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Kamala Harris doubles down on blue — but not the Blue Wall
Harris for President is in full swing, the Democrats are getting excited, and we’re getting a good look at where the campaign’s focus is. Whether that focus can win an election, however, is another question entirely.
First, Vice President Kamala Harris bedazzled her campaign launch with a get-out-the-vote message recorded on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
It’s early, with plenty of room for a reboot, but is Harris the politician to pull it off?
Then on Thursday night, a two-hour, glitchy Zoom call for “white women for Kamala” began with a poet dressed like beatnik Steve Urkel confronting her privilege. She was followed by a woman who asked, “Are we admitting that we’re white now?” Then the call crashed, and when the campaign got it working again, the pop artist Pink called in from a private jet on the way home from Sweden. Soccer activist Megan Rapinoe showed up, too.
Meanwhile on the West Coast, second gentleman Doug Emhoff initially missed the word that President Joe Biden would not be running because, he told a Black Gay and Queer Men for Harris video call, he was out with some gay friends at SoulCycle in West Hollywood.
Take what you will from the stories above, but all three point to where Harris and the reconfigured Biden campaign see their political priorities. After weeks of sagging energy and growing dread, these loyal Democrats are eager to get on board with a campaign they think can actually win. Despite numerous crashes, for example, that white women Zoom call raised over $2 million.
When you combine 1) the activist push with 2) the news media’s furious effort to rewrite Harris’ history of failures and even her Senate voting record and 3) social-media algorithms pushing a Kamala-is-cool campaign to the kids as hard as possible, you get a formidable boost — but not necessarily a win. You can pump up the vote all day long in California and Massachusetts, but if you’re not moving the needle in Pennsylvania and Michigan, the Rust Belt swing states of “the Blue Wall,” you’re in trouble.
The problem this poses to the Harris campaign hasn’t gone unnoticed. “She is stronger among younger voters and voters of color but weaker with older voters and white working-class voters,” Friday morning’s New York Times newsletter noted. “Because swing states are disproportionately old, white, and working-class, Harris is likelier to win the popular vote and lose the election than Biden was.”
It will take another week or so to have a clear eye on how Harris’ triumphal reboot will affect polls, but early numbers are putting her a little behind former President Donald Trump — about where her boss was before his debate. If that’s where she ends after the slavish media rollout, the euphoria will begin to fade (and it’s hard to imagine Democrats switching candidates again).
It’s early, with plenty of room for a reboot, but is Harris the politician to pull it off? In 2019, GovTrack ranked her to the left of Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts (before the site deleted those pages this month). For every video or recording about Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) talking about cat ladies, there are five of Harris talking about defunding the police, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, shutting down American energy, decriminalizing illegal border crossings, mandating gun buybacks, and letting the Boston Marathon bomber vote.
When you tie it all together, Harris’ Big Gay Rollout starts to look more like a feature than a bug — and the kind of bubble a guy at SoulCycle in West Hollywood might not even notice he’s living in.
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The fire rises: The New Criterion: Ghosts of the great
The Labour Party is decidedly in charge in the United Kingdom, and not without good reason. Few parties have failed at executing their mandates from the voters quite as effectively as the Conservative Party. But with Labour comes a great danger to one of the kingdom’s great remaining links to its past. From the House of Lords, Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia, warns:
... We are surrounded by ghosts in this Chamber, but they are the ghosts of the great. One of the speakers in this debate from the Liberal Benches will be the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso. At a crucial moment for the continued existence of this country, in May 1940, his grandfather, Sir Archibald Sinclair, put party differences to one side to make his old comrade from the trenches, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister. He was Secretary of State for Air during the Battle of Britain. Then, only three months after he left that vital post, his place was taken by Viscount Stansgate, a decorated RAF officer and, of course, the grandfather of our own noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate.
Some of the families represented in this House go back to the very founding of our country. The first Duke of Montrose—and we heard that moving statement from the eighth Duke—played a central part in the Act of Union that created the United Kingdom.
The greatness and the drama of our national past finds a living embodiment here in this Chamber in a way that does not exist in other Parliaments around the world. Once that link is broken, it cannot be reconstituted. To quote Burke again, “The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded.” My Lords, I hope that, when the time comes to say farewell to the hereditary Peers, we will do so full of genuine gratitude for the centuries of service that they and their families have given this House and this country.
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