Erin Hooley/AP Photo
Delegates hold signs during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, August 20, 2024.
Vice President Kamala Harris has accomplished amazing things in four weeks and is poised to be victorious in the 2024 presidential election. She may also be setting the stage for a win so big even Trump’s claim that illegal immigrants robbed him of his victory won’t be sustained for very long. That is a win for democracy. But she may also be able to achieve what is considered a landslide in our polarized times. That would give her a government majority and a win for social democracy.
What is happening?
First, she consolidated and energized Democrats. President Biden had a historic presidency, and this week’s send-off could not be more deserved. But not very long ago, over 60 percent of Democrats said he should not be running. That suppressed Democratic turnout and support, but Democrats are now just as united by their candidate and determined to vote as Republicans. The Democratic National Convention will only re-enforce those gains.
Second, Biden passing the torch shifted votes to Harris from groups that had been the emerging base of the Democratic Party. She made significant gains with millennials and Gen Z voters, Blacks, and Hispanics. That cut the third-party vote in half, as many were looking for Democrats to be led by somebody speaking to their issues.
None of those groups that were part of the so-called “Rising American Electorate” of young people, voters of color, and unmarried women—except the youngest—are yet giving Harris the kind of landslide margins they did in past elections. The convention will likely get them much closer.
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Third, Harris is shifting votes among all women but creating a non-polarized, non-Hillary Clinton-like gender gap. Clinton cheered Harris’s chance: “Together, we’ve put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling. And tonight, tonight’s so close to breaking through once and for all.” One of the reasons Harris may win when Clinton lost is that Harris’s gains with women have not been accompanied by a symmetrical shift in the vote for Trump. Philip Bump in The Washington Post looks at the national and state polls and concludes that Harris’s gains over Biden are “heavily a function of increased support from women and younger voters.” He didn’t point out that the lines for men were largely unchanged. That reflects a new climate where Harris’s image is divided almost equally between positive and negative sentiments. Trump’s image, on the other hand, ranges between -5 and -22, all in negative territory.
Nearly every type of woman is shifting to Harris. In Democracy Corps’s battleground poll, Democrats are suddenly winning white unmarried women by 13 points, 54 to 41 percent. And the wave for now includes white working women, who are the majority of women. Harris is right now winning white working-class women under 50 by 7 points, 51 to 44 percent.
This wave no doubt grows every time Donald Trump shows contempt for women and attacks Harris as “stupid” or not attractive. It may grow every time Democrats remind voters of Trump’s role in women being denied access to legal abortion. And the Democratic National Convention has done exactly that.
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But the “all is well in America” columnists get a close read in the White House. President Biden defiantly declared, “Now the murder rate is falling faster than any time in history. Violent crime has dropped to the lowest level in more than 50 years.” Yet those living in many cities have experienced four years of violent crime and growing homelessness. Blacks and Hispanics in particular put crime among their very top problems, and they thought Democrats didn’t prioritize the issue or see what they were experiencing. They think Democrats supported defunding the police. So don’t rule out this key group of white working-class women’s fear of chaos shifting them back to Trump in the end, as they moved in 2016.
VP nominee Gov. Tim Walz and Biden opposed defunding the police, and other key speakers have reassured of the need for a strong border. That may allow this year to be like 2018. Those were the midterms when all groups of women revolted against Trump. In 2018, I wrote in The New York Times that unmarried white women, for example, pushed up their vote margin for Democrats by 10 points.
Fourth, Harris and Walz are running as candidates of the middle class. That is their main message and identity. It infused her campaign launch and the selection and introduction of her vice-presidential selection. Their ads re-enforce their shared biographies growing up middle-class. While J.D. Vance attacked his military record, Coach Walz’s favorability remains high. It has been a long time since voters have seen leaders who they think are authentically battling for them.
I asked in my articles in the Prospect: When are Democrats going to see the working-class majority and its discontent? They are doing precisely that.
The campaign has made this message a strategy as Harris—and almost every speaker—says that what matters is who each is fighting for: “Donald Trump fights for billionaires and large corporations. I will fight to give money back to working- and middle-class Americans.”
The DNC has highlighted their biographies and the choice in this election.
And the “Empower the Middle Class” message now being articulated at the convention received twice as positive a response in our battleground survey as Trump’s “Make America Great” message.
Almost every key speaker at the DNC took up corporate greed, the hardships from high costs, and the current battle for the middle class.
Fifth, the Harris economic-plan policies are extremely popular. Obviously, voters are just learning about them. But my surveys show how much voters applaud the lowering of drug costs, getting big corporations to pay taxes, and the expanded monthly tax credit, if they knew about them. And the expanded Child Tax Credit was the near top priority for Blacks, Hispanics, white Gen Z and millennials, and under-50 white working-class voters.
Major speakers spoke of the expanded Child Tax Credit, and the campaign’s ads hit Trump for cutting taxes for billionaires. Many base groups intensely support raising their taxes and re-introducing the expanded Child Tax Credit. White union households and working-class women really love those policies.
The risk to these plans is that the campaign loses its nerve. There is no evidence yet, but their plans were broadly attacked in editorials and by some economists who served in prior Democratic administrations.
President Biden laid the policy groundwork for most of these plans, but he never developed a political narrative around them or an emotive language. Right now, the DNC is hitting its targets.
