I don’t want to jinx anything, but we should consider what the world will look like if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz win the election. In particular, we might ask how Harris should approach building a coalition for governance and maintaining public support.
In the normal course of post-presidential politics, the victors reach out a hand to the opponents and at least try to find some common ground. Even if this is futile, as it has been in recent decades, it’s kind of expected. Of course, Donald Trump did not do this, but it arguably hurt his reelection chances by preventing him from growing his coalition. It was probably essential for him considering he had lost the popular vote and basically got an inside straight in the Electoral College that would be, and ultimately was hard to repeat. But bipartisanship isn’t his style or his brand, and he decided to ride and die.
President Barack Obama chose the typical path, putting a Republican in his cabinet and making all the rhetorical moves expected of him. And he got the back of the Republican Party’s hand, as they voted as a bloc against everything he wanted to do. I’ve long argued that Obama’s success in winning over the more Eisenhower/Rockefeller type Republicans helped accelerate the rest of the GOP into its present rabid state. Any elected Republican who thought about working with him quickly discovered that the GOP base preferred the Tea Party and Trump’s Birtherism. The more Obama occupied the broad middle, the more the Republican Party responded by going over a cliff.
And if the GOP base lost its mind over a moderate black man as president, how much more unhinged will they be with a black woman?
This is what I thought about when I saw that Harris is holding an event near Washington’s Crossing, Pennsylvania with former Republican elected officials.
Vice President Kamala Harris will continue her explicit outreach to Republican voters on Wednesday at a Pennsylvania event with a phalanx of former Republican elected officials who have turned against former President Donald J. Trump, the Harris campaign said.
Ms. Harris will be joined at a campaign stop in Bucks County, Pa., by former Representatives Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Barbara Comstock and Denver Riggleman of Virginia, Chris Shays of Connecticut, Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania and Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma.
Former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan of Georgia and former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, among others, are also expected to attend, a Harris campaign official said.
Turning these types of folks into permanent parts of the Harris coalition is important. It will help her preserve a winning coalition and signal that she’s not a radical outlier. But one thing it will not do is help moderate her political opposition once she’s in office. I have spent years trying to figure out what might stop the GOP’s lurch to the right, and I have never come up with anything more convincing than repeated electoral losses. And the closeness of this election shows how much centrifugal pull there is our system towards party balance. It’s just hard to build a coalition that can dominate cycle after cycle the way FDR’s New Deal Democrats did in the mid-20th Century.And, to be honest, a half century of losing is what caused the GOP to transform from being the party of business and civil rights into a Gingrichesque populist freak show.
I suspect there is no magic fix, which means realism is called for. A Harris administration should expect no cooperation at all from the GOP, completely irrespective of anything she might try, or any gesture she might make. She should also expect the American electorate to go to the polls in the 2026 midterms intent on punishing her by electing Republicans, also irrespective of any success she might have or any outreach she might attempt.
If this doesn’t happen, it won’t likely be because of any decision Harris made, but because some big event has unified the country behind her leadership. Think Pearl Harbor or 9/11.
The irony is that the more comfortable Harris makes it for former Republicans to support her, the fewer reasonable Republicans remain in the opposition. But instead of this leading to an all-powerful majority coalition, it doesn’t work out that way. It just means that when the country wants to push back in the other direction, the only alternative is a frothing movement of religious nuts, conspiracy theorists, fraudsters and tax evaders, and outright fascist white nationalists. And the American people will eventually choose these people to lead, even if they don’t this November.
I know this is pessimistic, but it’s my honest analysis, and I think the conclusion is that Harris should choose the leaders she’s comfortable with rather than trying to signal bipartisanship for its own sake. And she should make damn sure to keep inflation down because inflation is fascists’ best friend.
At this point, given that she’s relying on disaffected Republicans as a moderately significant element of her pitch, she won’t have much choice but to give Liz Cheney some kind of role if that’s what Liz Cheney wants. What if Harris dumps all the bipartisanship in January? I see your point that this could shape the opposition more constructively. I’m just not sure it’ll work. The narrative would be that Harris dumped her allies after they helped her out.
Well, Liz Cheney doesn’t belong in a Democratic cabinet, but she could be an ambassador or something.
Maybe to Iraq? Lol.
I agree any moves toward bipartisanship by Harris would have effects similar to Obama’s: i.e., further radicalizing what’s left of the Republican party.
But I’d argue those risks are outweighed by the value of keeping her promises. That means, at a minimum, someone like Adam Kinzinger in her cabinet (Veterans Affairs?) and ambassadorships, commission appointments, and advisory council roles for people like Cheney (ambassador to Russia?), Duncan, and Riggleman.
I’d also argue Dems need to get over their nostalgia for FDR’s Democratic coalition which, among other things, relied on the disenfranchisement of 70-90% of African-Americans. (Someone else can make the argument that one reason the US fascist movement didn’t take over the whole country is that they already controlled 1/4 of it, and that was enough for many of them.)
I’d guess the biggest thing a Harris administration could do to undermine the fascists is to prosecute them vigorously in the courts (starting/continuing with Trump) and undermining their support from the federal government (e.g., if Starlink is essential to national defense, seize it from Musk).
I think this is right. Cheney aligns with Democrats on Russia? Let her be the Russian Ambassador. Kinzinger is remotely sane and is a veteran? Let him do Veterans’ Affairs stuff. Bureaucrats are still in place to make sure abjectly illegal things don’t happen. Sounds OK to me. Siphon the sane people out of the Republican Brand. That party is fucking dead, there’s no bringing it back.
My big picture thought is, take whatever remaining sane Republicans are left, pile them into a Centrist Democrat Big Tent, and alienate the fascist right as much as possible. There is nothing left in the Republican Party name worth attempting to save.
First we have to dismantle the Republican Party. Then we can have an actual left-ish party competing with a majority center party that isn’t full-on fascist. Let’s make the Democratic Party the centrist party that can become, over time, the “conservative” party.
IF the Democrats win the White House, they need to focus on firewalling the governments’ inherent weaknesses and loopholes to prevent fascists like Trump and his successors from being able to just start carving up the government. This is something that is just as important as any other kind of policies Harris might start working on.
But long-term a “leftist” minority can start carving up enough of the leftist portion of the Democratic Party to create an actual left-wing party that is a minority, and we can allow a centrist Democratic Party majority to implement policy and over time become modern US Conservatives. That’s how you marginalize fascism.
I don’t think she’ll have a choice if she loses the Senate. She’ll accept whomever the Republicans agree to approve.
You’re right that the only thing that will convince Republicans to moderate is to lose elections again and again. I’ll be honest, I thought by now we’d be at that moment. In 2009 I wrote an op-ed about how I welcome Republicans embracing the Sarah Palins of the world because it would make them unelectable. Well, I was wrong about that! I didn’t expect us to completely fall off a cliff with rural voters. We are due for a realignment election. We haven’t had one since 1984. We should have gotten it with Trump’s trouncing defeat in 2020, and instead we got a 4.5% skin of our teeth victory.
So I think we are in purgatory for a bit until Boomers die off. Demographics aren’t destiny, but demographics are the only things that allow for society to move forward. Generally, people don’t change their minds. Older people die off and younger people take their place. That’s our only hope.
To 2032-2036. Because 2028 is going to be a slog, too.