As the contest for the White House draws to a close, I asked a wide range of scholars and political strategists where they think the blame will go, whether it is Kamala Harris or Donald Trump who wins.
Their answers varied widely.
William Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Harris, he wrote in an email,
has run a surprisingly centrist presidential campaign while the party’s progressive wing has bitten its tongue. If she wins, the gloves will come off, and progressives will probably repeat what they did during the first two years of the Biden administration — pressure the new president to support their agenda.
But, Galston noted, even if Harris wins,
Republicans are likely to take control of the Senate. If so, Harris would be forced to negotiate with a Senate Republican leadership to get anything done, reducing the influence of the left on her administration, and House Democrats would face a choice between gridlock and accepting whatever the administration could get from a Republican-led Senate.
How would Harris exercise presidential executive authority?
Galston:
The answer to this question depends on who she really is — a former progressive mugged by reality and transformed into a Biden Democrat, or an actual progressive who is trimming her sails to close the deal with moderate voters.
If it’s the latter, expect the rule-making process to tilt left, especially on cultural issues. If it’s the former, the Harris administration will disappoint the left on immigration, crime and education, among other issues.
Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, also replied to my queries by email:
If Harris wins it will be because she successfully jettisoned the progressive dogma that doomed Democratic primary candidates in the 2020 cycle and made a convincing case to mainstream voters that she is a Democratic centrist.
Her decisive move to the center began on the day Joe Biden stepped back from the race and culminated in her convention speech, which was the most centrist of any Democratic nominee in memory, including Bill Clinton in 1992.
Harris’s embrace, Kessler continued, of
“opportunity economics” and capitalism helped her close the economy gap with Donald Trump. Her “tough on the border” policies have closed some of the border gap with Trump. Her accountability and prevention framing and touting her personal gun ownership has helped her on crime. All of these are tier one issues for voters and issues in which Democrats suffered huge deficits.
What if Trump wins?
Kessler:
If Harris loses, progressives will argue publicly that her moving to the center was the cause. Frankly, I don’t think even they will believe it. If you watch the swing state ads against Harris or congressional Democrats like Sherrod Brown, they are devastating frontal assaults on progressive liturgy. Every ad is about chaos at the border, out-of-control city streets, runaway inflation and mischaracterizations on transgender issues.
How will Republicans react to a Trump defeat?
“Let’s be realistic,” Kessler wrote:
There are only two outcomes in the minds of the Trump people — he wins or it was stolen from him. What happens to Republicans after a Trump loss will depend on whether enough Republicans tell Trump that they have lost patience with his stolen election charade. If you’re counting on courage from congressional Republicans, don’t bet the house on it.
Ruy Teixeira, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a co-author of “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” contended that even before the votes have been counted, the progressive movement in the Democratic Party is dead in its tracks. His views of the cultural left are unrelentingly hostile.
In an Oct. 24 essay, “The Progressive Moment Is Over,” Teixeira wrote:
It wasn’t so long ago progressives were riding high. They had a moment; they really did. Their radical views set the agenda and tone for the Democratic Party and, especially in cultural areas, were hegemonic in the nation’s discourse.
Building in the teens and cresting in the early ’20s with the Black Lives Matter protests and heady early days of the Biden administration, very few of their ideas seemed off the table. Defund the police and empty the jails? Sure! Abolish ICE and decriminalize the border? Absolutely! Get rid of fossil fuels and have a “Green New Deal”? Definitely! Demand trillions of dollars for a “transformational” Build Back Better bill? We’re just getting started! Promote DEI and the struggle for “equity” (not equal opportunity) everywhere? It’s the only way to fight privilege! Insist that a new ideology around race and gender should be accepted by everyone? Of course, only a bigot would resist!
Each of these policies in fact was opposed by majorities of the electorate, Teixeira contends, and “now the backlash against these ideas is strong enough that it can’t be ignored.” As a result, “the progressive moment is well and truly over.”
Many on the Democratic Party’s progressive left adamantly reject the analyses of Galston, Kessler and Teixeira.
Robert L. Borosage, president of the left-liberal Institute for America’s Future, wrote by email:
If Harris loses, much of the media will say that she was too liberal on social/cultural issues. The Democratic operatives have a large stake in that argument, as opposed to the reality that the party has failed working people and its candidates fail to engage them.
The real blame goes to those trying to sustain a failed establishment consensus. Biden made the break. Harris could have built on that, drawing constantly the contrast between her agenda and Trump’s — whose side are you on? Instead, the closing focus on democracy v. fascism, bipartisanship v. extremism, demonstrated convincingly that Harris was about continuity and the status quo when most of the country yearns for dramatic change.
Democrats won’t win a governing majority without a compelling appeal to working people that draws the contrast with the “succor the rich” policies of Trump and the faux populist right (top-end tax breaks, catering to big oil and entrenched interests, deregulation to favor monopolies and grifters like the crypto crowd etc.).
