Kamala Harris’s Very Big Tent

The most challenging part of Kamala Harris’s campaign for the presidency of the United States is still to come. She must respond to the questions of informed journalists, win the debate(s) with Trump, and hold together the coalition that came to celebrate her (and itself) at the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago last week. What the Democrats have accomplished since Harris ascended to the top of their presidential ticket is impressive, but the race is still close enough for Trump to win in November. To ensure victory, Harris must convince voters that she is the pragmatic centrist of her acceptance speech in Chicago and not a conventional left-liberal. Her speech was the beginning of that effort but much remains to be done.

Bret Stephens in the New York Times describes the Democrats’ challenge as follows: “The problem with Harris is that she’s a political chameleon—a tough-on-crime prosecutor in one phase of her career, a self-described ‘radical’ in another. Voters will want to figure out whether she’s a pragmatist (good), an opportunist (not good) or a phony.” That said, the version of Harris who spoke to the country from Chicago defied predictions that she would make an effort to appease the Left’s noisy anti-Zionist contingent. Instead, she and her party’s most prominent politicians invited Americans to gather inside a very large political tent—a kind of American popular front that extends from the party’s Israel-bashing socialists to hawkish never-Trump Republicans. Her decision to select Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate was clearly intended to appeal to those white working- and middle-class Midwesterners who felt ignored by previous Democratic campaigns. While Trump has doubled down on his reactionary base and made no effort to reach beyond it, Harris and the Democrats have opted for the more traditional route to victory by appealing to the political centre.