Trump just keeps getting more and more bad press for his authoritarian threats, new sexual harassment claims, incoherent rants, and a host of other things that would have long ago disqualified most candidates in the history of American politics. And yet the race for the White House continues to be a jump ball and sales of acid reducers are surely peaking in local drug stores.
As I wrote in this space last week, there has been much chatter about Kamala Harris’s struggles with working class voters in swing states even as the union movement continues to go all in for her by sending armies of canvassers to the doors of working folks in key battlegrounds.
A few days after my last column, the New York Times published yet another piece noting labor’s efforts while also zeroing in on some of the central obstacles that Harris and the Democrats face, observing that:
Older working-class voters still associate the party with the free-trade principles of Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, an association emphasized by Mr. Trump’s protectionist takeover of the Republican Party, said Michael Podhorzer, who recently retired as the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s longtime political chief. Many younger working-class voters, crushed economically by the coronavirus pandemic, then hit by inflation just as they emerged from isolation, appear to have given up.
“Most young working-class people, for good reason, think Democrats, Republicans or the political class have done nothing for them,” Mr. Podhorzer said. “People don’t trust the system.”
In the face of this, it appears that the Harris campaign has doubled down on courting wayward Republicans and replicating the very triangulation politics that Hillary Clinton embodied, risking not only reenforcing the perception that the Democrats have not pivoted away from neoliberalism, but also alienating younger progressives who may be left cold by the blitzkrieg of Liz Cheney and company.
Thus, Democratic activists have sounded the alarm that making this the closing argument in the closing days would be deeply unwise.
As The Progress Report recently outlined:
Armed with polls and other data points, progressive leaders and strategists have launched a campaign to redirect Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign in a more populist direction in the two weeks before Election Day.
The effort launched in earnest on Tuesday, when several left-leaning economic advocacy groups released polling that found broad support for shifting the balance of power in the American economy toward workers and consumers . . .
Calls for cracking down on price gouging — which polled at unprecedentedly high levels — and raising taxes on the wealthy contributed to a comfortable polling lead that peaked after Harris’s debate victory against Donald Trump.
Her campaign has since pivoted to appealing to a vanishingly thin band of Trump-averse neoconservatives, which has coincided with a statistically significant regression in critical battleground state polls.
The take-away here is clear and it’s backed by data as well as the historical record: neoliberal economic policy is losing the industrial Midwest for the Democrats. Thus, shifting away from hugging Liz Cheney and pivoting back toward a more populist final push would be a far better way to bring in just enough of the working-class voters that the Democrats have lost to win the blue wall states on the margins with voters who should be part of the base, rather than voters who will never be a reliable segment of an enduring progressive coalition.
It's not rocket science: don’t let your legacy be that you absurdly surrendered economic populism to the billionaire class and lost.