The Perfect Storm
For Kamala Harris, timing is everything.
On the Secret Pod today, Sarah and I spun through the new polling numbers, looked at Kamala’s upside potential, and had some carefully couched thoughts about JD Vance.
You can catch the dolphin show right here.
1. Timing
Let’s pretend it’s November 2022. Democrats had a surprisingly good midterm showing. Suddenly a DeLorean skids to a stop outside your house and I jump out telling you that I’m from the future. July 2024, to be precise.
There are a number of distinct stories I could tell you that would scare the crap out of you.
Story 1: Trump wins the Republican nomination by acclimation, without bothering to campaign.
From the perspective of November 2022, this would seem crazy and very bad! In your timeline all of the mini-Trump candidates—Kari Lake, Doug Mastriano, Blake Masters, Joe Kent, J.R. Majewski—got pantsed. The Republican party was in disarray.
The idea that the party would coalesce so quickly around a loser insurrectionist would seem like bad news.
Story 2: Biden’s approval rating is stuck in the mid-30s.
Not great, Bob. Incumbents almost never get reelected with numbers that low. You would guess that for a sitting president to have approval numbers in that range the economy would be mired in recession. Or the president was embroiled in a serious scandal.
Story 3: Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee.
No one wanted to hear this in 2022. The assumption was that if Biden declined to run for reelection, then Harris would be the frontrunner in a contentious primary. Her institutional advantages were so large that she would probably limp across the finish line, but along the way Democrats would have gotten a long look at her vulnerabilities and limitations and the party would view her candidacy with resignation.
There would be a lot of bad feelings and battle scars from the fight.
Story 4: With 100 days left in the campaign, the Democratic nominee drops out of the race.
Self-explanatory: Of course this would have freaked out the November 2022 version of you.
Like I said: In a vacuum, any one of these stories would have seemed like very bad news in November of 2022.
But the way the four of them unwound—all together—created a dynamic that’s been a perfect storm.
Joe Biden’s persistent unpopularity, especially with Democratic voters, created a great deal of pent-up demand for a younger alternative. Which meant that when Kamala Harris emerged six days ago, she was riding rocket fuel.
A long and bruising primary campaign might have exposed Harris’s weaknesses and forced her into sub-optimal positions, making her the weakest possible version of herself as a candidate.
Biden’s sudden withdrawal circumvented a divisive primary process and allowed the party to coalesce organically around Harris—and gave her the freedom to run straight into the general election.
The contrast between Harris and Trump is everything Democrats could want and is probably the best possible match-up for Harris’s story and skillset.
A 100 day campaign is a huge advantage for Harris, who might be able to surf a wave of enthusiasm straight past Republican attacks. A short time table favors her and hurts Trump.
Timing isn’t everything in life. But it’s a lot.
2. Childless Cat Ladies
Watching the JD Vance / New Right obsession with natalism, I’m struck by how racially coded it is.
Because while Vance and his confederates are super-duper concerned about childless people who “have no stake in America’s future” I have also heard many conservatives/Republicans express a great deal of concern about brown people having too many babies.
Here, for example, is the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald in 2007: