Harris ran a flawed campaign. Unwillingness to bend on Gaza was her downfall.

Notes on a lost campaign

It’s 11:47 p.m. on Election Day. Most polls have closed, and votes are being counted at this very moment.

I’d tentatively planned to write a really heartfelt essay about my journey this year, from identifying with the Uncommitted movement due to President Biden’s Gaza policy all the way to this last week. I intended to write about how it was a most unlikely source — Ta-Nehisi Coates — with words that were not encouraging but were impactful nonetheless. I wanted to convey the tight chest and lemon-sour jaw I had when I considered I just wanted Kamala Harris to live up to her promise and knowing that she wouldn’t, that she had calculated and gambled.

I wanted to write about that when the tears were still hot, but they revealed too much of me to myself at the time. This was Thursday. I waited and wrestled for days, hoping that Harris would turn the race around by announcing she’d enforce the law when it came to Israel. This was one of the most wrenching decisions I’ve ever weighed in my life.

I waited as long as I could.

Two things influenced my decision. One, as I said, was Coates’s reminder that Black voters in this country have almost always faced catastrophic choices, with each of the major candidates within a single election cycle being a bad choice. 

I think about the institution of the presidency. It has never been the case that Black people have had the luxury of looking up at it and saying, “Yes, this completely represents our politics, this represents our aspirations, this represents our hopes and dreams.” It’s always been a fight to try to press these people [these candidates] to do the right thing. That was true in 1864 and it’s true today. … 

I’ll speak as a Black American. The situation you describe of having to choose between people who are openly evil and people you are not clear would do any better — this has been most of our lives. This has been most of our lives as a people in this country. I raised the Abraham Lincoln example because our choice in that moment in 1864 — and I know it’s remembered in a kind of different way — but I would choose (choice, as Black people, to the extent that very few of us could actually vote) — the slim majority was between Abraham Lincoln, whose plan was to export Black people out of this country, and George McClellan, whose plan was to end the war, leave slavery [in place] and allow slavery to expand. 

Lincoln had said openly, “If I could end the war and leave Black people enslaved, I would do it.” He said that. I mean, our choices were disastrous. Years later — you know, a couple [decades] later — we get Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, right? A guy who, after Reconstruction, is going to allow the Ku Klux Klan to take the South again and completely deprive us of our votes and rule by lynch law. That was the best option. That was the option that was being presented as the best option to us. It continues into the 20th century. … 

The calculus, man. It’s ugly. It’s really, really, really ugly.

The full section of remarks about Harris’s candidacy begins at ~ 39:25. The portion transcribed above begins ~ 43:00.

And I thought about the folks who had died for the right to vote. That’s not a legacy one can take lightly.

The other was the non-endorsement of Harris by the Washington Post — or, rather, what that non-endorsement revealed.

Readers had speculated for months that the Washington Post was in the tank for Donald Trump, and several articles certainly seemed to be slanted to the right. After the announcement by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, I had to retrofit that decision of his and read backwards some of the news coverage that had been published over the last several months.

I realized that the Washington Post was really the one national newspaper that had started to break the stolid, staid Gaza coverage. More critical articles had shown up, some of which even empathizing with or humanizing the Palestinians. At the time these pieces arrived, I was grateful to see this shift in coverage, though I had stated in the comments that this new take was too little, too late for the people on the ground.

Just before Bezos’s announcement, I’d read — tucked into a Washington Post story about the election — that Trump & Co. had decided to lean into a strategy of courting Arab- and Muslim-American votes after internal polling showed that the issue of Gaza resonated highly with that sector of the electorate.

I had to take that factoid into account and realized that the Washington Post had probably shifted the tone of its coverage as an indirect means of boosting Bezos’s preferred candidate. (I have no hard proof from this — it’s merely a sensibility. But I find it warranted in the wake of Bezos quashing the endorsement of Harris by his editorial board that had already gone through a vetting process and was ready for print.)

I already was critical of the Biden administration’s carte blanche policy towards Israel regarding Gaza, but at the time that I read those articles I was grateful to have seen such improved coverage in the press. Now that I was aware of this probability of slanted, motivated coverage, I had to take into account that I may have been manipulated.

Knowing what I do of propaganda, I knew that I may have been influenced at the time of reading, and the retroactive awareness would not cancel out that manipulation. The propaganda would have had its effect. All I could do was attempt to mitigate the effect going forward.

So I voted a straight Democratic ticket. I had not planned this. In fact, over the weekend, I saw a headline about a Harris campaign stop in Lansing, Michigan. Harris gave a closing speech that opened right off the top with her lamenting about the situation in Gaza and now Lebanon. She said she would “do everything in her power” to end hostilities there. I was repulsed anew, as it was clear she was lying or pandering. But I voted for the party anyway, because I didn’t want to be blatantly manipulated by Bezos and the Post.

