Kamala Harris Deserves to Win
Harris has run an extraordinary campaign with no major missteps. To the extent that doing real things in the real world still matters, she has put in the work to secure a well-deserved victory.
By Ryan McGreal
Posted November 02, 2024 in Blog (Last Updated November 02, 2024)
Kamala Harris and her team have run an extraordinary campaign. The central message is clear and consistent and compelling. Harris has successfully communicated her story, her values, her vision and her specific policy agenda.
Her core message puts freedom and opportunity at its centre, drawing an increasingly sharp contrast with her opponent and detailing in specific, personal terms how her policies will help Americans to get ahead. Harris doesn’t shy away from making the stakes of this election clear, but she campaigns with joy and laughter and optimism, and she has built a big tent, promising to represent the interests of all Americans, regardless of how they vote.
Harris has performed consistently well under unimaginably enormous pressure. From her first rally after suddenly becoming the presumptive nominee, to her masterful debate performance in which she goaded her opponent into a full meltdown, to her commanding execution of a hostile interview on Fox News, to her exhilarating closing argument to 75,000 attendees last Tuesday at the Ellipse, Harris has continually met each moment of this astonishing campaign.
In choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, Harris eschewed the poll-tested cautious route and selected a charismatic, down-to-earth Midwestern progressive with a strong track record of achieving popular, effective policy results and a folksy way of piercing the mystique of condescending, self-important Republicans.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has built a massive outreach and get-out-the-vote organization to build on the momentum of the presidential campaign, channel volunteer enthusiasm and maximize turnout across a large, fractious anti-MAGA coalition spanning everyone from social democrats on the left through constitutional conservative Republicans on the right.
Their social media strike force has been agile, witty and prolific, relentlessly driving the Harris campaign’s themes in an often hostile landscape of large social networks designed to reward paranoia and enragement.
Overall, the campaign has been well organized and well funded and the strategy has been well executed. They have gone to all the places they needed to go and done all the things they needed to do to reach voters - especially low-propensity undecided voters in key swing states which, thanks to the caprices of the Electoral College, will decide the outcome of the presidential election regardless of the overall popular vote share.
With no serious gaffes or major missteps, Harris has given her opponents no real hooks on which to hang their criticisms - which, of course, has not stopped them from embracing wholesale shameless denial of reality to make their apocalyptic opposing case to voters.
Her opponent promises to round up and deport millions of people, give huge tax cuts to his billionaire friends, impose a massive new sales tax across the board on all imported goods, slash spending on federal public services by trillions of dollars, and exact retribution on his political enemies by transforming what remains of the federal government into his personal revenge machine.
After refusing to concede his electoral loss in 2020 and inciting a mass violent insurrection on January 6, 2021, Trump continues to deny that he lost and has made accepting his lie a condition of loyalty for members of his party.
Everyone who refused to bend the knee has by now been pushed out. Those who remain - and those who signed up to fill the void of the more principled - are either craven enough to parrot the lie or doctrinaire enough to believe it.
Trump’s daughter-in-law has taken over the Republican National Committee and reallocated the funding for its GOTV operation to a massive lawfare assault on the integrity of the 2024 election while Trump and his sycophants have been busy laying the groundwork to insist again that he won, no matter the actual results.
And he absolutely could win. The swing state polls have had the two candidates essentially tied since Harris launched her whirlwind campaign on July 21. The election could go either way, and no one will know the outcome until the votes have been counted and litigated after November 5.
There is no question that Harris deserves to win. She has run a much better campaign. She has been disciplined, consistent and forceful. She and her team have built the largest and most comprehensive ground game in American history.
She also has an army of lawyers ready to litigate the Trump campaign’s efforts to disqualify legitimate votes. No one can accuse her of throwing the game.
To the extent that doing real things in the real world still means anything, Harris has put in the work to secure a well-deserved victory in this surreal campaign, whereas Trump has run a wildly undisciplined campaign and outsourced his ground operation to a billionaire oligarch toady.
If Harris loses, there will be a firehose of recriminations from pundits and politicos claiming this or that strategic failure or unforced error or tactical oversight caused her downfall.
The plain truth is that if she loses, it won’t be because of any mistakes she made, no matter how much some people will want to shoehorn the result into their pet priors.
If she loses, it will be because Americans, by and large, looked at their choices and chose fascism.
The good news is that the outcome has not been written yet. There absolutely is time for a majority of Americans to decide that their republic is still worth protecting and preserving.
I’m not superstitious, but I am a little stitious, so I’m not going to make any predictions, other than this:
If enough Americans come together and reconstruct the anti-MAGA majority that defeated Trump in 2020, they absolutely will defeat him again in 2024.