Is Kamala Harris going after the wrong voters? | Will Bunch Newsletter

Do you feel that chilly bite in the autumn air? I’ve always noticed that the moment the Phillies are eliminated from contention, the thermometer instantly plummets — because apparently God wants to make sure you feel the full depressive force of baseball’s long, looming winter. Until then, pray for Joel Embiid’s knees to heal and Nick Sirianni’s mouth to close.

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Last Friday, when Donald Trump was in Colorado making “gross exaggerations” about Venezuelan gangs and dredging up a 1798 law for his mass-deportation program, his election rival Kamala Harris was in Arizona and — in the spirit of the Republican icon who invented the phrase — offering a kindler, gentler idea if she’s elected. Harris, who’s already said she would put a GOPer in her cabinet, now wants a bipartisan panel of policy advisers.

“We need a healthy two-party system, we have to have a healthy two-party system, we have to,” the vice president said. “It’s in the best interest of all of us.”

Harris’ latest pitch to middle-of-the-road voters capped a month in which the Democrat — appealing to moderate Republicans put off by Trump’s racism or his authoritarian tendencies — accepted endorsements from former George W. Bush officials Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales and staged a campaign rally with Cheney’s ex-congresswoman daughter Liz in Ripon, Wisc., the town where the GOP was founded back in 1854.

But it’s also been a month in which polls — despite their all-over-the-map nature — and nervous, off-the-record Democrats are suggesting the enormous Harris momentum from her rave-like convention in Chicago and clear debate win over Donald Trump has stalled, at best.

This seeming speed bump, and the headlines Harris is getting for aggressively wooing disaffected Republicans — even as she mostly offers a standard Democratic policy agenda — raise a big question, especially in an election in which it’s increasingly clear the future of democracy is hanging in the balance.

Is the Harris campaign going after the wrong voters?

More specifically, is the nominee, in looking for votes on her right flank, taking the left wing of the Democratic Party for granted? It’s partly a matter of emphasis. Harris has a good record on climate change but seems determined to play up her more recent support for fracking. Progressive icons like Sen. Bernie Sanders are actively supporting her, but Harris has now held more joint rallies with Wyoming’s conservative Cheney (1) than with the Vermont senator (0).

But also, Harris’ refusal to suggest there’s any daylight on the Middle East between her and President Joe Biden, whose arms shipments and vocal support for Israel have angered the far left, could cause some young voters and some Muslim Americans to stay home or vote for the Green Party’s leftist Jill Stein, which could effectively hand a victory to Trump.

“They’re going with Liz Cheney and ‘appealing to traditional Republican values,’” James Zogby, head of the Arab American Institute, told Rolling Stone, complaining about the Harris strategy. “If that’s where they’re going to pick up their votes, good luck.” Zogby’s comments came after his institute polled Muslim-American communities in Michigan, where they comprise a substantial voting bloc. The survey found Trump leading narrowly among a group that had voted 2-1 Democratic in past elections.

It’s a complicated picture, though. Three recent surveys suggest that the Harris effort to pick off Republicans, especially college-educated white GOP voters, is showing positive results. For example, the New York Times/Siena College national poll conducted in late September and early October showed the Democrat’s support among Republican voters rising from 5% to 9%. Yet these gains don’t seem to be reflected in overall polling data.

Maybe that’s because politics isn’t a zero sum game. Two of those same surveys, from Siena and Emerson, found Harris’ support among her fellow Democrats actually dropping during the same period. A CNN poll of 18 to 35-year-old voters, with a large sample size, showed that while Harris was winning younger voters by 12 percentage points, that was barely half of the 21-point margin with the same age bracket Biden captured in winning the 2020 election.

It actually makes sense that Biden, even though he was 77 in 2020, did better with younger voters. The current president — perhaps with memories of the millennials who stayed home or backed Stein rather than support Hillary Clinton in 2016 — knew then he needed to shore up his left flank. Unlike Harris in 2024, Biden formed an informal policy group that wasn’t bipartisan but instead worked with Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and their aides, and issued progressive proposals on issues like reducing college debt with strong appeal to the youth vote.

Harris has chosen a different path, disappointing young activists who are terrified of a second Trump presidency but want to feel more enthusiastic about the Democratic ticket. “Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” the climate-activism Sunrise Movement complained after her September debate with Trump. Young voters, seeking more support for the Palestinian cause after nearly 42,000 deaths on Gaza over the last year, seem even more disappointed with Harris, especially after her recent appearance on ABC’s The View in which she couldn’t think of a major policy difference with Biden, despite progressive ire over military aid to Israel.

To say the online conversations between mainstream Democrats and the left flank have been counterproductive would be a gross understatement. A lot of it consists of MSNBC-watching boomer types, whose sole focus since 2015 has been the destructive nature of Trump, yelling at the younger generation that don’t they understand how much worse it would be after a GOP victory — especially for the Middle East and for climate change. Intellectually, the old yellers are 100% right.

But as we’ve seen repeatedly in modern American politics, emotion trumps (pun slightly intended) reason at the polls. There’s a substantial number of voters — young leftists, old hippies, Arab Americans — who are furious over the images of dead Palestinian babies on their phones. They blame Biden for supplying the bombs, and are baffled that Harris can’t promise a new direction. That makes them fed up with the entire system, and not single-mindedly fixated on the Trump fascism threat.

Harris’ current plight reminds me of the famous story repeatedly told by the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill, about narrowly losing one of his first elections. He told a neighbor — his former babysitter — that “at least you voted for me,” when the woman flummoxed O’Neill by implying maybe she didn’t. Why not? Because, she said, “you didn’t come to me and ask for my vote.”

