VIEW FROM THE UK
2024 US election: ‘Is Harrismania a honeymoon, or can she really win?’
The Democratic convention in Chicago proved to be a gathering in the great revivalist tradition of America with thousands of the party’s political representatives, delegates, supporters and stars converging to proclaim and celebrate their faith in Kamala Harris.
The uplifting atmosphere was, for many of those there, infectious and intoxicating with heady talk of Harris’s candidacy for the Presidency becoming an unstoppable popular movement that will sweep her to victory in November.
The tributes to the woman of the moment were as effusive as they were consistent. Bill Clinton described her as “the president of joy”, while Michell Obama reflected on “the joy of her laughter and her light”. Oprah Winfrey urged voters to “choose joy”.
One delegate on her way to the Convention on the day of Harris’s speech said, breathlessly: “It’s been an amazing week. We loved Joe Biden but the energy and enthusiasm for Kamala is extraordinary. We’re united and confident that we can take the fight to Trump and win.”
READ MORE: ‘The Chicago DNC shows how centre-left politics can be fun, diverse and dynamic’
The Democrats have certainly discovered their post-Joe mojo and the Harris/Walz ticket has energized the faithful in a way that few could have imagined just six weeks ago. The key question though is whether this Harrismania reflects a wider shift in the wider electorate too.
Has it changed the fundamentals of the 2024 race – or is this just an outpouring of tribal relief among Democrats not now having to campaign for an octogenarian candidate whose low public ratings were threatening not only to lose the White House but also to unseat representatives facing re-election in the House and Senate?
Does it now put Harris on a course for victory in November – or (as some commentators in the UK have suggested) are we at risk of falling for the hype and the noise, not least because of our own hopes and prejudices about what and who the election involves?
The polls are, for now at least, clear that Harris’s candidature has turned around the fortunes of a party that was looking doomed under Biden. Most pollsters agree that, nationally, she now leads Trump having added up to two to three percentage points, and battleground states like Michigan, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina are potentially back in play.
She appears to be playing particularly well with Black, Hispanic, female and young voters, groups her predecessor was struggling to mobilise in anything like the numbers he did in 2020.
Volunteers have been signing up in droves and Harris has been raising lots of money too. In a letter to activists this week, Jen O’Malley Dillon, chair of the Harris/Walz campaign, says that the party has raised more than half a billion dollars in just over a month – “a record for any campaign in history.”
What’s more, Harris has certainly got under Donald Trump’s skin and disrupted his campaign. He has been using his public events over the last few weeks to complain about Biden dropping out and his attacks on his newly crowned Democratic rival have been weak and unfocused.
READ MORE: ‘Why Labour is right to hedge its bets on the US elections’
Yet let’s not get carried away. The boost Harris has given the Democrats has served to make competitive again a race that appeared to be moving away from the party. That’s a big difference to where things stood at the time of the attempted assassination of Trump in July. But it certainly does not represent a decisive shift.
“This election is currently tied,” says Matt Bennett, former Clinton aide and founder of the centre-left think tank, Third Way. “Harris has given us a chance but we need to keep things in perspective. This remains a very tough election to win.”
After all, Trump continues to hold significant leads on key issues voters care about – the economy, inflation and immgration – and senior Democrat strategists remain wary about recent polling, not least because of the experience of 2016 when Trump defied the predictions to beat Hilary Clinton.
This sensible caution appears to have shaped Harris’s own address to the party last week. In a marked contrast to the exuberant joy that had characterised so much of the Chicago convention, her speech was serious in tone and substance, stressing her Presidential credentials.
Dressed in a dark navy suit, she contrasted her approach with that of her maverick opponent who she described as “an unserious man”, and sought to address those issues she is seen as having an electoral vulnerability.
One of those is foreign policy and defence on which she deployed one of her sharpest lines: “As Vice President, I have: confronted threats to our security, negotiated with foreign leaders, strengthened our alliances, and engaged with our brave troops overseas. As Commander-in-Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
READ MORE: Jonathan Ashworth meets with Kamala Harris team to share campaign tips
Labor Day this coming Monday is seen as the time when many voters start to “tune in” to the Presidential election, and the televised debate between Trump and Harris scheduled for 10th September is going to tell us a great deal about how the campaign will play out.
