F**king Mondays: The Harris Surge, Impeaching Biden, And the Identity Trap
Kamala Harris is on the up.
Apologies if this is reaching you late, I’m in the UK at the moment so posting will be at odd hours!
In the round up today:
Sunbelt is back in play for Dems
Recent polling shows the sunbelt is now back in play for Kamala Harris:
As the Times reports:
The new polls from The New York Times and Siena College show how quickly Ms. Harris has reshaped the terrain of 2024 and thrust the Sun Belt back to the center of the battleground-state map.
Ms. Harris is now leading Mr. Trump among likely voters in Arizona, 50 percent to 45 percent, and has even edged ahead of Mr. Trump in North Carolina — a state Mr. Trump won four years ago — while narrowing his lead significantly in Georgia and Nevada….
The new polls provide more evidence that Ms. Harris is successfully consolidating parts of the Democratic base that had been waffling over supporting Mr. Biden for months, particularly younger, nonwhite and female voters.
As we discussed in The Emergency Meeting podcast over the weekend, Harris’s surge in the polls is creating real panic in the Trump campaign. The Democrats now have many more paths to victory in November, making a win over Trump all the more likely. As Trump struggles to define his opponent or articulate a vision for a second term in office, Harris just continues consolidating young, minority, and female voters who were wavering when Biden was the candidate. It is hard to say whether this is a reflection of Harris’s astute campaigning, or more a brutal unmasking of Trump.
My guess is it’s somewhere in between. Harris has had a remarkable month on the trail, bringing an astonishing amount of energy to the race and creating a real sense of purpose again for Democrats. Trump looked strong and confident, but only when facing an aging Biden. Now that the age issue has disappeared, voters are faced with the prospect of a very good Democratic candidate or an aging, deeply polarizing demagogue who they know will usher in another era of deeply unpleasant conflict. The polls aren’t catastrophic for Trump yet, but the trends indicates they will be in the very near future. A good candidate would be listening to their campaign strategists and honing in on a more refined message. Trump however, is amping up the racism and having very public meltdowns — all indications this isn’t going to get much better for him.
The Democratic Convention is this week, and given the energy surrounding the Harris campaign thus far, we should expect another significant boost in the polls. It will be an enormously unifying event for Democrats, and a real show of force proving that the party has its act together and is more than capable of smashing the MAGA movement in November.
Impeach Biden for…?
To cover up the blatant crimes of Donald Trump, Republicans have used every tactic imaginable. From claiming Trump isn’t really responsible for anything he says to insisting presidents cannot be held accountable for crimes they commit while in office, Republicans have made a mockery of the rule of law, and of reality itself.
Perhaps most offensive is their childish attempts to project the criminality of their own leader onto the Democrats. Much of this started with Hillary Clinton, but reached new heights of lunacy with President Biden, who has run a truly exemplary administration with no observable scandals. In the GOP’s alt reality though, Biden is the head of a crime family and one of the most corrupt presidents in history. Biden is apparently so corrupt that the GOP has spent the past eight months compiling a report asserting he engaged in “impeachable conduct” through his family’s business dealings while he was Vice President under Obama. Reports Politico:
House Republican investigators accused President Joe Biden of engaging in “impeachable conduct” as part of a long-awaited report. It’s unlikely to change a reality the party has faced for months: They don’t have the votes to impeach him.
The 291-page report released Monday by the Oversight, Judiciary and Ways and Means committees comes roughly eight months after Republicans formalized their impeachment inquiry against the president. Their sweeping investigations, largely focused on the business deals of Biden’s family members, have gone on even longer, informally starting around the time they first took the House majority in January 2023.
The New York Times points out a small problem with the report:
The report contains no proof that Mr. Biden, when he was vice president, engaged in any corrupt quid pro quo to benefit his son’s business partners, and Republicans admit they have no direct evidence that he ordered any interference into a Justice Department investigation into Hunter Biden.
In other words, the report is a piece of fiction designed to humiliate Biden and distract the public from the crimes of Donald Trump, 34 of which he has already been convicted for.
The identity trap
I’ve long argued that identity politics is a toxic force on both sides of the aisle in America. The extremes on the left and right have weaponized identity in very different ways, but both with terrible outcomes. The left has created hierarchies of oppression based on race, gender and sexuality that have led to an inverted form of racism, while the right has used the politics of grievance to divide the country into “real” (read: white) Americans and everyone else.
Politicians who play into identity are, at least in my opinion, doomed to failure. Trump’s pandering to angry white men is why I believe he will lose in November, and why the GOP will likely implode in the coming years. Politicians who play into left identity politics have also failed badly in recent years. This was most visible during the 2020 Democratic primaries, where the candidates who pandered to the activist left were voted out in brutal fashion.
Interestingly, Kamala Harris seems to be acutely aware of this and tailoring her campaign accordingly. As the Washington Post reports:
Harris thus far has stepped gingerly around the subject of gender in her campaign – largely avoiding making it a focal point even as her supporters, running mate and husband often note that they hope to one day introduce her as “Madam President.” Her lighter touch reflects the lessons Democrats internalized from Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump, as well as their recalibrations after years of watching the former president use race and gender as a wedge to bolster his own political power. The dynamic is also a reflection of Harris’s own historical disinterest in dwelling on the more obvious attributes of her background and candidacy throughout many campaigns in California.
“She’s somebody who at every step of her career has been the first in one way or another – or in multiple ways — but that was something that was always said about her by others, and rarely, if ever, mentioned by her,” said Brian Brokaw, who managed Harris’s 2010 campaign for attorney general in California.
As the Post notes, this was President Obama’s formula for victory in 2008:
Though his supporters reveled in the excitement of electing the first Black president, his message was always focused on the future, his plans for the country and the inclusive messaging that he would be a president for all Americans. When reporters would press him on the significance of becoming the first Black president, Obama would sometimes note that he was proudly of the Black community but not limited to it as he ran to be president of the entire United States.
Trump has already tried to get Harris to wade into the identity debate, questioning her blackness and calling her “nasty” (a term he loves using for women who dare to question him). Harris hasn’t taken the bait, and judging by the polls, the strategy is working perfectly.
Hope everyone has a great week!
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I have an oft posted comment on polls vs election results. I'm not going to bake it again but only note that polls have vastly underreported Democratic candidates since 2016. The GOP strategists have to know this. If the polls are showing Harris with the lead they know the coming election is going to be an avalanche. Don't get happy or lazy until after the election. Get out and vote.
In the Times/Siena poll, the AZ numbers are *outside* the MOE, and GA is damn near. Note that the places where they’re closest (NC and NV) are both well within the MOE. So those numbers are more uncertain than the others. 🤔😉😊