Brat memes aside, the Harris campaign isn’t coming to the Democratic Party’s left wing or other young progressives and asking for their vote. Their assumption seems to be that when push comes to shove on Nov. 5, of course they will get off the battered couch and fill in the bubble for the Democrats as a rejection of Trump. As Clinton learned in 2016, that is an extremely dangerous calculation. As the battleship that is the Harris campaign keeps listing to the right, the time for a course correction is running short.

Question: Why do you think the [New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post] sanewash Trump? If they’re positioning themselves to stay in business if he wins, why don’t they get that he’s shut them down? — AmyMusician (@MmeScience) via X/Twitter

Answer: Amy, it’s increasingly clear that the both the growing insanity of the Trump campaign and its increasingly fascist tone is flummoxing a mainstream media that seems to lack both the language and the right perspective to deal with either. Monday night’s bizarre rally in Philadelphia’s western suburbs — a town hall that, after the disruption from two medical emergencies, devolved into a surreal 38-minute-long dance party with Trump and dog-killing South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem — is a perfect example. The Washington Post actually did a good job capturing the madness, but coverage in the Times and elsewhere had a dumbstruck, Emperor’s New Clothes quality. Newsroom editors have three weeks to fully imagine the danger of a Trump presidency and find the right way to warn the right voters. We are running out of time.

It wasn’t surprising that newsletter readers — responding to last week’s question about whether to ban fracking — replied with universal criticism of natural-gas drilling and its role in both causing pollution and worsening climate change. But several activists around the issue pointed out that the heated debate around a flat-out fracking ban obscures the immediate need for tough regulations while fossil fuels are rapidly phased out. Wrote Karen Elias: “The transition to a sustainable future needs to happen now. It can happen if we get broad support on the ground, but offering folks the option only of a fracking ‘ban’ will not generate the support we need to make our voices heard.”

📮This week’s question: I’m interested in your thoughts on today’s main column. Is Kamala Harris making a mistake in playing up her GOP endorsements and bipartisanship? Or is looking for votes on her right flank a winning strategy? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Harris Republicans” in the subject line.

The problem with trying to “war game” what a contested 2024 election or an authoritarian abuse of power by the next president (cough, cough Donald Trump) might look like is that the pace of wild disinformation and U.S. social decay is accelerating at an exponential rate. Claire Finkelstein, the philosophy professor who runs the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) at the University of Pennsylvania, pointed to this weekend’s news that false rumors about Hurricane Helene in North Carolina had led local militias to threaten federal cleanup workers — and how election workers could face similar intimidation in November. Finkelstein said two days of recently completed “table top” exercises at CERL with ex-officials, former generals, and lawmakers — playing out possible Election Day or post-election scenarios — showed “it was very clear we were not adequately prepared for the potential of violence and a contested election.”

The war gaming of potential civil unrest and other threats to the 2024 election were held on the Penn campus in September and October and attracted the likes of former Oklahoma Rep. Mickey Edwards and retired four-star Gen. Joseph Votel. They looked at two potentially troubling scenarios: rumors and disinformation triggering Election Day violence that threatened the vote count in Lancaster County, Pa., and an inauguration-related protest in Philadelphia that caused the new president to demand federalizing the Pennsylvania National Guard to quell the unrest.

In a briefing held Monday, Finkelstein, Edwards, and Votel told reporters the exercises found a troubling lack of preparedness among officials in the various levels of government for the possibility of election-related violence — especially given the increasing speed and power of the internet for bad actors to fan rumors. They urged key officials to set up lines of communication before Election Day and enlist community leaders and others to help tamp down rumors. On the second scenario involving potential presidential misuse of his military powers and the National Guard, the war gamers at CERL found that the White House could probably override the objections of a blue-state governor, but there are substantial grey areas around whether soldiers would obey unlawful orders, as well as and the significance of this summer’s Supreme Court ruling that expanded the president’s legal immunity. Votel said “it’s important for our citizens to appreciate that our senior military officers are well trained on this topic” of unlawful orders — but it was clear the potential for chaos in the coming months is high.

Still, there’s a hugely positive takeaway from these exercises: A lot of important thought leaders are worried about the future of U.S. democracy, and instead of getting caught off-guard — as so many were by the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection — are trying to figure out what can be done. One of the organizers, a veteran New York environmental lawyer, Larry Shapiro, whom I’ve known well since covering his work back in the early 1990s, is today devoting much of his time to planning how to stop American fascism. It’s a reminder that a 2020 Trump hostile coup was thwarted by folks who believed in democracy, from judges to election officials. We’re going to need a lot more of these American heroes if truth is to prevail in 2024’s fever swamp of disinformation.

We know what it feels like to be three weeks away from the 2024 election: sheer panic and terror. But how did it feel in 2020, on this date four years ago? After nearly four years of Donald Trump’s 45th presidency, we were looking for green shoots of hope. That’s why the start of early voting and long lines to cast ballots in that COVID-19 year felt like a huge win for democracy — despite the irony that a lot of what was creating those lines was GOP voter suppression. I wrote: “The crux of the Republican war on ballot box involves aiming to discourage voters by making it harder on them — making it difficult to find a polling place, or produce proper ID, and navigate a byzantine system. But these measures still aren’t enough to deter voters who see an election as a matter of life-or-death, which is what we’re seeing in 2020.” Read the rest: “12-hour voting lines give me hope, even as America looks like a banana republic.”

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