The vice president is trying to move the position of minorities backward—which makes campaigning against her difficult.
In a campaign that is increasingly turning on who is and isn’t weird, White Dudes for Harris and White Women for Harris are totally having a normal one.
These Zoom struggle sessions in support of Vice President Kamala Harris for president contain all the hallmarks of woke nonsense: weird self-abasement, off-putting lectures to put on “listening ears,” a separation of voters by race that looks eerily like the type of racist thinking it purportedly seeks to excise from the body politic—partly earnest and well-meaning while also not that subtly toxic, a form of outsourcing get-out-the-vote operations to your friendly local human resources department.
“Throughout American history, when white men organized, it was often with pointy hats on,” the dude rustler Ross Morales Rocketto was quoted as saying. He apparently also noted, with the good humor for which woke liberals are famous, that the White Dudes for Harris trucker caps were not themselves pointy.
Just some dudes and dudettes have good, clean fun, one supposes. But however tendentiously, they are making an important, uh, point: Harris’s path to the presidency, like the defenestrated President Joe Biden before her, runs through white voters living in the suburbs in battleground states.
That is why Harris is likely to pick a white dude as her own running mate. The Atlantic dubbed it Harris’s “white boy summer,” calling her would-be veep a “diversity hire.” Some of this is just normal political coalition-building, like John F. Kennedy picking a Texan or Barack Obama tapping Biden. But there’s also the veiled assumption that the country is too racist to elect a black and Asian woman president without a pale-complected pol whose pronouns are he/him by her side.
Colin Powell, whose wife died this week, could have been elected president in 1996, if not sooner. In 2008, White Dudes for Obama and White Women for Obama were simply known as the Iowa caucuses.
The Resistance is largely a college-educated white phenomenon. That’s not to say that there aren’t minority voters passionately opposed to the former President Donald Trump, as are the entire civil-rights establishment and all the related activist groups. But Trump has actually grown the Republican Party’s minority vote share, which was true in the last election and is one of the reasons the polls look so different in 2024 than they did in 2020.
Trump lost a subset of suburban whites faster than he gained black and Hispanic men, which is one of the reasons he lost in 2020 and why he isn’t guaranteed victory this time around. But it was widely predicted that Trump would do to the GOP and the Hispanic vote what Barry Goldwater, who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, did to the party’s share of the black vote.
Instead, even in defeat in 2020, Trump won the biggest percentage of the Hispanic vote of any Republican presidential nominee since George W. Bush, with diametrically opposed immigration policies. Trump also won nearly one in five black men while carrying white women.
Harris is going to try to claw back these minority votes. There is already evidence that the black and Asian voters who do intend to cast ballots for her are more enthusiastic than when Biden was still in the race. But if she wins, it will look more like Biden in 2020 than Obama in 2008. Her cultural approach will be both an asset and a liability.
As the Clinton-era scribe Joe Klein put it, “Democrats, led by their arrogant, elitist academic wing, have pursued a disastrous course for decades, emphasizing identity over unity, equity over equality of opportunity, and playing annoying, euphemistic, dilettante word games, using terms like socialism, gender-affirmation, white privilege, people of color, unhoused, intersectionality (whatever that is), Latinx and pronoun-imprecision—all guaranteed, indeed intended, to kick sand in the face of the bourgeoisie.”
That is why the “DEI candidate” talk is complicated. The moniker is certainly accurate in terms of what Harris believes: “Some people start out on first base. Some people start out on third base. And if the goal is truly about equality, it has to be about a goal of saying everybody should end up in the same place. And since we didn’t start in the same place, some folks might need more equitable distribution.” (This was said when she was vice president and might still be fair game and not subject to revision.)
To suggest, as some Republicans do, that Harris is uniquely unqualified isn’t quite right, even acknowledging the role race and gender played in her selection by Biden and the reason Democrats didn’t try to replace her too with a Rust Belt governor. It’s also worthwhile to compare Biden’s resume with his results as president and question the whole idea of whether politics is as much of a meritocracy as brain surgery ought to be.
Getting the precise anti-Harris messaging right is important if Republicans want to build a multiracial working-class coalition to compete with her coalition of cringe. Even if the dudes don’t abide.
The post Harris’s Weaknesses Are Complicated appeared first on The American Conservative.
