Why Kamala Harris Won’t Rebrand as a Populist

Many think Kamala Harris should embrace economic populism. But Harris is running a conservative campaign because, after decades of Democrats’ rightward slide, she may not have a credible alternative.

Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz speaking at a campaign rally at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona. (Gage Skidmore)

I grew up in a liberal Christian family and went to church most Sundays. As most churchgoing kids do, I picked up some aphorisms from the Bible that I won’t forget. Every once in a while, I’ll hear one of these again and realize I have no idea what it means. That’s what happened when I was looking for hooks for this piece and came across Jesus’s admonishment to the pharisees: “Neither do men put new wine into old bottles; else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.”

As someone who has definitely been guilty of putting new liquids into old containers and then stuffing them in the fridge, I clearly failed to internalize Jesus’s teaching. But this is the logic: In ancient times wine was stored in bags made from goatskins (the “bottles”). The bags were left hairy on the outside, which must have made serving the wine an experience. The danger in putting newly made wine into an old hairy goatskin bag was that the old bag would not be elastic enough to stretch as the new wine fermented. The pressure of the gas created in the fermentation process would explode an old bottle, and both the bottle and the wine would be spoiled.

Jesus’s real point was that the new way of living he was preaching could not fit into the legalistic order of the pharisees, just as new wine couldn’t safely go into old bottles. I think the connection to the point I’m about to make will be obvious by the end, so bear with me.

Kamala Harris’s Right Turn

I want to see Donald Trump and MAGA defeated on Tuesday and I’ll be grudgingly voting for Kamala Harris. Though I understand why many won’t, I think others on the left should vote tactically too. As I discussed in a recent roundtable at the Call, a blog I help coedit, I agree with nearly everyone else on the left who sees Trump and his movement for the incredibly dangerous threat that they are. I’d rejoice in their defeat. The brutal atrocities that Harris supports in Gaza and Lebanon do keep me questioning myself, but ultimately I think she’ll be an easier adversary for the peace movement to push to end the genocide.

But there’s no point in denying that Kamala Harris and the Democrats are running an aggressively moderate campaign this year. Their target is Donald Trump–wary conservatives, who they hope can push Democrats over the top. The in-your-face conservatism of the campaign is now pervasive: the Liz Cheney lovefest, the elevation of billionaire Mark Cuban as a top campaign surrogate, the campaign’s strategy memos that make no secret that their priority is winning suburban professionals. It’s not hard to see why, given all this, Trump might appear to many Americans as the candidate who offers a more compelling, radical-sounding — of course also reactionary, anti-immigrant, very deceptive — "pro-worker" agenda. (This was the argument of my recent piece in Jacobin.)

The Democrats’ right turn grates on many on the progressive left who see Harris’s appeal to Republicans and GOP-leaning independents as political malpractice or gross incompetence. I share their sense of repulsion at the direction this campaign has taken.

But I want to sketch out a theory about the Harris team’s theory of the campaign and why they’ve decided to abandon an economic populist message. I don't think their decision is irrational, even if I disagree with it, and even if it might not work. The tl;dr is that Democrats can’t run away from fifty years of defending the neoliberal model, and fewer and fewer people believe them when they trot out populist promises at election time that they never fulfill. As cynicism about the Democrats’ economic message grows, Democrats are choosing to fish where the fish are: by promising stability and good government to college-educated moderates who are increasingly sympathetic to the party.

Four Strategies

Most would agree — myself included — that in the final push in a knock-down-drag-out campaign you have to zero in on one core message. That message will depend a lot on two factors: First, which part of the electorate you think is most up for grabs. And second, what kind of message you think you can credibly and effectively deliver.

Let’s simplify and say there are two big, basic debates in the country today. On the one hand, there’s a debate about the culture war, which now is more-or-less identical with the tribal conflict between Democrats and Republicans. On the other hand, there’s a debate about what to do about the economy.

In both debates, some people lean to the left, some lie in the center, and others lean to the right. (Yes, I know this is all a dramatic simplification of matters that are a lot more complicated. But I subscribe to the “fuck nuance” school when trying to come up with a basic and useful theory of what’s happening.) When you combine the two basic debates (culture war, economy) with the three possible positions on each (left, center, right), you get four possible strategies that Harris could emphasize in the home stretch of the campaign (two options are obviously not plausible). See the table below.

Over the last few months, the Harris campaign has made some thrusts that looked like Strategy 1, some feints along the lines of Strategy 3 (price controls! though the campaign quickly walked that one back), and some moves toward Strategy 4 (tax subsidies for homebuyers comes to mind).¹

With time and in the pressure of the final stretch though the campaign has honed their message. I assume the Harris team had enough sense to know that Strategy 1 won’t get them very far. Die-hard progressives on queer rights, racial justice, and women’s rights are not going to vote Trump and are, by and large, already highly mobilized. That’s doubly true for the MSNBC-watching “Vote Blue No Matter who” crowd. Strategy 4 would be hard to pull off. Trump’s record on tax cuts is essentially unbeatable. And Democrats are looking warily at a rising deficit and next year’s fight over renewing the Trump tax cuts, so big cuts don’t seem to be in the cards for their 2025 agenda.

