Can Harris Reassemble Obama’s Coalition?
Her path to victory depends on re-creating the sort of electoral coalition that carried the 44th president into the White House.
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If the Democrats nominate Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed President Joe Biden, which now seems the most probable scenario, the shift will likely force the party to accelerate the continuing transformation of its coalition.
As the nominee, Harris could alleviate Biden’s most intractable electoral problem—his erosion of the support of younger and nonwhite voters—but she could also potentially squander his greatest remaining political asset, his continuing support among older and blue-collar whites. What makes this moment so nerve-racking for Democrats is that they have no sure way of knowing whether Harris could gain more with the former groups than she might lose among the voters that Biden brought back.
I asked Joe Trippi, the Democratic strategist who managed Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential bid, whether the benefits of switching to Harris as a potential nominee are greater than the costs. “I don’t think [that] is a knowable thing,” he said.
Despite that uncertainty, by the time Biden announced his withdrawal from the race yesterday, most Democratic professionals had concluded that the risks of sticking with Biden far exceeded the dangers of switching to Harris. Doubts about Harris’s ability to beat Donald Trump, considering the way her own presidential campaign sputtered in the lead-up to the 2020 Democratic primaries, were a principal reason Biden did not face more pressure to withdraw earlier, even though the polling persistently showed his reelection bid in a perilous position.
Since the first moments of last month’s debate, however, most of the party’s top operatives and strategists have come to view Harris as a better bet than the president. That assessment rests on the fact that, at a minimum, she offers an opportunity to shake up a race in which voter resistance to Biden, centered on doubts that he can still do the job, has been steadily solidifying. Yesterday, you could almost hear a collective sigh of relief as Democrats welcomed the opportunity to change the script: Now they could throw aside the need to defend Biden’s visibly diminished capabilities and redefine the presidential contest with new contrasts.
“There’s a chance it won’t work. There’s a chance we have already dug too big a hole here to get out of,” Paul Maslin, a longtime Democratic pollster, told me. “But we need a juiced-up party—and she and a running mate, and a new reset, and all the attention, might do it.”
Biden won in 2020 partly by luring back some of the older and blue-collar white voters who had resoundingly rejected Hillary Clinton four years earlier. That will be harder for Harris; instead, she will need to win back the younger and nonwhite voters whose support has been hemorrhaging from the Biden campaign, while further expanding the party’s margins with college-educated white women. In all of these ways, if the vice president wins the nomination, the Harris coalition will probably look a little less like the voting blocs Biden assembled and more like an updated version of the coalition that Barack Obama mobilized in his two victories.
Enough Democratic strategists, elected officials, donors, and voters worry about Harris’s viability against Trump to guarantee some receptivity at next month’s convention if one or more candidates want to contest the nomination. But after her endorsements from Biden and an array of party elected officials and interest groups yesterday, Harris may face no serious challenge. California Governor Gavin Newsom, one of the strongest possible rivals for the nomination, moved quickly yesterday to endorse Harris, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, another party favorite, joined him this morning.
“Behind the scenes, there are still people who are trying to make an argument for a contested convention,” Aimee Allison, the founder of She the People, a group that works to elect Democratic women of color, told me. “But I would be surprised after President Biden’s endorsement,” she said, “if any top-tier elected official would … make a play for the nomination.”
As I’ve previously reported, research by numerous Democratic groups this year has found that even after Harris’s three and a half years in office, voters hold very shallow impressions of the vice president. The good news is that Republican attempts to paint Harris as a “woke” San Francisco liberal have for the most part failed to stick. The bad news is that voters’ hazy view of her means that they also have little idea of what she’s accomplished or would like to—except for some limited awareness of the work she’s done defending abortion rights since the Supreme Court overturned them in 2022. Probably because Harris is so little known, her favorability ratings have closely tracked the president’s, although some recent surveys have shown her running very slightly ahead of Biden against Trump.
