“She prosecuted sex predators. He is one. She shut down for-profit colleges that swindled Americans. He was the for-profit college, literally. He’s owned by the big banks. She’s the attorney general who beat the biggest banks in America and forced them to pay homeowners $18 billion. He’s tearing us apart. She’ll bring us together.” —Kamala Harris 2019/20 Primary Campaign Video
“The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the one who wins this election,” — Nikkie Haley, January 23, 2024.
Everything changed on July 21 when President Joe Biden dropped his re-election bid and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris to take his place. The move set the stage for Harris’s long career as a prosecutor to refocus the debate on its true foundations: preserving democracy and the rule of law from an attempted authoritarian take-over. In response, three-plus weeks of Democrats in disarray disappeared in a flash as a tsunami of endorsements, money, and new volunteers flooded in.
All her imaginary challengers—including all Democratic governors—quickly endorsed Harris. And while rightwing tech billionaires have pledged hundreds of millions to support Trump in the coming months, the Harris campaign and allies surpassed their pledges within 24 hours. She reclaimed the fundraising momentum that Trump has enjoyed since his May 31 conviction on 34 counts of election-interference-related business fraud. Before the announcement, only a few hundred volunteers were signing up every day. After it, over 28,000 signed up in 24 hours.
Speaking before campaign workers the next day, Harris made things perfectly clear. Before she was vice president or US Senator, Harris noted, she was California attorney general, and before that “I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles, 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.”
Regardless of media focus, preserving democracy has always been a voter concern—second only to abortion in Swing Left’s nationwide feedback from canvassing in swing states and districts, according to Executive Director Yasmin Radjy, and Harris has been a powerful, laser-focused advocate on both issues.
“What we’re finding at Swing Left is that voters and volunteers alike are actually incredibly driven by concerns for our democracy,” Radjy told Random Lengths. “They are worried about the perception of having a president [like] Donald Trump who is a criminal with little respect for the law or our democracy. As a former prosecutor who has upheld the law to hold sex offenders and the wealthy to account, Vice President Harris is well-positioned to make Donald Trump’s lawlessness front and center in the campaign.”
Prior to this, a fog of other issues have clouded media coverage, topped by the media’s obsession with Biden’s age, and supposed incapacity, and their willingness to amplify Republican blame-shifting for problems decades in the making which Trump managed to make dramatically worse. With Biden out of the race, Harris is also better able to set the record straight.
“Joe Biden’s Legacy of accomplishment over the past three years is unmatched in modern history,” Harris said. “In one term he has already….yes you may clap…in one term he has already surpassed the legacy of most presidents who have served two terms in office.”
The record investments in energy transition, infrastructure, and rebuilding American manufacturing have not only been under-covered by the media, but they’ve disproportionately gone to red states and districts where Republicans who voted against them have shamelessly claimed credit while continuing to demonize Biden. The fact that America’s economic recovery after Covid is leading the world has been utterly ignored. But all that seems about to change.
The prospect of facing Harris in a debate so frightened Trump that within hours a GOP source told Politico he’s unlikely to debate her, using the dog-ate-my-homework excuse that he’ll call her an “illegitimate candidate,” a ludicrous claim reflecting both his fear and his authoritarian assumption that he is the sole arbiter of right and wrong, legal and illegal, truth and lies.
In his acceptance speech, for example, Trump claimed “If you took the ten worst presidents in the United States, think of it, the ten worst, added them up, they will not have done the damage that Biden has done…. The damage he’s done to this country is unthinkable.”
In reality, the 2024 edition of the Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey ranked Trump dead last, with Biden in 14th place, two slots ahead of Ronald Reagan. Trump’s raw score of 10.92 was so bad that Richard Nixon and Herbert Hoover, the two most disgraced GOP presidents of the 20th century, both scored three times as high. Trump was seen as “by far the most polarizing of the ranked presidents,” according to a summary of the survey.
But Trump’s threat to democracy and the rule of law overshadows all else. In that same acceptance speech, Trump repeated the 2020 stolen election lie multiple times, even warning, “The election result, we’re never gonna let that happen again.”