The debate will also represent the first time since her assumption as the Democrat’s Presidential nominee that Harris will have been tested in a live, unscripted environment.
It is scarcely believable that the current Vice President who as operated at the heart of the current administration for most of the last four years has suddenly emerged as the new, disruptive candidate who has thrown open this election. But that’s where we are, and over the next ten weeks we will find out its impact with real voters.
“Irrational exuberance is deadly in politics and we must avoid it,” says Bennett. “But the last month is what a movement campaign looks like. It might not last and we must not count on it. But it is possible that something big is happening.”
The empty politics of ‘joy’
AUGUST 29, 2024
George Binette assesses the electoral prospects of Kamala Harris in the wake of the Democrats’ National Convention.
In the end, neither Ms Knowles nor Ms Swift materialised, but the Democratic National Convention didn’t want for star power from an earlier generation with the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Stevie Wonder lending their support to the Harris-Walz campaign alongside assorted party grandees. From the perspective of the Democrats’’ senior stage managers, the Chicago gathering from 19th to 22th August was an almost unqualified success.
The spring-time anxiety about a latter-day version of the notorious 1968 Convention proved unfounded as the numbers on protests demanding a Gaza ceasefire and an arms embargo against Israel’s war machine fell far below expectations. The organisers successfully blocked any pro-Palestinian speaker from addressing the main Convention with only modest opposition and all the main speakers refrained from any overt criticism of Vice-President Harris. Some on the party’s left flank, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the original member of ‘the Squad’ in the House of Representatives, heaped unwarranted praise on the newly minted presidential candidate, going so far as to suggest that Harris was “working tirelessly to achieve a cease-fire in Gaza.”
Senator Bernie Sanders had his third prime-time slot at a Democratic convention, though he still notionally sits as an independent. Aside from a categorical call for a Gaza ceasefire, he stayed on message, exaggerating the Biden administration’s progressive domestic agenda, but did provide a laser focus on the actual threats to the US working class posed by a second Donald Trump presidency.
Harris’ running mate, Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz, introduced himself to a national television audience as an effective stump orator, offering some of the week’s most memorable lines. His speech managed in a single sentence to highlight his state’s commitment to free school meals and take a swipe at the Republican right’s obsession with censoring literature: “While other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing kids’ hunger from ours.” Such left-leaning populism from Walz may well prove valuable to the campaign between now and Tuesday 5th November.
An Adrenaline Shot
By the Thursday night finale marked by Kamala Harris’ keynote address, the disastrous “debate” performance by President Joe Biden, seemed a distant, almost surreal memory, though Biden’s frequently incoherent performance had come barely six weeks before the Convention. Harris, whose own campaign for the Democratic nomination foundered in its initial stages, came across as an unabashed champion of abortion rights – the issue which galvanised voters in 2022 and saved the Democrats from electoral wipeout in that year’s mid-term elections. Otherwise, she sang the predictable paeans of praise to the United States and avoided much in the way of firm policy commitments.
The nigh-seamless transition from Biden to Harris as the Democrats’ standard-bearer has undoubtedly provided an increasingly forlorn campaign with an adrenaline shot. The gap that had opened in numerous opinion polls in Donald Trump’s favour when pitted against Biden disappeared in days, with Harris pulling ahead on a national basis and, crucially, edging Trump in ‘swing’ states, which assume outsize importance, given the perverse Electoral College system. In addition, donations to Democratic coffers, which had slumped even before Biden’s late June debacle, surged from late July with a reported $90 million pouring in within a week of the announcement of Biden’s withdrawal and Harris’ candidacy.
The Road Post-Chicago
With little more than two months until the General Election, momentum has certainly shifted and the Trump campaign frequently appears to be lashing out in desperation, with Trump himself delivering often incoherent stream of consciousness monologues at his rallies. Whether claims from the likes of JD Vance and Elon Musk that Kamala Harris is a “communist” resonate beyond the most ardent sections of Trump’s electoral base strains credulity. Some senior Republicans have even resorted to suggesting that Biden and Harris were behind the failed attempt to assassinate Tump.
