Kamala Harris withdrew from the presidential race the other day, and this (seemingly ordinary) event has attracted much explanation:
Zakaria (the middle link above) writes:
In the post-2018 Democratic Party landscape, brown and immigrant women like Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York are welcome — but only if they keep to the far left edges of the party. Harris’ effort to occupy the center indicated a refusal to adhere to the implicit stay-in-your far-left lane message being doled out. Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez may have won in their minority dominated districts and been celebrated by the Democratic Party as emerging leaders, but when it came to Harris’ bid to represent all Americans, the support was far less ebullient.
This is not to say that race alone sank the Harris candidacy. She was slow to outline her position on Medicare For All. When she scored a debate win against former Vice President Joe Biden in the first contest, pointing out how his position against federally mandated busing to desegregate school districts (she was one of the minority students who benefited from it) she wasted a poignant moment that could have established her as belonging to a new generation of politicians. But her campaign had no discernible plan to capitalize on the defining moment and its impact, or to effectively position Harris as a heroic woman of color who had been front and center in the country’s efforts toward racial equality. She was soon lost again in the scrum of candidates.
We might pause here and smile at the “heroic woman of color who had been front and center in the country’s efforts toward racial equality.” A writer’s best friend is a sense that what you’ve just written is ridiculous.
Polls show that the most important issues for Democratic voters are healthcare, climate change and the economy. If Ocasio-Cortez gets more respect than Harris, could that possibly be because AOC has clear and mostly credible positions on all these issues, while Harris doesn’t?
And Harris wasn’t just “slow” to define her position on healthcare—-she was unconvincing as well. It appeared she was waiting to see how Sanders’ and Warren’s proposals played with the voters before releasing her own plan. That’s not someone who will fight through fierce opposition to enact single-payer healthcare.
And as far as Harris’ vaunted “moment” in the first debate versus Biden, the voters either don’t remember when busing was a big issue, or they do—-and those that do remember that busing was a public policy disaster. It was extremely divisive and mostly ineffective at achieving integration.
And then it turns out that Harris isn’t exactly in favor of mandatory busing—which was the only kind of busing that anyone ever cared about:
So of course Harris’ moment came to nothing, because it was entirely detached from any plan of action—for example to desegregate schools today—-or anything that voters currently care about. For older voters, being reminded that Biden opposed busing in the ‘70s and ‘80s wasn’t necessarily a negative for him. It was, after all, widely unpopular at the time.
And of course there’s the “Kamala Harris is a cop” internet meme, which wasn’t just a cheap laugh, because:
In 2015, Harris defended convictions obtained by county prosecutors who had inserted a false confession into an interrogation transcript, committed perjury, and withheld evidence.[7] Federal appeals court Judge Alex Kozinski threw out the convictions, telling lawyers, “Talk to the attorney general and make sure she understands the gravity of the situation.”[7]
In March 2015, a California superior courts judge ordered Harris to take over a criminal case after Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas was revealed to have illegally employed jailhouse informants and concealed evidence.[7] She refused, appealing the order and defending Rackauckas.[7]
Harris appealed the dismissal of an indictment when it was discovered a Kern County prosecutor perjured in submitting a falsified confession as court evidence. In the case, she argued that only abject physical brutality would warrant a finding of prosecutorial misconduct and the dismissal of an indictment, and that perjury alone was not enough.[117][118]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris#Significant_cases_and_policies
Falsifying a confession “shocks the conscience” in the words of Judge Kozinski. We already have a Republican president who doesn’t care about due process and who thinks lying is a positive contribution to civilization; we don’t need a Democratic president who might be even worse.
Why did Kamala Harris want to be president? Why would anyone vote for her? Would a Harris presidency reduce the heart-breaking destructiveness of the current system? Would it result in better healthcare, rational climate policies, less inequality? To achieve these things would require an iron will and strong principles, and I’m not picturing Kamala Harris in that movie.
