Kamala Harris, Pragmatic Progressive and Vice Presidential Nominee
Does the Vice Presidential Pick Help the Ticket?
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There are two questions I am going to address in this post. The first, which was posed to me by a good friend, is whether Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Democratic vice presidential nominee, can fairly be described as a progressive. The second is to discuss what impact Harris might have with voters. The second question has more salience for this blog, but I will address both of them.
But, first, let me lay out my simple defense of Harris as a progressive. Since this is a blog post and not a research paper, it’s going to be my overall impression of Harris as a progressive. So, forgive the lack of specificity. If you think my blog posts are normally long, you wouldn’t want to read an exhaustive analysis of Harris’ career.
Kamala Harris is what I refer to as a “pragmatic progressive.” Her positions on the issues are consistently very progressive, particularly since she has been in the Senate where policy plays a much larger role in the public imagination than as AG or DA. Where people have issues with her are mostly on her performance as a prosecutor, particularly as San Francisco District Attorney. (Some also have issues with her work as California Attorney General.) But, a look at her record shows that she was a progressive prosecutor where she could be, but made compromises where she thought she needed to in order to be successful and retained in her position. That last phase in the previous sentence sounds cynical, but it’s not. It’s a pragmatic posture.
So, what’s the difference between cynical and pragmatic? For starters, where one is sincere in trying to work towards progressive goals the likelihood of cynicism is low. The cynic is the politician who claims that some particular compromise is pragmatic when in fact it was that politician’s preferred outcome (or the pol didn’t care about the outcome at all). How can we see this? Usually when the politician in question offers the opposition something like the compromise as an opening offer. You might have an idea of some politician I have in mind. Maybe someone powerful in the 1990s. Someone who helped push the national dialogue rightward through his tactic of triangulation. You know who I mean.
One might argue that Harris’ position on Medicare for All was not sincere. She was looking for the “right” thing to say and changed her position on it. She was accused of being poll-driven on the issue and accused of not being responsive to public opinion. This is often the case; a lot of people think politicians are not principled and telling people what they want to hear. Some end up making no sense in criticizing her in this way. Where poll-driven refers to the unprincipled or “empty suit” politician who consults polling simply to tell her what to say and do, that’s no good. I agree with that criticism. But, I don’t agree that in a pluralist society like ours that it’s okay for a politician to not be responsive to public opinion. And one very useful way to understand public opinion is by paying attention to polling. My take on Harris and Medicare for All is that she was looking for the practical solution today that can move us toward that progressive goal of affordable/free health care for everyone. She bungled it, but that doesn’t make her cynical or even centrist.
That may have not been as complete or thorough an answer as my friend was looking for, but we only have so much space here. Onto the second, and what for this blog is the more important, question: what impact will Harris have on the electorate as vice presidential nominee?
Harris has the distinction of being the first woman of color nominated to be vice president of the United States on a major party ticket. Not only is she the first black woman nominated, but she is also the first Asian-American nominated (Harris’ mother is from India). This is not unimportant in this election year. It’s not just because of the success of the BLM movement that has raised the issue of racial and income inequality to one of the most important issues on voters’ minds in 2020. And it’s not just that polling shows dramatic change from 2016 in terms of the share of the electorate who now sympathize or support BLM. Those are really important political developments that will hopefully mark the beginning of the end of institutional racism in this country. These current events alone might be enough to justify putting a woman of color on the ticket. Women, and especially black women, are the most reliable demographic in the Democratic base. There is no excuse for not picking a black woman this year; the old excuses of there not being enough qualified women of color no longer hold water.
Harris is a US Senator, former state Attorney General, and ran for president.
Susan Rice is a former DNI and UN Ambassador.
Keisha Lance Bottoms is Mayor of Atlanta.
Val Demings is a Congresswoman and former police chief of Orlando.
Karen Bass is the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.
And those are just five of the finalists for the job. There is no way to conclude that there were not enough – or any – qualified black women candidates – let alone qualified women of color candidates. One thing that Biden’s pledge to pick a woman as veep did was highlight the strong bench of Democratic women. The 2004 Kerry/Edwards ticket may be the last time any of us will see the Democrats nominate two white men for their national ticket. And that is the way it should be. The Democratic Party is a multi-cultural, pluralist party and it should be drawing on its electoral strengths rather than try to appeal to ever-shrinking group of white men who make up the base of the GOP. We know that the black vote declined in 2016 from where it was in 2008 and 2012 – and that that made a difference in the 2016 election. So, picking one of the many qualified black women as a running mate this year would seem to make good politics.
Devine & Koptco (2020) have gone through years of polling data to try to understand the effect that a vice presidential nomination has on the success or major party presidential tickets. Their research shows that both voters and presidential candidates say that the vice presidential selection is important, but there is little evidence that any voters specifically change their vote because of a party’s vice presidential selection. What they did find is that there are indirect effects of a vice presidential pick. That is, how voters feel about the vice presidential pick influences how they feel about the nominee. So, if voters like the pick we tend to see an increase or solidification of support for the presidential nominee (and the reverse is also true). What we don’t know is whether the vice presidential selection improves turn-out. There do appear to be some group impacts on vice presidential selection (may help improving chances based on geography, ideology, identity – identity, such as Catholic, does seem to have an impact, but it is very minor).
We did not see a convention bump for Biden/Harris last week (although a new poll by CNN/SSRS seems to suggest otherwise; however, it’s come too late for a full analysis here), but a new Ipsos poll finds that in terms of favorability: “Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., is steadily rising in her favorables, with 43% giving her strong marks in this poll, compared to 41% last week and 35% right before the Democratic convention. Just over one-third (34%) have a negative view of Harris.
What the initial polling shows is that Harris is not hurting the ticket, which is often the best case scenario. Sometimes attributed to Nixon, sometimes to others, and probably apocryphal, but the old saw about vice president picks is that they cannot help you, only hurt you. Devine & Koptco don’t agree completely. There are some indirect and group effects that appear from the polling, but the major finding is that while both voters in the aggregate and presidential nominees over time think that the selection of a vice presidential candidate is very important for voter preference, there is no evidence that any except a very few voters have ever changed their mind for who they would vote for due to vice presidential selection. We’ll have to follow the polling over the next few weeks – and hope that at least some pollsters continue to ask about Harris – to see if her presence on the Democratic ticket helped Biden pick up new votes. My bet is that the advantage with Harris will be in turnout, not support. That is, more people will choose to vote this year than otherwise because Harris is on the ticket. But, those voters – if they voted otherwise – would likely have voted for Biden anyway. However, this is still significant because new votes are additional votes. It doesn’t matter how someone would have voted in a hypothetical election in which that person wouldn’t have voted. It matters that that person is now going to cast a vote because Harris is on the ticket. I want to be clear about this, however; we do not know that this is the case yet – and we might not until after the election is over.