The contrast with Harris could not be more stark, as Madiba Dennie, author of “The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back,” told Random Lengths.
“Democrats and Republicans are offering voters wildly different visions for the country’s future, and many of those differences are laid bare by Kamala Harris’s candidacy,” Dennie said. “Harris is a former prosecutor who has spent her career enforcing laws, while Trump is a convicted felon who has spent his life breaking them. She prosecuted sexual offenders; he’s a legally-adjudicated rapist. She represents women and people of color gaining political power; Trump’s Supreme Court justices have been stripping that power away,” she summed up. “Her candidacy gives voters a choice between a legal system that serves everyone or only serves to enable men like Trump.”
While the Harris announcement has dramatically altered the prospects, there are still more than 100 days before election day, and thousands of other races at the state and federal level in red, blue, and purple states and districts, including initiatives to protect abortion rights and other vital issues. In his Weekend Reading newsletter, Democratic strategist/analyst Michael Podhorzer, co-founder of multiple key progressive organizations, presented this big-picture view:
For the last three cycles, the success of the anti-MAGA majority has depended on historically high turnout and lopsided opposition from young voters and voters of color – the demographics Biden had lost the most ground within polls. However, these voters were never really “for” Biden or Democrats generally; in fact, they are much more likely to think the country is on the wrong track and lack confidence in American institutions and political leaders. But since 2018, they have been motivated to turn out by loss aversion – fearing (correctly) that they could lose their freedoms if MAGA wins.
That sense of loss aversion was significantly less in blue states in the 2022 election—most notably California and New York, each of which saw more than five Biden-won districts go Republican—enough to give Republicans a razor-thin House majority. Reversing that here in California is the entire goal of the California Grassroots Alliance.
While Harris offers the possibility of adding new hope to the mix, loss aversion remains a key starting point. The six targeted districts in California have a broader mix of concerns among lower-information, disaffected, and unregistered voters the Alliance is reaching out to, within a framework of “Our freedoms, our families, our futures,” as Alliance leader Patti Crane explained to Random Lengths. “That sounds generic, but it’s not,” she said. “There’s very specific things under freedom. There’s very specific things under families are very specific things under futures, like you have crumbling the economy.”
There are different local issues in each district—the Central Valley is different from the Inland Empire or Orange County, so “We don’t have a single thing” that predominates,” Crane said. “What we have seen is threats to democracy have risen from … below the top ten, right up there into the top five. I have had that confirmed by people, regardless of the district that that is starting to penetrate.”
She regrets that the Supreme Court decision giving king-like immunity to the President didn’t get more attention, “because it’s such a perfect illustration of what a corrupt court looks like and how you can no longer trust the basics because the MAGA justices were just doing the partisan bidding for one party.”
As a long-time Senator, responsible for approving judges and justices, Biden has been quite reluctant to challenge the court full-throatedly, though that’s begun to change just in the last week. But Harris’s very different experience, fighting legal battles in the trenches raises the possibility that this will become a major campaign focus, particularly given the Court’s role in overturning Roe, and subsequent efforts to limit medical abortions and even threats to birth control.
In short, the shape of the election at every level is in a state of flux. But there’s significant momentum toward a clarifying choice between a democracy that preserves the rights and opportunities of all Americans versus a MAGA, Handmaid’s Tale-style pseudo-democracy where only a minority of self-proclaimed “real Americans” gets to have their way on every aspect of life.
In her first campaign rally, in Milwaukee, Harris gave a preview of the campaign to come.
“Donald Trump wants to take our country backwards. He and his extreme project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class,” Harris said. “Can you believe they put that thing in writing? …. When you read it you will see Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare. He intends to give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations and make working families foot the bill….. They intend to end the Affordable Care Act and take us back then to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting conditions. Remember what that was like? Children with asthma. Women who survived breast cancer. Grandparents with diabetes. America has tried these failed economic policies before, but we are not going back,” she said.. “We are not going back.”
And the crowd began chanting “We’re not going back!”
“I’ll tell you why we’re not going back,” Harris said, after several rounds of chanting. “Because ours is a fight for the future. And it is a fight for freedom.”