopoly-busting chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, a Biden appointment who has led a lonely fight against the omnipotent tech empires headquartered in California. The lawyer Karen Dunn, meanwhile, helped Harris prepare for her debate with Trump hours after defending Google against monopoly charges in court.
Harris seems open to being courted by corporate interests. Tariffs are only mentioned in her policy document in order to attack Trump, and her platform has already diluted Biden’s plans to tax the rich. As president, how long would she resist a pugnacious lobbying operation from tech companies and alluring words from the wealthy? Trump, meanwhile, has already caved: he now spends his rallies gushing over the size of Elon Musk’s rockets.
The consensus between the two candidates is thin and precarious. Both are vaguely gesturing at a pro-union economic populism, but are poised to appease big business. However, Harris is unpredictable and still largely unknown. If she wins, she could yet revert to type, restoring an ultra-progressive politics that voters roundly rejected in 2016. If that happens, Trump’s heirs among the Republican New Right would be ready and waiting.
[See also: JD Vance won the VP debate]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Make or Break