Perhaps Harris can simply continue to project her newly minted image as a “joyful warrior”, avoid banana skins and become the USA’s first female Commander-in-Chief with the Harris-Walz ticket titling some close Congressional contests in favour of Democrats. But Trump’s base remains large and remarkably loyal. While he lost the popular vote across the US in both 2016 and 2020, Trump’s tally of 74 million just under four years ago was the second highest in history, eclipsed only by Biden’s winning total. The recent endorsements of his candidacy by Democratic scion Robert F Kennedy Jr and idiosyncratic ex-Representative Tulsi Gabbard will do him no harm but are also unlikely to carry much weight. Harris, though, certainly has vulnerabilities, not least around the issue of immigration and ‘border security,’ which was ostensibly part of her vice-presidential brief and appears to have salience in opinion polls.
Voter turnout in 2020 smashed records in many of the 50 states. At present and for a variety of reasons including voter suppression measures, 2024 looks unlikely to see such levels of electoral participation. That clearly matters much more for the fate of Harris’ White House bid, especially in such key states as Michigan and Pennsylvania as well as Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin.
The Israel-Palestine Factor
Even though pro-Palestinian protests were muted in Chicago, the reality of Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza alongside increased settler and military violence on the West Bank remains only too present. Harris’ expressions of concern for the civilian death toll and the ongoing suffering of Gazans may have placated a few of those voters who had broken with Biden since last autumn, but there are still many Arab-Americans in Michigan particularly who are far from convinced and may either abstain or cast ballots for another candidate.
Whatever Harris’ personal views, she dares not stray too far from the Biden administration’s record and so there is little reason to believe that she would impose cuts on military assistance to Israel, much less an arms embargo. The Democratic leadership’s position underscores the still-substantial consensus in mainstream US politics around foreign policy. Reinforcing that consensus is fear of incurring the wrath of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which proved its continued effectiveness in two Democratic primaries this summer, which saw pro-ceasefire ‘Squad’ members Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush ousted after the expenditure of millions to back candidates prepared to give Israel carte blanche.
The Unions’ Role
Union density in the United States may still hover barely above historic lows, but the past five years have seen something of a resurgence in organised labour’s combativity and recruiting power. Since the often-unofficial strike wave involving teachers in several states in 2018, a union drive at Amazon’s giant Long Island warehouse has finally succeeded and unionising efforts at Starbucks have seen ‘yes’ votes for union recognition at more than 500 stores and the corporation’s management eventually agreeing to contract talks. The United Auto Workers (UAW), a still-strategic union, has seen the election of a far more radical, reforming leadership, a largely successful strike across the car industry last year and a win in a recognition vote at a car plant in the historically union-hostile South.
The UAW’s president, Shawn Fain, sporting a T-shirt that branded Donald Trump “a scab,” delivered an explicitly class-conscious speech on the opening night of the Democratic convention. The union, which has a significant Arab-American membership, concentrated in Michigan, has endorsed Harris, but has also been to the fore in calling for a ceasefire and being overtly critical of Israel in a significant shift by one of the AFL-CIO’s major affiliates.
Vice-presidential candidate Walz spoke at the Boston convention of the 350,000-strong International Association of Fire Fighters on 28th August, receiving a warm reception from the vast majority of delegates in a union that backed Biden in 2020, but has yet to declare support for a presidential candidate. In contrast, Sean O’Brien, the recently elected head of a revitalised Teamsters union, spoke at the Republican National Convention in a nigh-unprecedented move, though he stopped far stopped far short of endorsing the Trump-Vance ticket. He’s since shown signs of remorse, especially in the wake of Trump’s notorious conversation with “X” (formerly known as Twitter) boss Elon Musk where Trump praised Musk for simply sacking workers taking strike action.
Thus far, of course, there are few, if any, signs of a willingness on the part of any major union leadership to break decisively with the duopoly of the Democrats and Republicans. Assuming Democratic success in November, followed by a likely period of further disillusionment, the question may emerge of whether the likes of Shawn Fain would be prepared to initiate such a break and promote a class-based politics beyond the vacuity of endless memes.
George Binette is a Massachusetts native, who has previously been a UNISON branch secretary and the Trade Union Liaison Officer for Hackney North & Stoke Newington Labour Party.
Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/prachatai/53944375570/ Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