Zakaria complains at length that Buttigieg is still in the race while Harris is gone, and that is a good question. Perhaps we should look at the natural constituencies of both candidates? Educated and moderate white people like Buttigieg somewhat, as do gay voters. In other words, the people who are similar to Buttigieg support him…..to some extent. He is only in 4th place, after all.
But only 6% of African-American voters chose Kamala Harris in a recent South Carolina poll. The only way a Democratic candidate gets into the White House with that kind of support from blacks is to book the tour.
https://poll.qu.edu/images/polling/sc/sc11182019_snzm94.pdf/
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/04/kamala-harris-black-voters-2020-075651
This is a staggeringly sorry showing that cannot be pinned on the white patriarchy. Charles Blow attempts to shrug off Harris’ dismal poll numbers without actually mentioning how low they are:
It is fair to ask why, as of now, only white candidates have qualified for the next debate, even though the field began as one of the most diverse.
All of this must be explored and discussed and learned from.
But there is something else that we learn — or relearn — from Harris’s run: the enduring practicality of black voters. They, in general, reward familiarity, fealty and feasibility.
Joe Biden just fits that bill for the plurality of black voters. When it comes to picking a nominee, black people don’t adhere to racial tribalism, broadly speaking. They want their votes to matter; they want to pick a winner.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/opinion/kamala-harris.html
But of course Harris’ African-American poll numbers aren’t just lower than Biden’s, at least in South Carolina. Bernie Sanders, a candidate blacks never warmed up to 2016, gets 10% of the African-Americans polled—and he just had a heart attack! Warren also attracts more black support than Harris. Even Tom Steyer, with 4% of the black voters polled, is nipping at Harris’ heels.
There’s no way around this. Harris’ extremely low poll numbers must indicate that African-Americans in South Carolina don’t want her to be president; they are just not impressed. They take Biden, Sanders (and Warren) more seriously than Harris—exactly as white voters do. An African-American voter is ten times more likely to support Biden, Sanders or Warren than Harris; and with whites that number rises to 25.
Few people connect with Harris because she’s weak on the issues, she did some dubious things as prosecutor and Attorney General and she strikes some people as inauthentic. And although African-American voters are more likely than whites to give her the benefit of the doubt, their generosity is distinctly limited. Blacks are nodding politely to Harris as they walk away; whites are simply walking away.
Blow writes:
It is fair to ask why, as of now, only white candidates have qualified for the next debate, even though the field began as one of the most diverse.
It is perfectly fair to ask that question, and I have the answer. In the South Carolina poll, 87% of blacks who have a presidential preference are planning to vote for a white candidate. That number alone, if it holds true nationwide, implies that the Democratic nominee will necessarily be white. That is why the only candidates in the next debate will be white—because black voters favor them.
For whites polled, the same number is 88%. And both races have the same top three candidates: Biden, Sanders and Warren. There are differences, of course. Warren is in second place with whites; Sanders is second with blacks. (And Buttigieg is tied for third among whites.)
And when we look at the issues that are important to voters it’s the same pattern. Healthcare, climate change and the economy are the top three issues for whites; healthcare, the economy and gun policy are most important to blacks.
White and black Democrats are broadly in agreement. Where there are differences, they seem to be matters of emphasis, rather than actual disagreements.
Could it be that both groups are facing the destructiveness of Billionaire Capitalism and are responding in largely the same way?
No voting bloc—and no identity—is permanent. Black and white Democrats in South Carolina today are just barely distinguishable in their political views. Harris, Zakaria and Blow may interpret this phenomenon as a subtle form of racism, or misogyny, or both. But what would they say if blacks and whites disagreed significantly on the issues and the candidates?
Identity politics is not a fact of nature; it makes sense only when different groups have opposing interests and mistrust each other….and those conditions may be disappearing, at least among Democrats. Healthcare, climate change, and mass shootings are pushing voters together, and so they are making similar choices based on the issues and the qualifications of the candidates. They still notice race—a little bit—but they are mostly setting race and identity aside in 2020. And when Dr. King said he had a dream, wasn’t an electorate like this part of what he meant?
