Have Kamala Harris and Tim Walz learned from Democrats’ mistakes?
As the Republican party has become increasingly radicalized, its refugees have made Democrats more conservative, and less successful electorally
This essay is the seventh in a series called “How This Happened,” examining larger trends in American political history and how they manifest in today’s politics. Please subscribe to receive future installments.
Kamala Harris’s choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate has been hailed from everyone to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Joe Manchin. But one group of political observers has been decidedly less than positive about Walz, however, former Republicans who have made the Democratic party their political home in recent years. It’s worth asking why they’re so discontented.
“I thought the smart, obvious choice was Josh Shapiro,” former Republican Rep. Charlie Dent said in a Tuesday MSNBC interview, referring to the Pennsylvania Democrat who was among the veep finalists. “What does Waltz bring? Minnesota is already in the bag for the Democrats. What else does he bring? I just didn’t see that.”
Not all of the former Never Trumpers agreed with these remarks, but many did, including ex-Republican MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, who remarked on his program that “the candidate that I’m most comfortable with is the candidate that helps me win Pennsylvania in 2024. So let us hope… that those outside of Pittsburgh love Tim Walz.”
That point was echoed by Damon Linker, a former Christian right activist who now describes himself as a centrist.
“Rather than pick the very popular governor of a neck-and-neck must-win purple state, Harris chose a dime-a-dozen blue-state governor who gives feels to progressives,” he wrote on the charred remains of Twitter. “That’s about what I’d have expected from her a month ago.”
Of course, no one knows for certain whether Walz or Shapiro would have been better picks for Harris, but based on their recent policy records, it’s pretty clear that Shapiro has been more conservative than Walz.
This is relevant because when you zoom out on the political scene, so many former Never Trumpers always seem to be giving Democrats this exact same advice: be more conservative. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens even went so far as to urge Harris to nominate Jim Mattis, Donald Trump’s first defense secretary.
Ever since Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016, we have heard constantly from self-described “centrists” that Democrats are painfully out of touch with White rural America, and that they need to do more to reach citizens who have been left behind by economic globalization and changing demographics and opinions, but if that really were the objective, why then has there been so much Never Trump resistance to Tim Walz, a jovial man from rural Minnesota who has a teacher’s talent for explaining himself? If you want agrarian outreach, Tim Walz is almost the perfect candidate to do it for Democrats, especially since he practices a full-inclusion model of politics that includes people of all races, sexes, beliefs, and orientations.
Tim Walz is everything these pundits pretended to want. What he isn’t is what they actually want, a conservative Democrat.
It’s more than a little ironic for me to complain about this as a former Republican, but the inconvenient truth is that there are way too many conservatives who gave up on their own party and are trying to turn Democrats into the party they once controlled before Trump took it over.
I was afraid this was going to happen in 2016. Unlike most of the former Never Trumpers who flooded into center-left spaces, I actually left the Republican party before Trump, because I realized that its leaders had allowed a monstrously radical Christian nationalist movement to overrun the GOP at every level. This made me different from other fellow disaffected Republicans at the time. While I had changed my views and moved to the left, they primarily opposed Trump because they saw him as insufficiently right-wing.
Nine years after Trump first announced his candidacy, the Republican party as currently constituted is no place for conservatives. It is a reactionary authoritarian party. But instead of fighting the radical right within their own party, conservatives have been trying to move Democrats to the right, while also calling themselves “centrists.”
How Republicans made Democrats more conservative
This cycle of conservative refugees flooding into the Democratic Party and demanding that it accommodate them has been the tail end of another cycle that’s repeated multiple times as reactionaries have sequentially seized more power over the Republican Party in wave primary elections beginning in 1964. As the right has become increasingly radical, it has had the second-order effect of making the Democratic Party become more conservative.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, there were the “Atari Democrats,” many of whom were ex-Republicans who gave up fighting in their party. Senators Paul Tsongas and Bill Bradley were among the most prominent. While they injected new energy and ideas into the Democratic Party, they often clashed with its traditional liberal base. But they eventually prevailed, with major assistance from President Jimmy Carter and Rep. Dick Gephardt.
The migrations continued in the 1990s with neoliberals like former “Goldwater Girl” Hillary Clinton, her husband Bill, and many other right-leaning Democrats affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council. Calling themselves “New Democrats,” they emphatically rejected the New Deal and Great Society policies of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson in favor of deregulation, free trade, and trying to end “Big Government.” It was libertarianism by another name, which is why so many Silicon Valley and Wall Street elites who had originally gravitated toward Ronald Reagan in the 1980s began shifting toward Democrats who promised them the same economic policies while protecting abortion access and gay rights.
