The Harris Gamble

The documentarian Matt Ornstein interviewed two young Latino men in Long Beach, California, at the midpoint of the Trump presidency. They were both strong Trump supporters. Why?

One answered, “Trump’s smart. He knows right from wrong.”

The other one scoffed: “No. No he doesn’t. He’s dumb as shit. But he’s got balls.”

In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost to Trump among male voters by 11 points. In 2020, Joe Biden ran about even with Donald Trump among men. Clinton lost. Biden won.

Now Democrats are preparing again to nominate a woman for president, Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris likes to use the poetic phrase “What can be, unburdened by what has been.” But “what has been” cannot be so easily banished.

In the spring and early summer, polls that asked about a Harris-Trump race suggested that Harris would score somewhat worse or about the same as Biden. One poll conducted after the disastrous Biden-Trump debate showed Harris running slightly stronger than Biden. And recent state-by-state polls indicate that Harris could do better than Biden among women, young people, and Black voters.

But polls of hypothetical political matchups may not really tell us very much. In repeated surveys, only about 70 percent of Americans can even name the current vice president. How substantive are their opinions about that person, pro or con? Building out any kind of independent political identity is challenging for a former vice president: Witness the non-presidencies of Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Dan Quayle, and Al Gore—all former veeps who sought and missed the top job. Even canny Richard Nixon lost the race he ran while still serving as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president in 1960.

Now, the Trump campaign will be defining Harris’s identity too—and no prizes for guessing how they will do that: by casting Harris as a threat to sexual decency and racial order. Earlier this month, Trump posted on Truth Social an advance warning of the campaign he’ll run against Harris:

Also, respects to our potentially new Democrat Challenger, Laffin’ Kamala Harris. She did poorly in the Democrat Nominating process, starting out at Number Two, and ending up defeated and dropping out, even before getting to Iowa, but that doesn’t mean she’s not a “highly talented” politician! Just ask her Mentor, the Great Willie Brown of San Francisco.

In case you missed Trump’s hint, he’s referencing an old internet smear that Harris slept her way to political success.

The attacks on Harris will operate in a dual universe. In the more obscure and disreputable parts of the right-wing media system, the sexual and racial fantasies will be elaborated. The former Fox News star Megyn Kelly declared Harris’s intimate history “fair game” in a social-media post today. In the more public and more careful parts of the right-wing media system, the fantasies will be referenced and exploited without ever being quite explicitly stated.

In 2012, the Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld quipped: “Obama is now out of the closet … He’s officially gay for class warfare.” The joke was carefully constructed, using the phrase gay for to mean “enthusiastic about.” But the joke worked, as I wrote at the time, because:

A large part of his audience ardently believes that Obama is in fact gay, that his marriage is a sham, and that Mrs. Obama leads a life of Marie Antoinette like extravagance to compensate her for her husband’s neglect while he disports himself with his personal aides.

So it will go with Harris. Her midlife marriage, her mixed-race origins, her manner and appearance, her vocal intonations, her career in the Bay Area with all its association in the right-wing mind with dirt and depravity—those will be resources to construct a frightening psychosexual profile of the Black, Asian, and female Democratic candidate.

Never in U.S. history has there been a candidate for president who more flagrantly violated Christian ideals of marriage and family than Trump, the thrice-married sexual predator who has boasted on recorded audio of sexually assaulting women and reportedly made lewd remarks about his own daughter. Trump’s supporters can and will block all that out on their way to imagining Harris as sexually debauched.

Images and stereotypes overwhelm reality.

Trump often looked disengaged at his convention last week, including during the speech of his eldest son. However, he clapped and smiled delightedly through the speech by Hulk Hogan, who ripped off his shirt to demonstrate to the audience his fighting zeal for Trump. Hogan is a 70-year-old man who gained fame as an actor in pretend fights that every fan knew to be staged. Yet he’s also an icon of male strength and virility, considered no less awe-inspiring for being fake, maybe more awe-inspiring for being fake.

