If we learn anything from Harris's loss, it should be that we must stop sacrificing the power of other identities — their values, their hopes, their security — for a chance that will not pan out.
When writing my column for Times Opinion this week, I started from this question: Does it matter how a candidate wins or loses? There have been, and there will continue to be, many post-mortems about the Harris campaign. Even though Kamala Harris was not a perfect candidate, she ran an impressive campaign under difficult circumstances. But whether she had won or lost, the way she ran it was going to be her legacy. In this election, both candidates tested a theory about identity politics. The Harris campaign shied away from talking about why a Black female president would have been a historic first for the nation. In general, Harris minimized her own race and gender and instead prioritized her "law and order" credentials and gun-toting persona. On the other hand, Donald Trump continued to expand his 2020 white-identity coalition to include a more diverse group of supporters: Hispanic men, Black men and young voters. It made for some strange bedfellows this cycle. And whether Trump makes it through an entire term or becomes the Republican Party's kingmaker, the resilience of this coalition will have lasting consequences. Political observers made too much of economic anxiety. The thesis has some empirical truth but it is misused to dismiss real dynamics of race and gender. Trump himself is the one who calls the economic anxiety argument on the carpet. How else could we explain why a diverse coalition would have the same economic anxiety of white working-class voters? There are some answers in understanding how demographic identifiers like "Latino" and "working class" and "educated" are shifting. The challenge for Democrats is to have the political courage to not disavow their own base's identity politics but to instead understand how their base's identities have changed. Trump proved that identity politics can win elections if you understand your voters' most salient identities. What if the future of politics isn't less identity politics but better identity politics? Programming note: Opinion Today will be off on Monday in observance of Veterans Day.
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Saturday, November 9, 2024
Opinion Today: The way Kamala Harris lost will be her legacy
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