In an Oct. 24 Newsweek op-ed, “The Kamala Harris Campaign Is Leaning Into a Losing Strategy,” David Faris, a political scientist at Roosevelt University in Chicago, is more outspoken than Borosage, pre-emptively faulting Harris. Faris calls Harris’s bid to win over dissident Republicans, including campaigning with Liz Cheney, “Without a doubt one of the most inexplicable stretch-run decisions I’ve ever seen from a major party nominee, and it is a sign of deep, structural delusion inside the Harris campaign and Democratic elites.”
In doing so, Faris continued,
Harris has unwittingly leaned into everything that independent voters hate about D.C. politics — the inauthenticity, the refusal to answer direct questions, the casual jettisoning of past policies and stances in a mad dash to chase public opinion around as if she has no power whatsoever to shape it.
It’s like someone sat her down in late July and told her that in order to win, she had to basically renounce the person that she had been throughout her entire time in the U.S. Senate and to walk back the positions she staked out when she sought the presidency in 2019 one by one.
Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, which was founded in 2016 by supporters of Bernie Sanders, contended in an email that the Harris campaign made a fundamentally wrong decision that to run
to the center to win over disaffected Republicans is her best path to victory. We couldn’t disagree more. And in fact, we’re seeing clear evidence that buddying up with the Cheneys and parroting conservative immigration talking points over leaning into a strong, populist economic message is causing widespread disillusionment among the party’s progressive base.
If she loses, who will get the blame?
Geevarghese: “As they always do, the establishment will blame progressives instead of taking a serious look in the mirror and acknowledging their failure to lay out a clear vision for addressing the very real economic pain folks are feeling.”
The post-election debate will also focus on the most effective strategies and ideological positioning to win future elections, especially among Democrats.
Yascha Mounk, a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins and the author of “The Identity Trap,” argued in an email that
If Kamala Harris loses the election, it would be a good reason for Democrats to reassess their unpopular stance on some key cultural issues. But the opposite is likely to happen. As in 2016, a victory by Donald Trump is likely to embolden radical voices within the party, and make it much harder for moderates to push back.
“Most Americans,” Mounk added,
are moderate or slightly left-leaning on economic questions and moderate or slightly right-leaning on culture. They believe in capitalism and free markets — but want their government to fight for working people and help make health care accessible to all. And they are much more inclusive than previous generations of Americans, evincing great tolerance for sexual minorities and taking a positive view of the country’s ethnic diversity. But they want their government to get the southern border under control and feel that many activists have lost touch with common sense.
While Mounk believes progressive forces will push the Democratic Party to the left in the event of a Harris loss, Christopher Federico, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, disagrees:
In the case of a loss, my sense is that the Democratic Party will move right, though primarily on economic issues and on what you might call cultural presentation. There are elite constituencies within the Democratic Party that were uncomfortable with Biden’s shift back in a New Deal direction (e.g., some donors, some economists) and may blame that shift for post-Covid inflation. On the cultural front, the nature of the Democratic coalition would most likely prevent too large a reversion to the center, but I suspect that there would be future reluctance to nominate candidates who are not white males.
A Trump defeat, in Federico’s view, is unlikely to threaten continued MAGA domination of the Republican Party:
Trump has thoroughly remade the party already; a Trump win will simply further reduce any internal resistance to Trumpism. In the case of a loss, the changes that have occurred over the last 10 to 15 years still leave me unconvinced that the Republicans would be able to shift back to the center or even Reaganism.
Too many people who are now influential would resist that. Trump, even if he loses, is likely to remain the lodestar for the party until he passes, becomes too incapacitated to be a public figure, or goes to prison. After that, I suspect it will be mainly internal conflict over who will be Trump’s heir apparent.
Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, argued by email that attitudes on race and gender will be crucial in the aftermath of the election:
With Harris replacing Biden on the Democratic ticket, race and gender became salient considerations, and Trump continues to pander to white masculinity. My research has shown that people form their party attachments based upon their feelings toward the groups in each party, with people moving away from a party once it starts to contain people they do not like.
Trump activated his MAGA coalition based on hostility toward minority groups linked with the Democratic Party.
Which form of out-group animosity will ultimately be more impactful on the 2024 election? Will it be disdain toward the race and gender groups symbolized by Harris and the Democratic Party’s support for minority groups’ rights? Will it be disdain toward Trump and his MAGA faction of the Republican Party?
Two reporters at Vox, Andrew Prokop, who wrote “The Big Political Shift That Explains the 2024 Election” on Oct. 21, and Eric Levitz, who wrote “If Harris Loses, Expect Democrats to Move Right” on Oct. 22, explored post-election American politics.
“2005 to 2020,” Prokop wrote, “was, broadly, a period where progressives and the left became increasingly influential inside the Democratic Party, in Democrat-dominated spaces, and in the larger culture. Call it the era of rising progressive ambitions,” a period when “the ‘Overton window’ — the boundaries within which political and policy ideas are deemed fit for mainstream discussion, rather than fringe or self-evidently absurd — opened far further left.”
In recent years, however, Prokop argues, the leftward movement has not just stalled but reversed:
Democrats in cities disavowed police cuts as they struggled with rising crime and complained they couldn’t handle a migrant influx. Corporations have laid off D.E.I. workers. Mainstream media companies, increasingly influenced by progressive causes in the 2010s, are now more forthrightly asserting their journalistic independence and challenging progressive ideas. Activism in protest of Israel was met with fierce pushback at universities.