I almost cried on my way to City Hall to hand in my ballot. I left feeling no sense of joy, satisfaction or relief.

Harris is losing.

It’s been a debacle just about everywhere. Florida failed to override its draconian six-week abortion ban. For me, that was the bellwether. Later, it was revealed that Trump flipped Miami-Dade County red, the first time for that in decades.

Sherrod Brown lost his Senate seat in Ohio. Jon Tester lost in Montana.

Harris lost “south Dearborn” (I’m not sure how or why it’s separated from the rest of the city). As I’d been warning for months, Michigan is probably in the loss column for Democrats when it easily could have gone for Democrats had we taken common-sense, empathetic policy changes regarding Gaza (instead of merely a cosmetic change in rhetoric).

When Harris & Co. barred Ruwa Romman, Georgia state representative and Palestinian-American, from addressing the DNC with a pre-vetted speech, that was the mistake that derailed her entire campaign. The error was definitive because the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared in a poof. She lost the idealism.

Harris decided to try to grind it out, courting Nikki Haley center-right voters. She embraced Dick and Liz Cheney. She stiff-armed the Democratic base because the base demanded a change in Gaza policy, and apparently for Harris that was a step too far. “This is the part I don’t understand,” filmmaker Michael Moore confessed to Medhi Hasan when asked about Harris’s strategic silence. “Politicians usually will do just about anything to win.”

Everything that I predicted came true. I predicted that if the Democratic Party ran Harris, Black women would be left twisting in the wind from all of the racism and sexism (and the unique combination of the two, known as misogynoir). That’s exactly what happened.

It’s important to know that, while Kamala Harris is fierce and an extraordinary fighter, she will not be the only one bearing the brunt of these attacks. All Black women in America will be forced to endure these attacks, to hear not just Harris but Black women as a concept — as an idea — being rent apart and torn asunder. Our skin will be cloth in a tiger’s teeth. Our sex will be an opened centerfold.

It would be a tall ask of African-American women to endure such caustic fury as would be unleashed by these stereotypes, were there a decent chance that Harris could ascend to the highest office. But she cannot. Not in this environment.

Thus, the ask is futile; but, more than that, it requests that African-American women come in for and withstand gratuitous abuse. Accept this sadism, perform this masochism, for our fantasy of an equitable America, one where a Black woman can claim this crowning achievement. It is folly — and Black women are the ones who will bear the lash.

Democrats should pass on a Kamala Harris candidacy

I said Harris needed a rapid response team to knock down these odious attacks. She never did this. Instead, she let such body blows land. She thought staying silent would be seen as nobler than getting into the muck, but instead the mud that Trump slung at her stuck.

Harris is in danger of losing the election

In a fascist time where White men were and are especially worried about their place in the world, Democrats should have put up a mirror-match candidate. A White male should have gone up against Donald Trump. It was the height of malpractice for Biden to put his thumb on the scale on his way to stepping down from his pursuit of the nomination. We as a party should have been able to pick the strongest candidate given conditions on the ground — not shoehorned into a candidate whose strongest claim was that she was next in line. That was a mistake.

Still, Harris could have mitigated much of that by taking a firm, course-correcting stance on Gaza. Many thought that her choice of Tim Walz as a running mate was a nod to that portion of the Democratic voting base. Then she began to recite canned boilerplate hagiography of October 7th whenever someone inquired about getting humanitarian aid into Gaza. Her handlers came out to the press on background and specifically said that, if Harris were to get into the Oval Office, her Gaza policy would not materially differ from Biden’s. This was disastrous.

I could see all of this from here. Harris’s lack of adequately responding to attack ads that painted her as eager to give prisoners sex-change surgeries — an attack that cast her as soft-hearted on crime and overly partial to transgender folk (i.e., blatant transphobia) — probably had an impact. A lack of responding to ads that said she was allowing terrorists into the country (pouring across the border!) probably did her no favors. Not pushing back on ads that bluntly called her dumb was not in her best interest. Did she not have people on the ground who could tell her the effect these nonstop ads were having?

It was always going to be an uphill battle with Harris as the nominee. While I don’t have the poll at my fingertips, I recall that when Harris stepped into the race, only 38% of White middle-class Americans had a positive attitude toward her. There are more of those folks than just about anyone else. She had to climb mountains just to get to parity.

Everyone knew that the election would be won at the margins. Harris could have had so many votes had she simply said that she would enforce U.S. law with regards to Israel’s actions in Gaza. She wasn’t prepared to do that. She’d rather lose.

Now, it’s 12:54 a.m. Votes are, technically, still being counted. So, technically, we’re in limbo. But this is absolutely the time to note that Harris made so many mistakes! This election was winnable, and she fucked up. She was unwilling to bend on the one issue that would have lent her moral force. I can’t think of a more significant failure this election cycle.