No law of history dictated that a right-wing billionaire would win over vast swaths of the working class in this year’s election. It simply didn’t have to be like this.
Kamala Harris didn’t have to start her campaign by distancing herself from her past support for Medicare for All. She didn’t have to answer the most obvious question of all time (how she would be different from the unpopular incumbent president) by saying that nothing came to mind. She didn’t have to end it by spending weeks bragging about being supported by a universally despised war criminal. And she didn’t have to hand a staggering victory to Donald Trump.
It wasn’t written in the stars that Trump had to emerge as the first Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004, and the first to do so without being an incumbent since George H. W. Bush in 1988. No law of history dictated that he pull off such a comprehensive political realignment that he went from losing voters making less than $50,000 a year by nine points the first time he ran for president to winning them by a couple of points on Tuesday.
As a Senator in 2019, Harris was a cosponsor of Medicare for All. When Biden dropped out in July, she could have started the race by reminding everyone of that position and affirming that she hadn’t changed her mind. She could have taken time in every speech to ask why Trump didn’t also want to give every American health care. “I just don’t understand why former president Trump cares more about the profits of insurance companies than whether Americans get to see the doctor when they’re sick. I don’t know about you, but that disturbs me.” (Can’t you imagine her saying that? I can. I can hear it in her voice in my head.)
If either Liz or Dick Cheney had tried to endorse her, she could have repudiated that like it was an endorsement from David Duke. She could have taken the opportunity to remind people that it was Trump who quadrupled the rate of drone strikes, who ended Barack Obama’s détente with Iran and brought us to the brink of what could be the most disastrous American war in the Middle East yet, and who was quite chummy with the Cheney family when he was president. Imagine her saying, “I believe that we’ve had enough wars already. I grew up in a middle-class community where people took pride in their lawns, and I want to spend our country’s resources helping families like that instead of wasting them on war and destruction.”
When Trump accused her of “hating Israel,” she could have said, “I don’t hate anyone. But I want to end this thing, right away, and one place where I do disagree with my friend Joe Biden is that I don’t think it can just be a blank check forever. If we want this to be over, there comes a time when we need to stop sending more bombs.”
Instead of focusing on warnings about Democracy that voters have heard so many times since Trump came down the escalator in 2015 that they barely register anymore, she could have talked about the ways voters could use democracy to improve their lives. That would mean running a robustly economically populist campaign, and talking about the right to have a say in how our nation’s resources get spent.
In our alternate timeline, the United Auto Workers’ Shawn Fain could have spent as much time with her on the trail as Liz Cheney really did. Instead of abandoning her past support for a federal jobs guarantee, adopted in 2019 when she was trying to position herself for the Democratic primary in 2020, she could have reaffirmed that position and demanded to know why Trump didn’t want to give a good job that could support a family to every American who wanted one.
Instead of excluding Teamsters president Sean O’Brien from the Democratic National Convention out of apparent pique that he also addressed the Republican National Convention, she could have aggressively courted the Teamsters’ support. While she was at it, she could have answered the question “What would you do differently?” by saying that she disagreed with Biden’s decision to invoke the Railway Labor Act to stop a strike in 2022. She could have spent as much time talking about labor rights and health care and daycare as she spent talking about January 6. She could have picked some major piece of universalistic, populist social policy and associated herself with it as relentlessly as Trump associated himself with “Build the Wall” the first time he ran for president.
If she’d done all these things, there’s no guarantee it would have worked. In courting some constituencies, she would alienate others. There’s never any guarantee that by taking a stand and fighting like hell for it you come out on top.
But moving from this pleasant fantasy of what could have happened to what actually did, we know what she got from her strategy of democracy-talk, bland affability, and Liz Cheney. We know what she got from peddling fantasies that a legion of suburban Republican women were going to secretly vote for her. She got such a shocking Trump landslide that it’s hard not to use words like “realignment.”
That didn’t have to happen. And maybe, just once, those of us who don’t want it to happen again could try learning from the experience.