Harris is burdened by what has been after all

The question is whether Democrats are done with her after she failed to prevent President-elect Donald Trump from returning to the White House. 

Trump just completed one of the great political comebacks in history. That won’t be easy for Harris.

“On the campaign trail, I would often say, ‘When we fight, we win,’ but here’s the thing, sometimes the fight takes a while,” Harris said. “That doesn’t mean we won’t win. The important thing is don’t ever give up. Don’t ever give up.”

This suggests both that Harris’s defeat is temporary and that she is still the right person to lead “the fight that fueled this campaign.”

Harris is still only 60. She was not given the normal 18 or so months to build out a presidential campaign. She relied heavily on a team assembled by President Joe Biden, augmented by Obama alumni and some of her own aides, that was headquartered in Wilmington, where she has no ties.

But Democrats have little appreciation for Trump’s political talents, despite the fact he is nearing a decade as titular head of the Republican Party and has now beaten them in two presidential elections. Less than 43,000 votes in three states prevented him from winning four years ago.

That means many Democrats will view Harris as a bad candidate precisely because she lost to Trump, a fate that befell Hillary Clinton in some circles after her shock defeat in 2016. Moreover, there are multiple Democratic governors, including several who either were passed over for a place on this year’s ticket or professed to be uninterested, who would like to run in 2028 themselves.

It is entirely possible that there was nothing Harris could have done to improve her circumstances as the incumbent vice president in an unpopular administration. Biden’s job approval rating was 41.1% on Election Day, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. She had 107 days to reintroduce herself to the public and differentiate herself from Biden.

At the same time, Harris clearly wanted to use the abbreviated campaign to her benefit. For reasons ranging from personal loyalty to fear of a public rift with the man she replaced on top of the Democratic ticket to a desire to get some credit for her time as vice president, she hesitated to draw a strong contrast with Biden. 

Harris intentionally left vague many of her public policy views. When she distanced herself from her progressive policy platform from 2019, she often did so through aides speaking on background to the press. That gave her plausible deniability. She practiced a type of strategic ambiguity that sowed distrust across the ideological spectrum and kept voters from getting to know her.

That doesn’t mean Democrats, in particular, didn’t like Harris. Even in defeat at the hands of a man she called a fascist, she tried to present a smiling and upbeat image. She often invoked her experience as a prosecutor but seldom took on the prosecutorial tone that made her famous as a senator during the first Trump administration. 

Harris gave Democrats hope they might win the election. She pushed a message with more discipline than Biden was able to muster at 81 years of age. But she frequently served up word salads, and there was an inconsistency between “joy” and the urgency implied by a fight for democracy’s survival.

This was all evident in Harris’s concession, which was by turns gracious, well meaning, and an oddly therapeutic “it gets better” approach to the Resistance. She offered her own particular twist on George H.W. Bush’s “thousand points of light” in the tradition of her paeans to outer space and waxing philosophical by what has been.

“Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. … Let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant, billion of stars,” Harris said. “The light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service.”

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There is surely an Eat, Pray, Love constituency for this kind of talk, especially in contrast with Trump’s bluster. The balance between being likable and substantive has weighed on Harris throughout her political career.

In conflict with one of her most memorable catchphrases, Harris was burdened by what has been during her presidential campaign. She couldn’t escape incumbency or the Biden-Harris record no matter how hard she tried. An attempted Harris comeback could be burdened by what has been a bigger-than-expected loss to Trump.