Eighty-six days ago, Kamala Harris became the presidential candidate no one expected, not even her. Since then, she has gotten her coalition in formation, galvanized a party that felt more loyal than alive, and rewritten the odds.
Still, three Tuesdays from the Tuesday that will decide America’s course for a generation, there remains unfinished business.
To win decisively in November and crush American fascism, Harris must — more than she or her party have in some time — tap into and channel the most powerful force in American life today: rage at the establishment, mistrust of a rigged system, cynicism about the hope of anything ever changing, the defection from belief itself.
In this brief race, a paradoxical contest has formed.
Harris is running against white nationalism, but she is doing very well with white voters with college degrees; they are essential to her path to victory. Meanwhile, she is seeing defections from voters of color, especially Black and Latino men, a risk the campaign has taken on head on this week with new waves of outreach.
She is running as someone whose name and appearance reminds you that she was born outside of the American power elite. And yet she has put together an A.O.C.-to-Dick Cheney coalition of leaders, united the pro-democracy American establishment, and raised more money than basically anyone.
She is a fresh face in a party that took the risk of switching nominees, but she is struggling to sell some voters on being a change agent.
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For all of the vice president’s success thus far, it is important to name the greatest risk to her candidacy, in the hope of avoiding it: In the homestretch, Democrats cannot let themselves be defined as the Whole Foods party — a party that speaks convincingly to upscale and educated and socially conscious and politically engaged and often-voting Americans, but doesn’t similarly rouse working-class voters of various stripes and more disaffected, jaded, demoralized voters.
In the last mile of this election, so many of the remaining pool of undecided voters — or, more importantly, people undecided about voting — have simply lost faith that anyone will change anything for the better in their lifetime.
It is beyond ironic, beyond ridiculous even, that some people who feel this way, millions of them, are attracted to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, two pillars of the establishment who are running for president on a platform that would only make the richest and most powerful Americans more rich and more powerful.
But it is happening, and it must be stopped.
I have written four books (so far), and three of them, in different ways, were about this rage and cynicism and frustration toward the system. One was about white guys drifting out of the system and toward white nationalism; another was about fury toward the billionaire class in a new gilded age; another still was about overcoming common resistance to the idea that electoral politics would ever change anything.
And what these reporting experiences tell me is that that many of the people the Harris campaign is most struggling to win over and activate right now are tired, cynical, jaded, not feeling it — for a reason.
They are the once-bitten, twice-shy voters. They are democracy’s jilted lovers. They are people who maybe once gave their heart to democracy but democracy neglected and neglected them and now it’s coming back around saying, Take me back! Defend me! And they don’t feel what they used to feel.
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The last mile in this election is the people who no longer believe.
For this group, it’s not going to be enough to use the fascism word, which connects better with educated groups and engaged voters. It’s not going to be enough to offer policy, which presumes a faith in the system. It’s not going to be enough to warn of the threat to democracy, for democracy has felt threatened, and absent, for too long.
Here’s what will not work. Scolding people. Lecturing them. Condescending to people who have lost faith, who no longer believe.
Telling them they’re being lazy or dumb or unstrategic.
Yes, of course, this election should be a straightforward choice. But do not underestimate the psychic effect of being asked to believe again and again and not seeing your life change. Sometimes booing can be its own way of voting.
Voters are always trying to tell you something, one way or another, by voting for you or voting for the other person or simply not voting.
Voters of color telling a historic, trailblazing woman of color candidate that they’re not feeling it aren’t being dumb; they’re trying to tell us something. Men being unmoved by the threat of fascism aren’t being lazy; they’re trying to tell us something.
And, more than we’d like to admit, what they’re trying to tell us is that sales pitches in general, however meritorious-sounding, don’t land, because nothing has worked.
I remember encountering many voters like this when reporting on deep canvassing in Arizona. The canvassers informed and reasoned earnestly; often the answers coming back from the other side of the threshold were full of, as one canvasser put it to me, a dangerous mix of disinformation and truth. Wars, financial crises, pandemics, bad weather, housing crises, floods, fires, education that didn’t deliver what it promised — these voters swam in reasons not to believe.
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What we need in this homestretch is curiosity. Curiosity about the defections, curiosity about those with whom the sales pitch isn’t landing.
Not to be mad at them, but actually to be curious.
From everything I’ve listened to and heard over these years and in this cycle, here is some of what I think needs to happen still.
Harris needs to tell a big story, a whole story, about what has happened to America, naming and acknowledging why so many feel as they do, and explaining how, together, we can get out of this condition, and, then, what America will look and feel and be like when we do.
It needs to be a populist story, backed by populist policy. It’s not just about beating Trump. It’s about beating a colluding elite of the rich and powerful that have rigged America, rigged the economy, rigged your workplace, rigged the information ecosystem, and made your life harder. And she needs to tell us, especially the distrusting, how exactly she will break it.
She needs to summon the distrusting back into belief. Doing so will require more than telling the usual story of being a middle-class kid, just like you. She needs to show people who have lost faith that she sees why. That both parties have failed them, one more than the other, but both, really.
And she needs to invite them into a vision of what American can be that is so compelling that they forget they are supposed to be cynical.
With men, in particular, she must stop the bleeding. The defection and disaffection of millions of men is profoundly alarming. Many men are resisting standing up for democracy. They are more drawn to the phony masculinity of Trump and Vance than the generous kind incarnated by Tim Walz. But, again, we have to be curious.
Men cannot be lectured to return to the fold. Voting for Harris, voting for democracy itself, has to be made aspirational. Men who have struggled in recent years to feel like the providers they aspire to be, because of housing costs and food costs and economic precarity — these men must be recognized head on. Harris did that this week with her outreach to Black men on the economy. It must be done more and more and more.
This outreach must be backed by policy. At her best, Harris has embraced big ideas that would change the landscape of the country, from housing construction to the care economy. Go further. Be sweeping. Propose the kind of simple-to-understand, sweeping, universal policies that make people thirst for the future.
And, finally, be everywhere, all at once. It has been a relief to see Harris saturate the airwaves in recent days, after an earlier reticence.
There is so much reason not to believe in America in 2024. If you want people to believe again, especially the people who are right now still on the fence, you need to tell them a story that not only persuades them but all but rewires their brain. You need to help them make new meaning of what they have seen and heard and felt.
This will require being everywhere all at once, in their heads and hearts, morning, noon, and night. It doesn’t matter if every interview isn’t perfect. Show them your power, your life force, the life force that proposes to smash obstacles and change their lives. Do whatever media most helps you reach them. It doesn’t need to be the old guard. But people are looking for whether you are unafraid, because if you are, it might give you what it takes to help them.
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Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
This post was originally published on The.Ink.