One Democratic pollster, who late last week conducted focus groups that included discussions of Harris, told me just before Biden’s announcement that he was enthusiastic about a possible switch to Harris precisely because there was still “more room to define her” than there was for Biden. “She’d have to prove herself almost immediately out of the gate,” said the pollster, who asked for anonymity to discuss the private focus-group results, “but that is doable.”
Those excited about a switch to Harris point to several immediate benefits it can bring. The most immediate would be to reenergize party donors who had started a kind of sit-down strike against Biden. Harris also has the capacity to campaign far more vigorously than Biden and deliver more cogently the party’s core messages against Trump. Besides advocating for abortion rights, Harris has been the administration’s point person pushing back against book bans, anti-LGBTQ discrimination, classroom censorship, and other restrictions in Republican-controlled states.
That contrasts with Biden, who, as the presidential debate last month showed, “just cannot play offense,” Charles Coughlin, an Arizona-based Republican consultant who is critical of Trump, told me. Harris, Coughlin said, will have a better chance of reminding voters of what they didn’t like about Trump when he was president. That could help Democrats reverse a consistent and, for them, ominous trend in public opinion: Retrospective assessments of Trump’s performance as president routinely exceed the highest ratings he recorded while in office.
In particular, Harris has a proven ability to express more effectively than Biden the Democrats’ case that Trump threatens American rights, values, and democracy itself. She can try to frame the race as that of a prosecutor against a convicted felon. Harris, at 59, also has the advantage of relative youth: Polls have shown that a significant share of Americans doubt the mental capacity of Trump, who has stumbled through his own procession of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and incomprehensible tangents during stump speeches and interviews to relatively little attention in the shadow of Biden’s difficulties. Particularly if Harris picks a younger running mate, she could top a ticket that embodies the generational change that many voters indicated they were yearning for when facing a Trump-Biden rematch.
“Not only is she uniquely prepared to deliver our best argument for taking down Trump and the MAGA movement’s assault on our freedoms,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, a co-founder of Way to Win, another liberal group that focuses on electing candidates of color, told me, “she embodies the passing of the torch to a new generation at a time when that is desperately needed to shore up our diverse, winning coalition.”
If Harris can strongly present herself that way, many Democrats believe she could improve on Biden’s performance with several significant groups of voters.
In the best-case scenario for this line of thinking, Harris could regain ground among the younger voters and Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted away from Biden since 2020. At the same time, she could further expand Democrats’ already solid margins among college-educated women who support abortion rights.
“One of our biggest problems is the lack of enthusiasm among younger voters and voters of color, younger independent women in particular,” Maslin, the Democratic pollster, told me. “They have been the standoffish voters who don’t like this choice.” A Harris-led ticket would be “at least an opportunity for those people to perk up their ears and listen.”
Against that hope, Democrats also express anxious uncertainty about how Harris might perform among other groups that the party prizes. Some party operatives are skeptical about whether she can reel back a meaningful number of the Black and Latino men, who, polls show, have moved toward Trump since 2020. Even greater concerns circulate about whether Harris can preserve the surprisingly durable support Biden has posted this year among older and non-college-educated white voters.
In 2020, Biden made modest but decisive gains compared with Clinton in 2016 among those groups (as well as among college-educated whites) in the key Rust Belt battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—and Biden has largely held those gains in polling this year, despite his erosion among voters of color. Some Democrats worry that a Harris-led ticket could bleed support among working-class and older whites in the same way that cost Clinton narrow defeats in all three states.
If Harris, as the nominee, loses some of Biden’s older white voters, that could easily offset any gains she might make among nonwhite and younger ones. Mike Mikus, a Democratic consultant based in Pittsburgh, told me that in Pennsylvania—a must-win state for the Democrats where the polls have consistently shown Trump ahead—he didn’t see “much difference in the overall strength” of Harris and Biden.
