Kamala Harris Has Shockingly Little "Democratic" Legitimacy

Kamala and Joe warmly embrace in March 2020 — via GettyImages

What the ouster of Joe Biden seems to have indisputably proven, although it was never such a mystery, is that the Democratic Party is completely captive to elite consensus; in fact, it’s effectively synonymous with elite consensus. Yes, there are factions of the “elite” that are more affiliated with the Republican Party, and “elites” are always a nebulous grouping to begin with, but Democrats are unique in that the upper echelons of the Party actually care about and will be pressured into taking collective action by the New York Times editorial board. The head of a different party, with a different set of sensibilities and interest groups to placate, might have turned the media clamor demanding his removal into a galvanizing battle cry: It’s little old me versus those dang know-it-all elites!

Biden tried this, fitfully and unconvincingly, by railing against the unspecified “elites” who were trying to dislodge him: having delivered this message on Morning Joe, however, all one could do was laugh. It was like going into a candy shop and railing against sugar.

An irony with Biden, though, is that he really was never the most natural candidate of Democratic “elites.” Virtually none of the party’s predominant media/activist types favored him in the 2020 Democratic Primaries, at least in the early stages, in part because he belied their preferred vision of what, at that juncture, the Democratic Party ought to be embodied by: certainly not an “old white guy” touting his commitment to bipartisan pragmatism. So he attracted almost non-existent “elite” Democratic support in 2019, while the “elites” instead sorted themselves between Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and even to some extent Bernie Sanders. Not only did Biden lack an obvious constituency within the party’s intelligentsia and operative class, even Obama campaign alumni were wary of him.

That of course changed when he won the South Carolina primary, and the party’s Grand Poobahs rapidly consolidated behind him (in a manner eerily reminiscent of how they just connived to remove him). But still, Biden’s core voting bloc had been older, black voters in the South, who have a uniquely unshakeable attachment to the institutional Democratic Party—and thus to Biden, who as Vice President had accepted a subordinate role to the first Black President. Early on in the primary cycle, pundits galore had taken for granted that Southern Blacks would inevitably flock to Kamala Harris, because they were just so certain that such voters would eagerly line up behind a half-Indian, half-Jamaican prosecutor from Berkeley, California. I can often appreciate the crotchety empiricism of Nate Silver, but I also took the liberty of recording for posterity that on January 29, 2019, Nate said the following of Kamala: “She’s probably the frontrunner at this point, folks.” This was always incredibly silly. 

Here is what I wrote in The Spectator on December 4, 2019, after Kamala Harris abruptly terminated her floundering primary campaign:

The downward trajectory of her campaign had been obvious for months, however. In fact, it was obvious from the moment that she announced, given how swiftly she’d been anointed ‘front-runner’ by every data-wiz and professional party operative. (Nate Silver, call your office.) They believed her to be such an impressive contender not because she demonstrated any particular political strengths that would have vaulted her into contention, but because she represented what sections of elite opinion thought the Democratic presidential nominee ought to look like. Professional prognosticators projected onto Kamala their perfect ideal for what the electorate wanted, mistaking their own preferences for the preferences of actual voters.

This was extremely silly in numerous respects. First, the assumption that Kamala Harris, a mixed-race lawyer from Berkeley (whose husband’s name is Douglas Emhoff) would automatically resonate with black voters in the Deep South was always laughable, not to mention highly condescending. Democratic-aligned operatives and pundits tend to use minority voters as instruments in their ideological crusade to depict the wider electorate as identity-fixated as they are. But even in terms of the raw identity question, there was never any intrinsic connection between Kamala and those voters, aside from skin pigmentation, which of course is only one facet of identity. Kamala was immediately heralded as an obvious ‘front-runner’ because of the fallacious pundit belief that black voters naturally prefer black candidates, which is not borne out by their voting history in recent national elections or in the data concerning this election, and neglects any consideration of factors like geography and professional background — neither of which boded particularly well for Kamala.