Why?
The main reason for that, I’d argue, is a spreading sense among many who are in the center, center-left, or politically neutral that the left has overreached or screwed up.
Levitz, in turn, puts it this way:
I suspect anyone who believes a Harris defeat would strengthen the party’s progressive wing is kidding themselves. On the contrary, I think Trump’s election would push the Democrats rightward or at least consolidate the moderate turn that the party has already taken.
As a liberal, Levitz acknowledges “this would not be a happy development,” but
losing a second election to an undisciplined reactionary probably won’t convince Democrats that Biden and Harris were insufficiently left-wing on immigration, criminal justice or fiscal policy. A second Trump victory would therefore probably mean not only a more conservative federal government, but also, in all likelihood, a more moderate Democratic Party.
Levitz also makes the case that flaws have emerged in the strategic argument of the progressive wing, that
instead of placating Republican-curious voters, Democrats could mobilize young and nonwhite voters who already favored their party but hadn’t previously shown up at the polls. Achieving the latter task required championing a bold vision for progressive change.
Two developments, Levitz writes,
have weakened this case in recent years. First, young and nonwhite Americans have become less reliably Democratic, according to the polls. Second, it’s become clear that the subset of young and nonwhite Americans with a low propensity to vote isn’t especially left-wing.
John Halpin, editor of The Liberal Patriot, a political newsletter for which Ruy Teixeira also writes, looks at the question of winners and losers from a different vantage point, writing by email:
If Harris wins, it will be the revenge of Joe Biden and senior adviser Mike Donilon. They laid out the anti-Trump, pro-freedom, abortion rights strategy — with a dash of kitchen-table economics and household-costs-messaging thrown in — more than a year before he dropped out.
This is now Harris’s closing argument aimed at suburban voters, women and base Democrats: Trump’s a danger to democracy and your fundamental rights and “I’m for the middle class.” Many people will try to take credit for the victory but it will ultimately be Harris carrying out the Biden-Harris message for one last successful run against a despised Trump in the face of pretty negative voter sentiments about inflation and immigration.
Conversely, Halpin continued,
If Harris loses, both Biden and Harris will be blamed equally. Biden, for not passing the torch earlier and for failing to mount a convincing case for his own economic and immigration policies. Harris, for embracing a bunch of loony leftist ideas in 2019 and never fully convincing people that she was someone different and genuinely pragmatic.
Realistically, predicting the outcome of these inevitable disputes is a fool’s game. In the short run, such conflicts tend to fester, emerging in force during the next set of presidential primaries. In the long run, politicians who understand how to capitalize on the moment are the prime movers behind shifts in American politics, as Trump was in 2016 and, before that, Bill Clinton in 1992 and Ronald Reagan in 1980.
There is, however, one possible development that will make the debate I just described more or less moot: a repetition of Trump’s false claims of victory in the event he loses, but with the added dimension of far more rigorous planning and sophisticated legal maneuvering designed to subvert the rule of law and to bring election machinery to a halt.
Trump and his allies have made it clear that their strategy in the event of defeat is more than hypothetical. As my Times colleagues Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti reported on July 13 in “Unbowed by Jan. 6 Charges, Republicans Pursue Plans to Contest a Trump Defeat”:
The Republican Party and its conservative allies are engaged in an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system. Their wide-ranging and methodical effort is laying the groundwork to contest an election that they argue, falsely, is already being rigged against former President Donald J. Trump.
Rutenberg and Corasaniti note that “unlike the chaotic and improvised challenge four years ago, the new drive includes a systematic search for any vulnerability in the nation’s patchwork election system,” based on a strategy “to convince voters that the election is about to be stolen, even without evidence.”
Trump has pointedly and repeatedly reinforced, in advance, a false claim of an election stolen by Democrats, declaring, on the campaign stump,
“The only way they can do anything is if they cheat like hell, and we’ve been victims of that. We don’t need the votes, we just want to make sure that they don’t cheat.”
“If I lose — I’ll tell you what, it’s possible. Because they cheat. That’s the only way we’re going to lose, because they cheat.”
“A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.”
Richard Hasen, an election law expert at U.C.L.A., warned in a 2022 Harvard Law Review article, “Identifying and Minimizing the Risk of Election Subversion and Stolen Elections in the Contemporary United States,” that
The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules.
The potential mechanisms by which election losers may be declared election winners are: (1) usurpation of voter choices for president by state legislatures purporting to exercise constitutional authority, possibly with the blessing of a partisan Supreme Court and the acquiescence of Republicans in Congress; (2) fraudulent or suppressive election administration or vote counting by law- or norm-breaking election officials; and (3) violent or disruptive private action that prevents voting, interferes with the counting of votes, or interrupts the assumption of power by the actual winning candidate.
The Trump campaign and many Republican state officials are gearing up to take full advantage of all three options. What kind of reckoning that would lead to, we cannot know, but we do know what happened last time.
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