To hear Democrats tell it, they are beset by the forces of reaction and regression. Sexists, racial antagonists, and cultural irredentists are aligned, intent on destroying the cause of social progress. But Democrats are not talking about the Right. The specters that haunt them are their supporters.
This crisis of confidence in core Democratic constituencies has been building for some time, but it was Sen. Kamala Harris’s exit from the 2020 primary that forced it into the open. Sen. Cory Booker lamented “the bile, the anger” that he’s seen from his colleagues and constituents over the fact that “there’s more billionaires in the 2020 race than there are black people.” He blamed the Democratic National Committee for “preferencing” the wealthy. Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro said Harris was subject to “grossly unfair and unfortunate” treatment, evidence of a “double standard.” He blamed the political media. Even before Harris dropped out, an Axios analysis found that the Democratic Party’s black candidates struggled to raise the funds needed to compete in a national campaign. They blamed the donors.
These analyses fail to account for the extent to which Harris underperformed as a candidate. Much of her poor showing is attributable to a misreading of the Democratic electorate, which she and many of her fellow presidential aspirants have confused for the unreasonable and unrepresentative sample of left-wing activists who populate online forums.
The signs of trouble were visible early. Harris’s campaign stumbled out of the gate during a town hall hosted by CNN’s Jake Tapper. When the host observed Harris had co-sponsored Bernie Sanders’s single-payer healthcare bill, which would prohibit almost all employer-sponsored private health insurance, Harris glibly affirmed her desire to all but nationalize the industry. “Let’s eliminate all of that,” she concluded with a smile. “Let’s move on.” It’s hard to see how a politician could disregard the polls that show most of those with private health insurance, including Democrats, are satisfied with both the care and cost associated with those plans. That is, unless that politician had mistaken activists on Twitter for the Democratic Party writ large.
Harris made a similar mistake after she landed a bruising blow against Joe Biden on the debate stage in June. She deftly leveraged his melancholy nostalgia for a time in American history when it was possible to forge a consensus in the Senate, even with the Democratic Party’s remaining segregationists. But in the process, she pivoted to attacking Biden’s hostility toward forced busing as a method of imposing racial integration on schools. In the days that followed, it was clear that Harris had painted herself into a corner. Busing was neither popular nor successful as a policy, an inescapably obvious fact to those who haven’t sequestered themselves on internet-based platforms, where the legacy of American racism presents itself as the most urgent of societal scourges. Harris first confirmed that she did, in fact, endorse the reimplementation of forced busing, then backtracked when it became clear voters rejected it.
The junior senator from California tried to reinvigorate her campaign with the mortifying demand that Twitter suspend President Trump’s account. This was no errant aside, either, but a formal demand issued in writing to the microblogging company (a demand Twitter summarily disregarded). Harris went so far as to introduce the issue during a presidential debate, where she tried and failed to force Sen. Elizabeth Warren to join her in the quest to rid Twitter of Trump’s missives. Once again, her petitions were dismissed, demonstrating not just the senator’s myopia, but also her impotence.
Harris’s commitment to satisfying the preoccupations of the liberal fringe was so absolute that it led her to de-emphasize aspects of her record that might have strengthened her candidacy. Her history as a prosecutor, which began at the height of a violent crime epidemic in 1990, would doubtlessly have been an asset in a general election against Trump. But rather than embrace her decades of service to her home state, Harris ran from it. Instead, she highlighted her efforts to combat racial bias and injustice, reintegrate convicts into society, and reduce gun violence. This trepidation betrayed her vulnerability to the charge that California’s rates of incarceration for blacks, aggressive policing of truancy, and controversial executions were her doing alone, evidence of retrograde thought and conservative sympathies. When Tulsi Gabbard attacked Harris on those and other criminal justice issues, the senator had no response. Harris had already implicitly conceded that those critiques were perfectly valid, and her candidacy never recovered.
In retrospect, Harris’s poor political instincts were apparent well before she launched a presidential bid. The senator’s attempts to satisfy the insatiable maw of liberal confirmation bias became obvious during the hearings that led to Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. During those hearings, Harris alluded obliquely to a meeting Kavanaugh allegedly took with attorneys at the law firm founded by Trump’s attorney, Marc Kasowitz. When Kavanaugh said he had no idea what Harris was talking about, the senator suggested that the future justice was flirting with perjury. “I think you’re thinking of someone and don’t want to tell us,” Harris claimed. But nothing ever came of Harris’s assertion. It was vaporware designed to excite the passions of the online Left, which leaped at the opportunity to speculate wildly about Kavanaugh’s suspect associations. The exchange made Harris a sensation on Twitter, but that didn’t translate to the sustained support of anything resembling an electoral coalition.
Likewise, Harris pounced on the dramatic allegation that Empire star Jussie Smollett had been the victim of a racist assault by two Trump-supporting assailants. She described the improbable assault in the dead of winter in the wealthy section of one of America’s more reliably left-leaning cities “an attempted modern-day lynching.” But when Smollett’s dubious story imploded, Harris acted as though she had no memory of those remarks. “Which tweet, what tweet?” a visibly uncomfortable Harris asked when confronted by a reporter. The best defense of Harris was that she had delegated the composition of that statement to her staff, but that’s yet another indication that her campaign was invested in pandering to an online demographic that never really mattered.
It’s telling that the candidates who mourn Harris’s absence on the campaign trail describe her only as a set of demographic boxes that she will no longer be around to check. Not only did her candidacy lack a rationale, it was woefully short of sound political instincts. Despite the obvious lessons to be gleaned from the Harris campaign’s failure, some of her former rivals, Warren prominent among them, seem intent on repeating her mistakes.
Warren’s precipitous decline in the polls against her Democratic rivals might have begun in response to her duplicitous attempts to portray her multitrillion-dollar spending plans as cost-free for the middle class, but it accelerated as she devoted her campaign to bizarre crusades with no relevance beyond social media. Warren dedicated her time to attacking Jacob Wohl, an alleged fraudster with almost no profile outside the internet. She insisted on villainizing Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for monetizing his platform through advertising. She pledged to end “traffic violence,” which the rational and judicious prefer to call “car accidents.” And she dedicated herself to defending Taylor Swift’s honor in the effort to popularize her crusade against private equity markets. But while Warren was being inaugurated the “president of Twitter clapbacks” by bloggers, her support among actual Democratic voters declined.
By contrast, and to the chagrin of his younger aides, Biden’s campaign appears utterly indifferent to the demands of the social media mob. More revealing than Biden’s ambivalence toward the internet, though, is the internet’s total inability to comprehend Biden’s appeal.
When voters saw Biden engage a critic in Iowa and issue a passionate defense of his son against claims of impropriety (claims echoed by Trump and his Republican allies), the Twitter Left only saw the vice president seemingly escalate the personal nature of the argument. When voters saw Biden apologize for how Anita Hill “got treated,” online observers only saw a man disregarding the dictates of the #MeToo moment by not taking full responsibility for his role as Judiciary Committee chairman during the Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. When voters heard Biden affirm his desire to attack a cultural indifference toward domestic violence by “punching at it and punching at it,” as Business Insider observed, “the internet was not amused.” And yet, the former vice president remains ensconced at the top of national Democratic primary polls.
Amused or not, “the internet” has clearly led candidates such as Warren and Harris astray, and Biden has benefited from a healthy skepticism of the famously astigmatic medium. Like Harris, Warren’s campaign may have also squandered its early promise, and all in the effort to appease a rapacious constituency that was only ever a mirage.
Noah Rothman is the associate editor of Commentary Magazine.