More recently, conservatives bearing bad advice have had important allies like Rahm Emanuel, lifelong Democrats who benefit from a politics of the status quo. Under the guidance of Emanuel, who served as a senior White House adviser and top party executive, conservative Democrats effected a political strategy that prioritizes stability over bold change, catering to corporate interests and established power structures.
Lacking a constituency beyond the corporate boardroom, Emanuel and his allies managed to retain power by pushing mythical tensions between social and economic justice. There is no such conflict, and in fact, helping other people against bigotry and oligarchy helps you be protected as well. I am freed by your liberation, and you are by mine. We can only protect democracy by expanding it.
But that is not the story that many left-leaning voters were led to believe. Democrats couldn’t protect abortion rights without giving out giant tax cuts; rolling back regulations was necessary to protect same-sex marriage; and racial injustice was best combated through panel discussions hosted by union-busting universities with $36 billion dollar endowments who exploit their employees.
Former Republicans didn’t just flood into Democratic Party offices, however, they also were invited into media outlets commonly perceived as left-leaning, especially the New York Times and Washington Post, each of which employ separate fleets of “fictitious Republicans,” who never criticize their party as excessively right-wing, while always being on guard against Democrats becoming too progressive. As Kamala Harris and other Democratic leaders mull how to defeat the scourge of Trumpist fascism, Democrats are being hounded constantly by moderates-in-name only like David Brooks or Bret Stephens, perpetually wrong commentators who represent no one outside of elite newsrooms.
The political science literature has been quite clear for some time that unaffiliated voters do not have defined policy views, much less a preference for conservative-libertarian ones, but this is not what you hear in the mainstream media, a fact that should give one pause about the supposed experts you hear prattling on the TV.
Democrats have largely rejected the polisci research, including when allies of then-Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean tried to use it in support of his “Fifty State Strategy,” which posited that party strength in one area could help it in another. Instead, Emanuel’s Democrats created a “just-in-time” strategy (my term, not theirs) of conservatism which focused on easy short-term victories rather than building a sustainable, long-term movement.
But just as we saw during the Covid-19 pandemic, just-in-time strategies are not resilient. They break and fall under pressure because they are narrowly tailored to circumstances that are not assured to prevail in the future. JIT politics is based on an interpretation of the “median voter theory,” the idea that elections are decided by unaligned voters who are ideologically situated in-between each of the major parties. But as the 2016 election of Donald Trump and his enduring popularity should have demonstrated, this conception of the electorate is fundamentally false.
While tilting the Democrats to the right proved very beneficial to the party’s coffers, this re-imagined approach to coalition-building has been less useful from an electoral standpointperfectly because even though libertarianish people are vastly over-represented in knowledge professions, they barely exist demographically when compared to the much larger group of uncommitted voters who have no consistency to their opinions whatsoever, as political scientist Lee Drutman has observed:
The upshot of all this is that if you’re a campaign trying to appeal to independents, moderates or undecided voters — or a concerned citizen trying to make sense of these groups in the context of an election — policy and ideology aren’t good frames of reference. There just isn’t much in terms of policy or ideology that unites these groups.
Anybody who claims to have the winning formula for winning moderate, independent or undecided voters is making things up. Perhaps more centrist policies will appeal to some voters in each of these categories — but so will more extreme policies.
And come election day, these potential swing voters may not ultimately care all that much about policy. They don’t tend to identify themselves based on ideology, and they don’t follow politics all that closely. They’re more likely to decide based on whatever random events happen at the last minute (like, say, a letter from the FBI director). These are even harder to measure and generalize about.
Obama, Biden and erosion of neoliberal dominance
No political coalition lasts forever though, and the moderate libertarianism that had dominated Democratic politics since the mid-1990s began fraying around the edges, first during Barack Obama’s 2008 primary challenge of Hillary Clinton, which was powered by a new generation wanting something beyond dyspeptic neoliberalism, and then later during his presidency after his efforts at bipartisan outreach were rejected viciously by the Tea Party Republicans.
Fed-up Democrats kept chipping away at neoliberals’ power in 2016 when Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s protest candidacy against Clinton became something much bigger than anyone expected. The progressive resurgence only gained momentum after Trump’s fake populism gave him the keys to the White House later in the year.
Although progressives were unable to propel Sanders into the presidency when he ran again in 2020, they have racked up one victory after another under the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. But the electoral model favored by the Clintons was still the one that was followed by Biden, who was often included among the “Watergate Babies” even though he had been elected in 1973, a year before the rest.