The Socialist Investor 
Hello again, Socialist Investor. I don’t know how I got here but I seem to keep returning. Looks like those primary voters were correct! Lots of Democrats would have been better choices as running mates for Joe Biden. Instead, we got the cackler. Seriously, I don’t understand what is wrong with her because she didn’t behave this way before the election. Not just the nervous laugh, which is excusable and understandable, but her total incoherence when she speaks.
As we locals say in Arizona, “Class war not race war”. I think locals throughout the United States probably feel that way. I am not a socialist like you, but I have no love of what I call Billionaire Capitalism. I haven’t yet read any of your posts about it, thus don’t know exactly what your definition of the term is. (That will be my next stop, to read some of your posts about that.) I’m most concerned about a follow-on problem: Unelected billionaires have increasing control and influence over public policy in the United States, despite their lack of experience, education (be it formal OR acquired in other meaningful ways). It is no different in Biden’s administration than Trump’s, or Obama’s. I wrote about a particularly egregious example, of billionaire’s (both Dem and GOP) meddling in the U.S. public school system in 2015. Teachers and many union members were opposed. I re-read and updated my post about school privatization last month. The billionaires were wrong, and their actions likely harmful to children.
In this post, you wrote,
According to you, healthcare and the economy are the two top issues in common between white and black voters. I agree with that. Ironically, you then go on to entirely omit the economy, and say that healthcare, climate change and mass shootings are the common concerns pushing white and black voters together. That’s a rather disingenuous conclusion!
Regardless, I believe that now, in August 2023, the majority of white and black voters, both Democrats and Republicans, consider the economy and healthcare to be their most pressing concerns. Sadly, few of our elected leaders, be they Democrats or GOP, seem to concur given their spending and policy priorities. A few of both parties do, but partisanship makes it difficult for them to act.
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Hello again, Ellie!
As for my disingenuous conclusion, both whites and blacks have been intensely concerned with the economy for decades, if not centuries. If race relations are good, they care about the economy a lot; if they’re bad (the more common case) they still care about wages, prices and jobs. A mutual concern for the economy is not driving these two groups together.
But the similarity of their presidential preferences must imply similarity in both groups’ policy concerns. Now, is healthcare more important than gun violence, or vice-versa? I don’t know, the poll doesn’t go into much depth on the issues.
Billionaire Capitalism is both an economic trend and a political movement. It’s a form of capitalism that produces billionaires and not much else. It continuously concentrates wealth into as few hands as possible, and it does so by seizing political power and redistributing wealth upward through tax cuts, subsidies and policies that prevent significant upward social mobility.
Economically, it stands in contrast with industrial capitalism, which at least increases the productive power of society, potentially benefiting large numbers of people. Industrial capitalism does not depend on seizing political control to function. Billionaire capitalism hasn’t replaced industrial capitalism yet; currently they exist in parallel.
The goals of Billionaire Capitalism are inherently unpopular given the current values and socialization of the American people. Therefore, Billionaire Capitalism has a social and cultural agenda designed to destroy or neutralize any institution or set of values that would strengthen its opposition. This includes the educated middle class, public education, science, democracy, the environmental movement, the life of the spirit, egalitarianism, the civic virtues of truthfulness and moderation, secular universities, an independent judiciary that understands the limits to its power, an apolitical military that supports the Constitution, vibrant communities that aren’t based on race or class, and so on. In other words, Billionaire Capitalism is a profoundly destructive revolutionary movement. It does not value human life.
Russia is the best example of a Billionaire Capitalist state. American politics have been dominated by Billionaire Capitalism since 1980.
Check out the blogs “A Greater Power” and “Is Billionaire Capitalism a Thing?” for more details.
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