More and more the main push has been along the lines of Strategy 2. That’s why the closing message sounds like this:

Put “country over party”!

Trump is far too dangerous.

Fellow Americans from the respectable ranks of conservatism: listen to Liz Cheney — this year it’s ok to vote blue.

Harris will even appoint a Republican to her cabinet!

Mark Cuban is an actual billionaire, and even he says don’t vote for Trump.

There’s a home for conservatives in the Harris-Walz campaign.

Many people on the left unsurprisingly see it very differently. They look at the set of options and shout: “Choose Strategy 3!” Many progressives would much rather see Harris campaign as an economic populist, rallying working-class voters to the party’s ranks. 

The case for Strategy 3 seems persuasive too. “Wasn’t Strategy 2 Hillary Clinton’s approach in 2016? Look what happened then!” There are many more workers than professionals. Elections are a numbers game, and the math seems obvious. Democrats have underperformed among workers for years, but they once supported Democrats at much higher rates. The economy is voters’ top concern. QED Harris should embrace economic populism.

Regrettably, that’s not what the Harris campaign is doing. But rather than just dismissing the campaign as incompetent, I think it’s worth asking why it has taken the turn that it has. Not to justify their choices, but to learn more about where the Democratic leadership is at.

The Populist Alternative Thwarted

Two factors make a Democratic appeal to workers less plausible this year:

1. Even if Joe Biden really was a redistributor in chief, as some on the left say — which many people quite reasonably argue he wasn’t; this Thomas Ferguson and Servaas Storm paper on the issue, for instance, is quite persuasive — he’s not getting credit for it. Biden’s approval among voters on economic matters has fallen to historically low levels. A recent Gallup poll found that “confidence in President Joe Biden to recommend or do the right thing for the economy is among the lowest Gallup has measured for any president since 2001.” The Harris team may fear that foregrounding the economy would only reinforce Trump’s message.

2. After years of promoting free trade and many failed attempts to deliver on populist commitments habitually promised during general elections, the Democratic Party brand has been trashed among workers. The most common refrain, in the articles I read these days asking working people in battleground counties why they’re thinking about voting for Trump, goes like this: “The Democrats don’t deliver on what they say they will do.” Even if the Harris campaign could lurch leftward on economic questions and promise a $20 minimum wage, Medicare for All, and universal free childcare, would anyone believe she would actually pursue any of these policies? (In fact, Harris was briefly for Medicare for All in her 2020 run; with good reason, no one who was paying attention took the commitment seriously.)

A single campaign cannot undo fifty years of political education that we’ve all received in how Democrats govern and what happens under their administrations. What people remember from the Clinton administration is bleak: punitive welfare “reform,” NAFTA, deindustrialization, massive blue-collar job losses. What people remember from the Obama administration is not much better: A weak labor market prolonged over years because Obama and team embraced a “Grand Bargain” with the GOP to impose austerity. Health care reform that failed in its basic promise to make the health care system noticeably better and significantly more affordable.

This is not to say the Republican record was any better — in fact it was worse, and Obama’s stunning victory in 2008 (a 7 percentage point margin in the popular vote, 67 percent of the Electoral College votes, a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, almost 60 percent of the seats in the House) was a major repudiation of Republicans’ management of the economy. One way to think about the whole 1976–2016 period is the two parties trading places every few years as voters grew disgusted with each party’s defense of the neoliberal model.

The difference now is that the Democratic Party is still run by the same crowd who has been in charge for fifty years, plus their anointed successors, whereas Donald Trump decapitated the GOP establishment in 2016 and seemed to give the party a fresh start. At least that’s what everyone, including Dick and Liz Cheney, many prominent Republicans from the pre–Trump revolution era, and most leading Democrats tell voters every day. “This is not your father’s Grand Old Party!” they warn. To which many regular people seem to be replying: “Interesting, tell me more.”²

The Harris Campaign’s Logic

Weigh the risks of the populist strategy — especially that few will buy another series of populist promises from Democrats — and the party’s declining support among working-class people since 2008, against the opportunities to be had among “moderates,” especially suburban, college-educated voters.³ The latter have been trending Democrat since at least 2008. They vote at very high rates. They’ve got a lot to lose, and Trump seems very unpredictable. They may not be left-wing culture warriors, but Trump’s crudeness offends them. And there are still many more of these college-educated, moderate suburban voters to be won by the blue team. Plus, a populist strategy would alienate the party’s affluent donors, who Democrats are leaning on to outraise and outspend the GOP at stunning rates.⁴

I suspect the Harris campaign, though it wouldn’t admit it (who but Mitt Romney would ever admit there’s a big swath of voters they’ve given up hope of winning?), has done these calculations and come to a similar conclusion. There’s enough working-class people of color who will vote for Harris for other reasons (or so the campaign thinks). And the suburbs strategy has worked to some extent: it delivered (razor-thin) wins for the Democrats in 2018, 2020, and to some extent in 2022.

