Kamala Harris takes what may be the biggest opportunity in the modern history of American presidential politics and blows it.
Harris’s Veep Pick Error
In selecting Minnesota governor Tim Walz to join her on the presidential ticket in November, Harris has declined to make the most of the impossibly rare chance to skip over the fractious and embittering dynamic that typifies primary elections. By selecting Walz over Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, the Harris campaign has signaled that the lady is not for triangulating. Rather than appealing to the middle of the electorate, this will be an election in which both parties try to maximize turnout among their respective partisans.
Partisan Democrats insist that Harris’s pick was the path of least resistance. Walz is inoffensive to every faction of the Democratic Party — progressives, youth voters, minority voters, squishy moderates, and low-information voters whose political preferences are determined by optics and sentiment. But as Nate Silver opined shortly after Harris’s decision was revealed, Walz’s value is not in helping deliver these voters, most of whom are already sufficiently enthused by Harris herself. He is a pick meant to pacify the loathsome malcontents in orbit around the Democratic Party.
“This Walz choice was designed to maintain the social fabric of the Democratic Party,” Silver wrote, “and avoid news cycles about a disappointed left and Democrats’ internal squabbling over the War in Gaza.” This is not a cost-free proposition for Democrats, as former Obama official and CNN commentator Van Jones confessed. “You also have antisemitism that has gotten marbled into this party,” he observed. “How much of what just happened is caving in to some of these darker parts in the party?”
When an honest Democrat is willing to describe anti-Jewish bigotry indelibly woven into the fabric of the party he supports, there’s a much deeper rot spreading within the Democratic firmament. To the extent that Walz’s elevation represents a sop to some of the most odious elements of American society, his selection is indicative not of the Harris campaign’s confidence but its cowardice.
So why did the Harris team pass over Shapiro? Maybe Harris’s vetting team, led by former attorney general Eric Holder, found some horrific skeletons in his closet — far more horrific than the opposition research Shapiro’s opponents dug up. Regardless, we can guess that the explanations for Harris’s choice have so far failed to satisfy Democratic bigwigs who are telling the New York Times that they were unnerved by the sordid, vaguely antisemitic whisper campaign deployed against the governor. So far, the campaign’s efforts to mollify this disquieted group are not convincing.
“Josh Shapiro was seen as not someone who could deliver the state of Pennsylvania based on internal polling,” NBC News reporter Yamiche Alcindor said, citing sources within Harris’s orbit. “The source also said Harris’ team was unconvinced that any one person could guaranteed [sic] any of the battleground states for the ticket.” There’s nothing at all reassuring in this excuse — assuming you are willing to believe that the well-regarded governor of a state he won by 15 points just two years ago is electoral poison in Pennsylvania. The Harris campaign is plying the notion that, with Kamala at the top of the ticket, no one — neither Shapiro nor Walz — has the political skillset necessary to drag her over the finish line. And they’re saying that in her defense.
Internal polling notwithstanding, this rationale doesn’t make a lot of sense. What does make sense is the reporting in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere indicating that Harris felt intimidated both by Shapiro’s natural political talents and his ambition. As NOTUS reported, Harris’s allies believe she was “looking for ‘more of a governing partner’ than an electoral boost.” In other words, Harris would rather leave Electoral College votes on the table than be upstaged by a more talented subordinate. That could soon prove a fatal error.
Nor is it the only example of the Harris campaign’s timidity. It is hard to blame the vice president for basking in the relief enjoyed both by Democratic partisans and media professionals following Joe Biden’s decision to bow out of the 2024 race. A more daring campaign might have taken that opportunity to reintroduce its candidate to voters by having her sit down for a friendly interview or two with known quantities in the media landscape — the party’s most reliable “homers” who wouldn’t press too hard but would prime the candidate to face sharper interlocutors later in the campaign. Instead, the campaign made Harris into an abstraction in the effort to preserve for as long as possible the Democratic euphoria that followed Biden’s defenestration.
The problem with this strategy is that the euphoria is illusory. It is predicated on little more than the fact that Harris is not a decrepit white male, and eventually, Harris will have to meet the expectations that are being set for her. Voters will be in for a rude awakening when they are exposed to an unfiltered and unmoderated version of the vice president. Unreality is a hard thing to maintain.
What’s more, Harris is not even making the most of the unreality that presently surrounds her. At the moment, it is abundantly clear that the political press is willing to let the vice president get away with almost anything. Sure, maybe she once supported doing away with the private health-insurance industry, but she doesn’t anymore. What more do you need to know? Likewise, Harris no longer supports a fracking ban or a Soviet-style federal jobs guarantee. Her staff said so! Indeed, she’s suddenly become an advocate for enhanced border security and increased funding for local police forces. Adopting this new persona has been easy for Harris, in part because those whose whole role in professional life is to be skeptical of politicians collectively suspended their disbelief.
But the Harris campaign has done little to reinforce the narrative it is retailing. Neither Harris nor her subordinates have articulated a conversion story, much less a convincing one, to explain her metamorphosis. She’s simply deemed herself a born-again moderate, and the press has played along. And with the Walz pick, Harris’s campaign seems to have bought into its own hype. It has convinced that it needs a progressive — “folksy” and “Midwestern nice” though he may be (emphasis on the “may”) — to round out the ticket for disaffected progressives. But while Harris is a cypher, every indication from her career in public life is that she, too, is also a committed progressive. As a result, Democrats are now saddled with a presidential ticket top-heavy with progressivism.
For over two weeks, the GOP has been on the back foot. The Trump campaign was derailed by Biden’s withdrawal from the race, and it has struggled to break into the Harris-dominated news cycle in a positive way. Walz’s selection provides Republicans with the opportunity to get their bearings by returning to the tested attacks on progressivism’s excesses, which failed to generate traction during the connubial phase of Harris’s rollout.
Walz backed programs designed to provide illegal immigrants with drivers’ licenses. He issued an executive order giving minors access to irreversible chemical and surgical treatments for gender dysphoria. He signed a law that makes it harder for black and other “disproportionately represented” children to be taken into foster care based on activists’ claims that the evidence of child abuse must be higher for minority children than it is for their white neighbors. As Jim Geraghty detailed, Walz’s administration of Minnesota’s executive branch was plagued by accusations of malfeasance and staggering incompetence. His state’s Covid-era restrictions on social and economic activity were among the nation’s most draconian, and, in that period, his administration caved to a grotesque fashion which prescribed rationing society’s benefits based on race. And by his own admission, his handling of the 2020 riots, which exploded under his watch and were loosed upon the world as a result of his conspicuous inaction, was an “abject failure.”
Harris’s team may be calculating that this is a worthwhile tradeoff. The alternative was a candidate who would rile up the anti-Israel mobs, which might make the party look bad. But that strategy is predicated on the assumption that New Kamala can neutralize the allegation that this is an ideologically extreme presidential ticket. That’s a flawed assumption. Harris has not succeeded in reinventing and reintroducing herself to voters. She hasn’t even really tried. Americans are about to be confronted with the most left-wing presidential ticket since 1984, and “vibes” alone won’t dispel that charge.
Oh, and one more thing, Democrats: The mobs are still coming for you in the fall. They always were, not because they’re anti-Israel or anti-war, but because they are pro-war and anti-American. They cannot be appeased. And now that you’ve given them an inch, they know that you can be made to bend to their demands.
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