The mistake in analogizing her to Barack Obama was that Obama made his initial political bones in black-dominated Chicago politics, which he skillfully coupled with a cultivation of white political elites. His background in ‘community organizing’, while derided by the right, gave him an intuitive sense of how to forge such connections. He often adopted the cadence of black preachers and it didn’t sound forced or clichéd. His wife and adopted family were descendants of American slaves. While Obama was practicing civil rights law, Kamala was establishing a career in law enforcement. All these salient ‘identity’ factors seemed to get ignored in the hoopla around Kamala’s supposed ascendance, which was always largely a media creation, and as such extremely superficial.

Kamala’s brief shining moment came in the first debate, when she took old Joe Biden to task for his decades-old position on racial issues. Media commentators were absolutely scintillated by this, and declared that the dynamics of the campaign had been completely upended. Voters didn’t agree. Shortly after that viral debate moment, I wrote: ‘Don’t believe the Kamala hype until she demonstrates something beyond an ability to impress media elites.’ That demonstration clearly never arrived.

Maybe her campaign was really and truly sunk beyond repair, but (fittingly) there’s still something a bit disingenuous about her departure. She was guaranteed a spot at this month’s debate, which is more than most of the still-running candidates can currently say. She’d repeatedly boasted about being ‘all-in’ on the Iowa Caucus, pledging to spend an extraordinary amount of time in the state making her case directly to voters. She had a bunch of high-dollar fundraisers lined up just this week, so the spigot wasn’t entirely dry. Then all of the sudden: poof. If you’re willing to terminate your campaign at this juncture, just like that, then you clearly lacked some fundamental confidence in your basic reason for running in the first place.

That was already evident by her manic oscillation between various electoral strategies, ‘pivots’, and campaign themes, none of which caught on or were even especially coherent. Because there was no core there. When you lack a core, you’re going to be exposed eventually. Tulsi may have ‘accelerated her decline’, as Kamala aides whined to the NYT, but given the ridiculous premises underlying her campaign from the outset — ‘Progressive Prosecutor’? Really? — declining was the only direction she had to go.

All this remains just as relevant today. Kamala Harris is being crowned the overnight nominee by an “insider” process that is staggering in its total disconnection from any actual voter input. She won a grand total of zero delegates in 2020, and a grand total of zero delegates in 2024, at least as apportioned by primary election outcomes in the states and territories. She’s undergoing this coronation at the behest of donors and “strategists” who schemed behind the scenes to impose their will. There is genuinely no apt parallel in American history that I’m aware of; even in 1968, before the advent of the modern primary system, eventual Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey had to compete in state nominating conventions, which provided for at least some semblance of a public process — that was before many states even held primary elections at all, and even then, the primaries were largely not binding. Kamala, meanwhile, has been required to do ZERO public campaigning to acquire the nomination. She just had to pick up the phone after Biden released his mysterious withdrawal letter on X, and start dialing around to Democratic Governors and Senators to synchronize their endorsements. Voters have no direct role in this at all. It’s pretty astonishing.

I realize that “Dem insiders” have been in a state of orgasmic exhilaration since last Sunday, when Biden finally capitulated to their caterwauling, and they’re ecstatic that Kamala can now ‘prosecute the case’ to federally re-impose abortion in Oklahoma or something — but I remain thoroughly unconvinced that she’s the electorally superior choice to even a partially sentient Biden. 

By the way, what are Kamala’s independent foreign policy positions, and how, if at all, are they distinct from Biden’s? Of course, it’s a reasonable inference to associate her with the policies of the Biden-Harris Administration, but now she’s running her own campaign, and has been vaulted into nominee status through the most insider-exclusive process perhaps in all of American history, without having to bother to answer a single pertinent question about how she’d command the US military, conduct US foreign policy, or otherwise exercise the awesome unilateral powers inherent to the presidency in the domain of “national security.” And all the “Dem insiders” can do is overflow with teary gratitude for Joe Biden making this preposterous situation possible.

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As a programming note, I am in Brazil for the next ten days or so guest-hosting Glenn Greenwald’s show, live in-studio, while he’s away luxuriating at some undisclosed holiday location. You can watch on Rumble — I will tweet the links each night, and also put them here the next day. Comment, tweet, or email me any show suggestions you might have! 

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