Too Much of a Risk
Senator Kamala Harris dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary today.
For a while, she seemed like she could have been the next Obama; a first-term Senator from a large, diverse state who ran on charisma to weld together a coalition of nonwhite voters and white liberals to succeed an unpopular Republican president and usher in a new period of progressive policymaking. That didn't happen, but why?
Well, a few reasons. In 2007, Obama had the specific advantage of having been publicly against the Iraq War when his rivals on the stage had favored it when it started. That war had become unpopular since, and it gave him a particular idea to run on that the other candidates would have had trouble with. In 2019, the field is stratified between progressives that support shifting to a single-payer healthcare system under the banner of "Medicare for All" and moderates who support adding a public option to the ACA's exchanges. Harris tried to strike a middle ground, using the phrase "Medicare for All" to describe a public health care option, but that only succeeded in alienating everyone. Running on "I'm less scary than Bernie but also scarier than Biden" is not a lane you can run in.
Nor is it one you can run in while being a visible minority. The Democratic Party might have nominated the first female major-party presidential candidate last cycle, after having nominated and elected the first black president. But they were the party that just lost when they nominated a woman after the party was annihilated in state and local government during the first black president's tenure. Nominating a black woman to run against an incumbent president who actively courts the politics of white resentment seemed like too much of a risk to take, thus Harris was at a disadvantage.
If your party is a coalition of the dispossessed and downtrodden and outcasts from society, it is inherently difficult to turn that coalition into a majority in electoral politics. Harris wanted to try, and she failed.
For a while, she seemed like she could have been the next Obama; a first-term Senator from a large, diverse state who ran on charisma to weld together a coalition of nonwhite voters and white liberals to succeed an unpopular Republican president and usher in a new period of progressive policymaking. That didn't happen, but why?
Well, a few reasons. In 2007, Obama had the specific advantage of having been publicly against the Iraq War when his rivals on the stage had favored it when it started. That war had become unpopular since, and it gave him a particular idea to run on that the other candidates would have had trouble with. In 2019, the field is stratified between progressives that support shifting to a single-payer healthcare system under the banner of "Medicare for All" and moderates who support adding a public option to the ACA's exchanges. Harris tried to strike a middle ground, using the phrase "Medicare for All" to describe a public health care option, but that only succeeded in alienating everyone. Running on "I'm less scary than Bernie but also scarier than Biden" is not a lane you can run in.
Nor is it one you can run in while being a visible minority. The Democratic Party might have nominated the first female major-party presidential candidate last cycle, after having nominated and elected the first black president. But they were the party that just lost when they nominated a woman after the party was annihilated in state and local government during the first black president's tenure. Nominating a black woman to run against an incumbent president who actively courts the politics of white resentment seemed like too much of a risk to take, thus Harris was at a disadvantage.
If your party is a coalition of the dispossessed and downtrodden and outcasts from society, it is inherently difficult to turn that coalition into a majority in electoral politics. Harris wanted to try, and she failed.
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