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Featuring David Faris and Eman Abdelhadi
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Since the Democrats’ embattled leader Joe Biden stepped aside last month in his bid for another presidential term, making way for Kamala Harris, the party has experienced a wave of enthusiasm and support. But despite that new momentum, it faces an uphill struggle in a few key policy areas that could be crucial to winning November’s presidential election and determine the direction of the party going forward.
One of the first successes of the Harris/Walz campaign, suggests Slate and Newsweek contributor, and author of “It’s Time To Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics,” David Faris, was to move away from rhetoric suggesting that democracy would be threatened by another Trump presidency — even though that might be the case. “Voters are tired of being told that the motivation for their decision should be to save democracy rather than to see any other positive forward-looking policy changes that I think particularly a lot of people on the left are looking for,” Faris tells New Lines’ Danny Postel on The Lede during the week of the Democrats’ National Convention. “The Harris-Walz campaign made a very savvy decision to switch the messaging to a different set of issues and try to put democracy, Jan. 6 and all that stuff on the back burner.”
“The way that you could get those voters is to offer concrete policy change to stop the killing: arms embargoes, making a real play for a cease-fire.”
Under Joe Biden, Democrats had been struggling to win over one of their key voting cohorts. “What we had seen over the past year is some worrying signs that Democrats were actually losing a lot of ground with [younger voters],” Faris says. “The war in Gaza is one of those factors, [and] a broader fatigue with gerontocracy in general was also driving that.”
The Harris-Walz campaign has recovered some — but not all — of the youth voters who might typically vote Democrat but had been put off by Joe Biden’s age, Faris says. “The swapping out of Biden for Harris has made up some of that ground. It hasn’t made up all of that ground with young voters,” Faris says.
Eman Abdelhadi, a sociologist at the University of Chicago’s Department of Comparative Human Development, warns that the optimism around the Harris/Walz campaign may not be enough to bring voters back to the Democrats without a real change in policy.
“There’s a shift, but I think what everyone sort of agrees on is that Harris has not actually lived up to the hopefulness of the moment in that she hasn’t offered any changes from Biden’s policy on Gaza,” Abdelhadi says.
“It feels like a cosmetic change. And I think many are saying that she has yet to earn their votes,” she adds.
Harris’ lack of clarity on her policy toward Israel and Gaza is likely driven by political strategy, Faris suggests.
“What’s driving this is a sense of caution,” Faris says. “From the Harris team’s perspective, if you look at where the race is right now, it looks like she’s winning. … I think from cold political calculus, she doesn’t want the election to be about [Gaza].”
Further reading: Kamala’s Progressive Skeptics