Who knows if the strategy can deliver again. Polling suggests the momentum is now against Harris, but she still has the edge in enough states to have a credible shot at winning. The fly in the ointment of the suburbs strategy may be that Trump and Republicans make a historic breakthrough into working-class communities of color this year. It could turn out that years of Democrats taking working-class people of color for granted is finally catching up to them. And young people and Arab and Muslim Americans (and many others for that matter!), sufficiently disgusted with the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocidal war, may desert the Democrats. If that happens, the Democrats’ right turn may not be enough to save them.

There Must Be a Different Way

Nothing I said here should lead anyone to believe that I think the Democrats aren’t to blame if they lose this year. It’s just that if they lose, it won’t just or principally be because Harris’s choice not to run on a populist program was irrational. And I’m doubtful that a loss could have been averted if the Harris campaign just sang a different, more populist tune.

If the Democrats lose, it’ll be because this campaign exists in the context of all that came before it: Fifty years of Democrats embracing and defending the neoliberal model. Fifty years of Democrats spurning their historic base among the American working class. History, past choices, the party’s reputation — these factors have real consequences for what Democrats can and can’t do and who will and who won’t be open to voting for them. There is path dependency in politics, and the Harris campaign is in some sense a (willing) product of it.

I sympathize with those on the progressive left who wish it were different. But like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football and falling for Lucy’s devilish ways every time, the left’s efforts to persuade the Democrats’ of our case for economic populism has also come up short every time. We can wish that someone would come along and clean house in the Democratic Party and start afresh, but I think we can all agree that the person to do that won’t be Kamala Harris. And many of us think that no such house cleaning is possible in the undemocratic Democratic Party. At some point, we need to try a different approach.

I strongly believe that only a broad-based, economically populist program will be able to break the back of the far right in the long run. If you want to beat Trumpism, you have to give America’s working-class majority something real to believe in instead. That’s why I’m looking to independent campaigns that get away from the Democrats’ toxic brand. It’s why I’m so interested in thinking through what could be done by the broader democratic left in the medium term to counter the right’s appeal to workers. It’s through steps like these that I see us breaking out of this downward spiral we’re currently stuck in and coming out the other end in better shape.

But I gave up hope a long time ago that the existing Democratic Party could actually deliver or even credibly campaign on a left-wing, populist program. And, so it seems — and with good reason — have the Democrats. As Jesus said, you can’t put new wine (an economically populist, left-wing program that working-class people actually believe in) into an old bottle.

1. The campaign has also tried to co-opt Trump’s message by minimizing the distance between his campaign and hers. Take the embrace of fracking and the Trump immigration message, for example. These are moves designed to try to neutralize Trump’s appeal — though they likely have the opposite effect of validating his message.

2. Trump doesn’t have a real answer to the problems of neoliberal capitalism either. Mass deportations and a return to protectionism may mark a break from key assumptions of neoliberalism, but there is every reason to think they’ll make the economy much worse for everyone. If there’s any reason not to be despondent at a possible return of Trump it’s this, that there is no reason to think his plan can deliver. But for now, the plan is the only big break from the neoliberal model on offer, and it’s not terribly surprising that it has a lot of support.

3. An interesting new study by the Center for Working-Class Politics shows that an economic populist appeal that attacks “billionaire crooks” and the “big corporations and the politicians in Washington who serve them” is very popular across many different groups of voters in Pennsylvania. I find this very encouraging. But the study focuses on whether the populist message itself is appealing, not on whether in a hypothetical scenario where Harris embraced that message people would believe her. I’d be surprised if a study that focused on the effect such a message would have on respondents’ voting preferences showed a big movement toward Harris; I just don’t think people would buy it. 

CWCP member Dustin Guastella puts this problem well in the Guardian: “If Harris loses, it’ll be because the campaign and the candidate represent a party that is now fundamentally alien to many working people — a party that has given up on mobilizing working people around shared class frustrations and aspirations. A party incapable of communicating a simple, direct, progressive economic policy agenda. A party so beholden to a contradictory mix of interests that, in the effort to appease everyone and offend no one, top strategists have rolled out a vague, unpopular and uninspiring pitch seemingly designed to help them replay the results of the 2016 election.”

4. Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic Party operative, recently gushed to the Washington Post: “The migration of higher-income, higher-educated voters in the Democratic Party is not only going to be very significant in terms of voters in the battleground states. Their money is helping supercharge all of our campaigns all across the country. This is among the more consequential things that’s happened in American politics in recent years, because Democrats are not used to living in a world where we dramatically outspend Republicans.” 

Back in the early 2000s, Rosenberg was one of a cadre of party operatives who built a donor base for Democrats in Silicon Valley and helped along the party’s shift to the right. In Sara Miles’s How to Hack a Party Line: The Democrats and Silicon Valley, Rosenberg is quoted as saying, “Our problem as a party is that the biggest source of our venture capital now comes from labor, which is a group that's becoming less and less important, and representing less and less of a percentage of American voters. . . . We have to replace labor's investment in the party with investment from another source, and hopefully from a source that's growing.” Rosenberg has been saying the quiet part out loud for the last two decades: Democrats are happily trading labor and workers for affluent voters. An economic populist message would be a retreat for them. The Harris-Cheney unity tour is an advance.