After years of watching, in sputtering frustration, as Donald Trump gleefully broke and rewrote the rules of American politics, Democrats have finally found a master rule-breaker of their own. We’ve rarely seen anything like Kamala Harris’s sudden launch from a standing start into the political stratosphere: She racked up a record-breaking $200 million in donations in the first week of her campaign — quadruple what President Biden raised in the entire month of April — and inspired a phenomenon in which hundreds of thousands of people have joined hastily organized Zoom calls that last for hours.
In the blink of an eye, Harris has entered the rarified space that most politicians can only dream of: She has become the symbol, figurehead, and beneficiary of a surge that has burst the normal bounds of politics and tapped into the broader culture. Beyoncé donated a stirring, gospel-inflected hit, “Freedom,” as the campaign’s anthem; British pop star Charli XCX set off a wave of memes and TikTok videos by dubbing the vice-president “brat,” a nifty co-branding of Charli’s summer album about women being themselves and having fun.
“Mindy Kaling joined the South Asian call, with George Takei, Zachary Quinto, Raven Symone, Sophia Bush, Ashlyn Harris, Brian Michael Smith, and Justin Tranter attending the LGBTQ call,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. “Katie McGrath, Connie Britton, Pink, and more signed on to the white women’s call, with Pink reportedly joining right after leaving the stage of a performance in Sweden.”
Republicans have acknowledged they were caught off guard. “All of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch,” the GOP vice-presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, admitted to a group of donors at a private meeting. “The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden.” That’s reflected in polls that show Harris pulling even with Trump, in sharp contrast to Biden’s poll numbers, which had stalled nationwide and began tanking in critical swing states.
One of the surest signs of frustration, if not panic, among Republican strategists is the onslaught of childish nicknames and ugly personal insults coming from Trump and his campaign surrogates. Calling Harris a “DEI hire” and making fun of her laugh might have made sense if that was all people had heard or knew about her, but the roar of pop culture is spreading the candidate’s name and face much faster in ways that a few snide remarks on cable-news programs can never match.
As they prepare for the national convention, the main job for Democrats is to harness the new bolt of lightning and convert the energy into organizing strength. Time reports that the Harris campaign knocked on 126,000 doors and made 768,635 phone calls over the last weekend and is hiring 150 new campaign workers to hit the ground in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
But Harris and her fellow Democrats also need to pay attention to the campaign’s message. Seizing America’s imagination is fantastic and knocking on doors is essential, but what you say when the door opens is crucial. And what Team Harris should be pounding home is the outstanding economic record of the Biden-Harris administration.
Democrats tend to lose whenever they forget that they are, first and foremost, the party of working American families. Since the days when FDR won four consecutive presidential races, voters have looked to the Dems to fight for economic growth, which brings jobs and opportunity; provide a safety net to protect the unlucky from disaster; and regulate the marketplace to keep cheaters, predators, and monopolists at bay.
Somewhere along the way, Democrats lost the plotline: Gallup polls show that Americans generally trust Republicans to do a better job of managing the economy, currently by a margin of 53 to 39 percent. Successful Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — the only two leaders of their party to win reelection since FDR — made it happen by focusing like a laser on the economy. In 1992, on the way to helping Bill Clinton break three terms of Reagan-Bush dominance, campaign manager James Carville famously distilled the candidate’s winning message into a quirky but memorable haiku:
Change versus no change
The economy, stupid
Don’t forget seniors
I thought about Carville’s middle verse during the Republican National Convention as one GOP speaker after another trashed the Democrats for supposedly running the economy into the toilet — on the same day that the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 were hitting record highs. Dems, for whatever reason, failed to answer by hammering home the fact that the overall economy has been performing splendidly: At the height of the RNC, in fact, the S&P set a record for the 36th time this year.
The multi-trillion-dollar market surge under Biden benefits the middle class, especially the 56 percent of all public- and private-sector workers —145 million people — who contribute to retirement plans and the two-thirds of Americans who own their homes with an estimated total of $17 trillion in equity. Earlier this year, Fidelity Investments reported a 20 percent jump in the number of “401(k) millionaires,” clients whose workplace retirement accounts hit seven figures for the first time. Such increases in assets in turn trigger what economists call the wealth effect; people who realize they are tens of thousands of dollars better off tend to spend more, powering our consumer-driven economy to new heights.
Inflation remains a problem, of course. After peaking at 9.1 percent in mid-2022, the rate has dropped to 3 percent this year. But Americans remain sour about the higher cost of staples — groceries cost 20 percent more than they did when Biden and Harris took office — and it does little good to point out that much of the problem is due to the ongoing war between the world’s third-largest oil and gas producer (Russia) and the seventh-largest grain producer (Ukraine). No wonder Trump mentioned inflation 14 times during his nomination-acceptance speech at the RNC.
Yes, inflation is too damn high. But that’s not the only number that counts, and Harris and her team have no reason to back away from the administration’s economic record. They should be shouting from the rooftops about the virtuous circle of growth the administration has pulled off. The economy is expanding at a robust 2.8 percent annually. Unemployment isn’t just at the lowest level in half a century — it has been 70 years since we’ve seen such a long run of unemployment under 4 percent. New factories are being built at twice the rate of the end of 2019, the final months before the pandemic struck. And the Federal Reserve is poised to cut interest rates in a few weeks as prices continue to fall toward its 2 percent target.
There are lots of issues at play in these closing weeks of the campaign, from the wars in the Middle East and Europe to the surge of migrants at the border and the future of democracy itself. But while juggling those concerns, Harris has to avoid the distraction of meme wars and juvenile name calling. Instead, she should stay laser focused on a proven issue on which she and Democrats can win.
The economy, stupid.