“She makes it a little easier to turn out the base in Philly, particularly African American voters,” Mikus said, “but I think she probably loses some of the gains he’s made in these outlying areas with blue-collar white voters.”
That might seem to imply a racist undertow in attitudes toward Harris, but Mikus largely discounts this, believing that Democrats have already lost virtually all the voters who might oppose her because of her race. The bigger problem, he said, is that her background in California could enable Republicans to paint her as “too far out of the mainstream.” As if on cue, the main super PAC supporting Trump sent out a press release yesterday afternoon describing Harris as a “Radical California liberal.” Republicans also believe that Harris’s greatest vulnerability may be her work as the administration’s point person on the border—and this is an area that Democratic polls, too, have identified as a danger for her.
Others more optimistic about Harris’s prospects think the gains she could generate over Biden among the key elements of the old Obama coalition—young people, minorities, and college-educated whites—will exceed any further erosion she might experience with working-class and older white voters. Nominating a Black woman, Allison said, would challenge the belief “that politicians have to appease older white voters in order to be successful. Is that true now? Does it have to be true, or can we evolve?” A Harris nomination would present a real-world test of these questions, with the highest possible stakes.
Whether Harris can assemble a winning coalition also depends on electoral geography. Before Biden withdrew, most analysts in both parties believed that his only remaining path to reelection was to sweep Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the three former “blue wall” industrial states.
With Harris’s assumed strength among Black voters, Ancona of Way to Win argues that Harris reopens “the full 2020 map” of swing states, including North Carolina and Georgia. Coughlin, the GOP consultant in Arizona, thinks her potential improvement among white suburban women around Phoenix could allow Harris to put his state back in play; some consultants focusing on Latino voters expressed optimism that she could do the same in Nevada.
But if those hopes are overstated, Harris will have to follow the same path as Biden and win all three Rust Belt battlegrounds—where white voters, and non-college-educated white voters in particular, are a much larger part of the electorate than they are nationally. Given their demographic composition, those states may be at least as difficult for her as they were for Biden. For that reason, some Democrats are worried that Harris might well win a greater share of the national popular vote than Biden but still face long odds of amassing the 270 Electoral College votes to reach the White House.
These considerations would also loom over Harris’s choice of a running mate, if she becomes the nominee next month. The safe play would be to “balance the ticket,” as political professionals say, by picking a white, male vice-presidential nominee from a swing state. Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona and Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania top many of those professionals’ lists, with Shapiro most favored because Pennsylvania is more crucial to Democrats’ chances than Arizona.
The other option that energizes many Democrats would be for Harris to take the bold, historic option of selecting another woman: Whitmer. That would be a greater gamble, but a possible model would be 1992, when Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate; Gore was, like him, a centrist Baby Boomer southerner—rather than an older D.C. hand. “I love Josh Shapiro and I think he would be a great VP candidate, but I would double down” with Whitmer, Mikus told me. “I don’t think you have to go with a moderate white guy. I think you can be bold [with a pick] that electrifies your base.” I heard similar views from several consultants.
Until yesterday, Democrats were so despondent that the prospect of an electrified campaign seemed remote. That’s all changed. Many Democrats now believe they have a chance to reawaken what they call the “anti-MAGA majority” of voters who showed up for elections in 2018, 2020, and 2022. In the nearly two years since the midterm elections, that coalition has fractured under the weight of discontent about inflation and the border, as well as doubts about Biden’s capacity.
Demographic and cultural changes are remaking America—creating a political moment that has cultivated the conditions for a Democratic “coalition of transformation,” as I’ve called it, centered on the younger, nonwhite, and female voters who are most comfortable with this new America. A Catholic white man born during World War II, Biden was always an improbable leader for such a coalition. Harris can not only articulate the values of such an alliance, but also embody them in a powerful way.
If Harris becomes the nominee, she must prove that she can inspire this coalition to go to the polls in numbers big enough to stop a highly motivated MAGA-Republican movement. A Trump victory would herald a very different, far darker transformation of American life.
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