In the final weeks leading up to Election Day, most presidential nominees hope to be comfortably campaigning to the center of undecided and lower-propensity voters. Alas, the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, is stuck trying to stop record bleeding among her base.
Despite promising voters a cornucopia of continued free (read: taxpayer-funded) credits and cash gifts in the spirit of Bidenomics, the vice president’s polling has stagnated to a national deadlock against former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee. She is at risk of fatal hemorrhaging among the historic bases of the Democratic Party. Harris is posting the worst polling with Hispanics for a Democrat in this century and outright losing Hispanic men. But where the campaign is signaling its most terrifying losses is among black voters, the backbone of any winning Democratic presidential campaign.
Across 13 polls from the first half of this month, Harris is averaging just 81% support among black voters overall, with her 67-point margin of support lagging nearly 16 points behind retiring President Joe Biden’s performance in 2020. Trump’s 14% average of support across these polls would constitute the single best performance of a Republican presidential candidate among black voters since Richard Nixon lost to JFK 64 years ago. Dig into the demographics and the picture becomes even less rosy for Harris.
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris visits Norwest Gallery of Art in Detroit, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
The latest New York Times-Siena poll of likely black voters nationwide found that just 70% of black men and 83% of black women support Harris, a drop-off of 17 points and 12 points, respectively, from Biden’s 2020 performance. Harris’s greatest loss is among black voters younger than 30, just 72% of whom support her relative to the 92% who voted for Biden in 2020.
Sending out former President Barack Obama to chastise young black men for expressing insufficient enthusiasm in supporting Harris didn’t work, forcing Harris to return to the well of the “Opportunity Economy,” whatever that means. In her late-breaking “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men,” Harris proposes:
Legalizing recreational marijuana.
“Supporting a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and other digital assets so Black men who invest in and own these assets are protected.”
Providing up to $20 billion worth of “fully forgivable” loans to “Black entrepreneurs and others” to start a business.”
Job training and mentorship to help black men become teachers.
Creating a “National Health Equity Initiative.”
As a stand-alone project, Harris’s “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” is no more absurd or transparently pandering than any of her other past economic proposals (though perhaps the assumption that black men care more about marijuana and crypto than grocery prices and mortgages is a tad racist). But at this stage in the campaign, such a desperate gambit constitutes a microcosm of the greater problem for any Democratic successor to the Biden-Harris administration, namely that after decades of decrying neoliberalism and begging for no-holds-barred Modern Monetary Theory, Democrats finally got what they wanted. It just turned out that everyone hated it.
Biden and Harris succeeded in enacting the single largest climate change bill in history, reversing 40% of the post-Reagan-era rise of income inequality, onshoring semiconductor production and other manufacturing, basically maintaining full employment and terrorizing and regulating corporate America out of mergers and acquisitions. The cost?
At least $8 trillion added to our national debt, a 20% increase in total prices, a 4% decrease in average real weekly wages, and double-digit real wage losses for the lowest-quintile of earners.
Nearly half of all likely voters polled by the New York Times rate the economy as poor, with just 1-in-4 likely black voters rating it good or excellent. Of the likely black electorate — who, again, have been the beating heart of the Democratic Party’s path to victory — barely one-third say that the policies of Biden and Harris have helped them personally. Even as inflation has abated somewhat over the last year, the majority of likely black voters report “often” cutting back on groceries because of the cost.
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Harris is stuck rhetorically trying to tack to the center while defending the radical record she pretends to spearhead. This Schrodinger’s presidency problem isn’t just partisan, as she tries to position herself as the real leader of the free world while distancing herself from Biden’s unpopularity. But never is it more insulting to common decency than when Harris is populating her economic platform with industrial policy protectionists and explicitly anti-growth corporate and capital gains taxation while trying to lie to her party’s most loyal constituency that she’ll be any better than her boss that caused such economic chaos in the first place.
Maybe in a different election season, Democrats could rely on false promises to placate the voters they screwed over. Yet after the worst inflationary crisis in 40 years, voters have no more grace left to give them.