All working politicians appreciate that the human mind is not fully rational, that voting behavior is impelled by stereotypes, fears, and hatreds. Liberal politics hopes and trusts that the irrationality can be offset by policies and programs: They may hate me, but they will love my $35 insulin. Trump has built his campaigns on the assumption that irrationality rules supreme: They love me, so they will believe me when I falsely claim that it was I who delivered the $35 insulin they love. So far, Trump’s bet has paid off.

To have any hope of countering it, the irrational must be faced and acknowledged. A lot of contemporary progressive politics is based on a faith, or a fantasy, that policing words can reshape reality. For example, call the justice system “the carceral state,” and voters may be persuaded not to mind that elected officials are sending fewer dangerous criminals in prison. Rename residents of urban encampments “the unhoused,” and voters may be led to shrug off tent cities of drug addicts and mentally ill people on streets and in parks. Cordon off measurable political facts with ominous “How dare you say that?” warnings, and the facts will somehow go away.

But facts don’t go away because they go undiscussed. In other competitive endeavors, professionals candidly balance advantages and disadvantages. Other things being equal, success is more likely to follow if a baseball pitcher is taller or a jockey is lighter. But because other things are rarely equal, some pitchers and some jockeys defy the odds and still win.

Democrats are taking a risk with Harris—and it’s not only their risk. If she does secure the Democratic presidential nomination, then she becomes the only hope to keep Trump out of the White House for a second term. She becomes the only hope for Ukraine, for NATO, for open international trade, for American democracy, for a society founded on the equal worth and dignity of all its people. Anyone committed to those principles and ideals, whatever his or her past or future political affiliation, now has everything riding on the chances of the nominee chosen by some 4,700 Democratic delegates in Chicago next month.

If it is to be Harris, what are her ways to fight the odds and prevail against the irrational urges of tribe and sex so powerfully exploited by Trump?

Three ideas, for now.

The first is to remember that two can play at the game of the irrational. Trump also exists within a vortex of stereotypes and animosities. In March 2019, a Gallup poll found that 56 percent of Americans approved of then-President Trump’s handling of the economy. Yet economic satisfaction did not pay off in a high approval rating; his languished in the low 40s. The CNN polling analyst Harry Enten put his finger on the reason: In a 2019 survey by Quinnipiac, only 39 percent of those polled believed that Trump cared about ordinary Americans, as opposed to 58 percent who thought he did not.

A second idea is to remember that the irrational can be harnessed and redeployed. According to a large body of research, sex stereotypes can help women candidates. The trick, the research suggests, is to persuade voters that the job—say, a seat on the school board—is gender-congruent: for example, that it’s best done by someone who cares a lot about children. This conclusion may be unwelcome to those who want to challenge gender stereotypes rather than benefit from them—but if it works, it works.  

A third idea is to trust that reality matters more than Trump wishes it did. The Trump presidency really did end in disaster. His partisans deploy a battery of excuses for why the disaster was not Trump’s fault: the coronavirus pandemic, the George Floyd protests, and so on. But he was the man in charge. The Trump of The Apprentice never accepted excuses. Confronted with candidates who each pinned the blame for failure on others, Apprentice Trump fired them all: “We’ve never had a team lose so badly.” President Trump wants an out for his term that Apprentice Trump would never have accepted from a contestant.

Great presidents have summoned Americans to heed the better angels of their nature, in Lincoln’s famous phrase. But before they became great, those presidents first had to become president—and that meant taking Americans as they are, not as the angels they might be. That same Lincoln again and again deferred to prejudices that he could not in the moment defeat. He even made use of impulses he did not share. As his law partner William Herndon said of him: “He was not impulsive, fanciful, or imaginative; but cold, calm, and precise.” Lincoln took the fewest possible risks; he habitually expressed his boldest ideas in the most conservative language. He had a democracy to save. So do we.