The most consequential moment of the presidential debate on 10 September came towards the middle of the exchange, when Donald Trump was baited into recontesting the outcome of the 2020 election – and tripling down on the false claim that he won that contest. Kamala Harris responded with the most lethal barb of the night: “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people, so let’s be clear about that, and clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that.” The second most consequential moment – easier to miss and, indeed, overlooked by most pundits – came towards the beginning, when Harris cited the approval of Goldman Sachs as proof that her economic plans are sound.
The first moment perfectly captured why Harris won the debate. The second one could explain why she is still having trouble winning over working-class voters, and why the new centrism she’s pitching is focused on the wrong “centre”.
Harris had one goal in the debate: to remind voters of how exhausting, and downright unhinged, Trump can be. With Trump largely off the app formerly known as Twitter, and with American political memory being as short as that of a goldfish, it was easy to forget his tendency to make everything about himself, his fragile ego, and his obsession with personal vindication. With remarkable discipline, Harris brought all this back to the foreground.
In addition to airing his 2020 delusions for the thousandth time, Trump managed to derail one of his strongest campaign issues – immigration – over a bizarre rant about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, supposedly kidnapping and eating residents’ feline friends. (Local authorities and reputable news organisations have found no evidence of such activity; a mentally ill woman was caught attacking a cat in Canton, Ohio, but she was neither a migrant nor of Haitian origin.)
Nor could Trump resist questioning his opponent’s identity as a black woman, a reprisal of his remarks at a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists this summer, when he claimed that Harris “happened to turn black” at some point in her career.
There is no denying that Harris enjoyed an assist from the ABC News moderators, who fact-checked Trump’s falsehoods but declined to do the same thing when it came to Harris’s claims. For example, they allowed her to get away with saying that she had never opposed fracking – an important element of the US’s emergence as a net energy exporter and a popular industry in Pennsylvania, the most important battleground state in the 2024 race. Yet in 2019, Harris told a CNN town hall that “there’s no question I’m in favour of banning fracking”.
Still, most of Trump’s wounds were self-inflicted. In addition to his forays into the racist and the crazy, he largely failed to offer a populist account of what ails the nation. In 2016, Trump had a cogent story to tell about a bipartisan establishment that had plunged the heartland into misery with misbegotten foreign wars and malicious neglect for the working class. This time around, as I’ve noted in these pages, Trump is struggling to tell a similar story.
This is partly because he is now more dependent on the GOP’s oligarchic donors; and partly because America’s centre-left establishment has partially embraced the Trumpian critique of neoliberal globalisation and sought to mollify the grievances that gave rise to the populist uprising that first erupted in the mid-2010s. The Biden administration’s decision to retain and expand Trump’s tariffs against Chinese goods is perhaps the most telling indicator of this shift on the centre left; it’s a move away from the mindless and destructive trade liberalism of the Clinton and Obama eras, and towards a new formation that emphasises closer supply chains, rural redevelopment and the revival of domestic manufacturing.
Which brings us to Harris’s disappointing Goldman Sachs moment. It came during the discussion on tariffs – which Harris framed as a tax on American consumers, seemingly unaware that her own administration has taken up the Hamiltonian tradition of tariffs and import substitution. Then, to tout her credibility on the economy, Harris boasted of approval from Goldman Sachs and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, and from various unnamed Nobel laureates. At another point, Harris proudly noted Dick Cheney’s endorsement of her campaign.
Goldman Sachs. Wharton professors. Nobel laureates. Dick Cheney. These aren’t beloved and popular figures and institutions in America in 2024. They thrived during the two or three peak-neoliberalism decades that saw the hollowing out of American manufacturing, the financialisation of the economy, and the rush to pointless and costly wars in the name of promoting democracy in the Middle East and North Africa.
If Trump had the presence of mind he possessed in 2016, he could have delivered a devastating comeback. “Goldman Sachs ruined the American economy in 2008,” he might have said, “and Dick Cheney has the blood of thousands of American servicemembers and a million Iraqis on his hands!” Luckily for Harris, he didn’t go there. Instead, Trump, a Wharton alumnus, was quick to claim similar professorial approval for his own plans.
Harris’s decision to publicly accept laurels from Wall Street and Cheney was no accident. She’d thought it through. And she did it, I think, as part of a broader tack to the “centre” that has also seen her disavow earlier, ultra-progressive stances on issues ranging from fracking to defunding police departments. There is a segment of affluent voters – political demographers call them “Romney Democrats” – who thrill to such “centrist” appeals to Cheney & co.
But the Romney Democrats were probably in her corner to begin with. The real prize for a Democrat in this cycle is returning Obama-to-Trump voters to the party’s fold. These are typically downscale, non-college, “white ethnics” (Poles, Irish, Italians and the like) who voted twice for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 before embracing Trump in 2016. Their choices, according to Democratic and Republican operatives I’ve interviewed, will determine the outcome in Pennsylvania, the paramount swing state in 2024.
Obama-to-Trump voters, needless to say, aren’t fond of Goldman Sachs, Dick Cheney, or the arch-neoliberal faculty of the Wharton School. They watched Obama bail out Wall Street after the financial crash while insisting that underwater homeowners must pay up or face foreclosure. They fell for “Hope” and “Change”, only to have the Obamaians continue and, in some cases, expand the sanguinary wars launched by George W Bush with the help of Cheney.
Harris is in a terrible place when it comes to such voters. As the Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira warned on 12 September, citing the latest New York Times/Siena poll, she is “trailing Trump among working-class (non-college) voters by 17 points. That’s identical to Biden’s working-class deficit in the last NYT poll before he dropped out and way worse than Biden’s deficit among these voters in 2020 – a mere four points.” He added: “More detailed NYT results reveal that Harris, relative to Biden in 2020, is doing 10 points worse among white working-class voters and 18 points worse among non-white working-class voters.”
It is possible that Harris can still win the race with a coalition of the educated and the affluent and the ex-Republican. Her post-debate boost is beginning to register on polls, with the latest Morning Consult and Reuters/Ipsos surveys showing her opening up a five-percentage-point lead over Trump nationwide. But a victory on such terms would do little to reverse the so-called dealignment between Democrats and the working class. Translated into policy, a victory on these terms would likely put an end to the post-neoliberal trend represented by Trumpism and Bidenism.
An increasingly erratic Donald Trump would be vanquished under such a scenario. But the social gaps giving rise to polarisation and populist fury would only widen.
[See also: Donald Trump is losing it]
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