While Democrats were duking it out, however, Trump and his fellow Republicans have continued the party’s long-term tactic of identifying disengaged Americans and finding ways to appeal to them that did not involve compromising their viewpoints. This is a difficult task because public opinion favors progressive viewpoints on most issues, including healthcare reform, climate action, and gun safety. And Americans have been becoming even more progressive as the older Silent and Baby Boom generations are being replaced on the voter rolls.
Despite their unpopular viewpoints, however, Republicans continue to get the votes of many Americans who disagree with them. How is this possible? One way is that they’ve used apocalyptic fantasies to radicalize White Evangelicals over time such that even though this group is a declining percentage of the American population as a whole, its percentage of the electorate has actually increased.
Another method seems to be just simply lying about their positions. As Rick Perlstein has observed, there is a long history of Republicans doing so. It was critical to Trump’s 2016 victory as well. People who vote Republican seem to have very little understanding of what policies the party wants to enact, as pollster Ethan Winters demonstrated in 2020.
The effectiveness of Republicans’ lying about their policy positions is a long-documented phenomenon, but now that the radical right has gained untrammeled control over the Supreme Court, party leaders are finding it increasingly difficult to stop Christianist politicians and activists from getting their way, as the enactment of a series of total abortion bans has demonstrated.
Democrats, meanwhile, have finally learned that the most effective attack on a Republican is to tell the public what they actually believe and want to accomplish. By highlighting the contrast between stated intentions and actual policies, Democrats can dismantle the facade of populism and reveal the true nature of their opponents.
Tim Walz deserves enormous credit for the super effective “weird” attack line against Trump and his cronies, but it wouldn’t have worked without the flood-the-zone PR strategy launched months earlier by the Joe Biden campaign to attack Project 2025, a policy organization set up by a coalition of the leading far-right groups who intend to effectively repeal the 20th century.
Aided significantly by progressive celebrity Taraji P. Henson, Biden and his surrogates have been so effective in their attacks that Trump himself was forced to (publicly) distance himself from the group, even though it was being run by many of his most-trusted advisers. The PR move is not going to work, however, because Trump nominated JD Vance, a bona fide extremist member of a new Republican oligarch class that publicly boasts about its desire to end America’s democratic governance.
Kamala Harris and the new Democratic future
Trump’s effort to mask Republicans’ extreme agenda and corruption is also not going to work because Kamala Harris will not allow him to do it.
In a fiery speech formally announcing her presidential candidacy to the public, Harris blasted Project 2025 and vowed to go hard after her criminal opponent:
“I took on perpetrators of all kinds — predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain, so hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said, adding later: “We’re not going back.”
No one can predict the future, but one thing is clear: Kamala Harris is deliberately moving her party back to its populist past and toward the more egalitarian policies that brought Democrats their massive majorities in the mid-20th century. And while some party loyalists have blamed media elites for forcing Joe Biden out of the race, it’s undeniable that grassroots Democrats were the ones who led the way on this question.
The American people want a leader who can inspire them to accomplish big things and to let them live their lives as they see fit. This was a theme Walz hit heavily in his own debut speech on Tuesday:
“Some of us are old enough to remember when it was Republicans who were talking about freedom. It turns out now what they meant was that the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office. In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make. Even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves, there’s a golden rule, ‘Mind your own damn business.’ ”
But even as both Harris and Walz have vowed to tell the full, uncompromising truth about elite Republicans’ radicalism, they have signaled a new openness to the broader public.
Despite Trump’s despicably racist attacks on her heritage, Harris’s exuberant determination is instantly recognizable to the millions of Black women who keep America moving. Meanwhile, Tim Walz’s cheerful and intelligent masculinity is breaking the right wing, which has spent decades propagating the lie that White men are an endangered species among Democrats, just like Christians supposedly are.
Black Democrats always saw that second lie for what it was. The instant acceptance of Walz’s “Midwestern Dad Energy” by the party base demonstrates the untruth of the first.
As Harris and Walz move Democrats back to the future, it’s worth noting that there is a Rahm Emanuel coda to the story. Back in 2006 when he was heading the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Emanuel was approached by Rep. Betty McCollum, a Minnesota Democrat who was excited to tell him about a new candidate.
“I came back to Rahm, and I said, ‘I met this fabulous guy. He’s in a red district, and I think he’s going to win,’” McCollum told NBC. “And Rahm looked at me like I was crazy. He said, ‘No, he has no money, no nothing.’”
Minnesota Democrats didn’t take Emanuel’s advice, and thanks to their determination, the national party is finally casting off the shackles of neoliberal dominance. We’ll see how it goes in November, but all the indicators are heading in the right direction.
We can do this.
Excellent
There is a great episode of the Citations Needed podcast called "The Rise of the Inexplicable Republican Best Friend"