The Kamala Harris Campaign Is Leaning Into a Losing Strategy | Opinion

On Monday, vice president and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris blitzed through the Rust Belt battlegrounds with an obscure Republican former congresswoman who lost her 2022 primary in Wyoming by almost 40 points, in an effort to appeal to suburban women. It is without a doubt one of the most inexplicable stretch-run decisions I’ve ever seen from a major party nominee, and it is a sign of deep, structural delusion inside the Harris campaign and Democratic elites. In an election that looks like it might be the closest in American history, Harris cannot afford to make any more unforced errors like barnstorming with an unpopular archconservative.
To think that some significant number of voters would be persuaded by former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney is to fundamentally misunderstand the moment. For one thing, a lot of people have never heard of her, and those that have aren’t particularly enamored. An August 2022 YouGov poll found that she had net negative approval ratings, 38 percent somewhat or very unfavorable to 35 percent somewhat or very favorable, and 26 percent of voters had no opinion. The numbers were even worse with independents, presumably the target of this whole operation—by a margin of 40 percent to 25 percent, Liz Cheney was underwater with America’s critical swing bloc. And if the goal is to peel away Republican women in the suburbs, as the Harris campaign apparently believes it can do, Cheney seems like a less than an ideal vehicle for that project too, given that her approval rating with Republicans was net negative by 47 points.
Before she became the party’s most vocal elected (and then unelected) anti-Trumper, Cheney was down-the-line reactionary just like her father. She wasn’t even one of the top 50 most liberal Republicans in the House in the 116th Congress that gave Trump all his signature legislative victories. And the House GOP is very conservative. And if the move here is to appeal to suburban women who are angry about the Dobbs Supreme Court abortion ruling and the loss of control over their bodily autonomy, Cheney is an even weirder choice. She has an A rating from the anti-choice Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life American organization and an unbroken, lifelong record of hostility to reproductive rights.
So what, you might ask, does Liz Cheney bring to the table that is worth risking the ire of rank-and-file Democrats who remember her not as the Never Trump hero who chaired the Jan. 6 inquiry in the House but as the daughter of the vice president whose administration was directly responsible for most of the major American catastrophes of the 21st century, including the Iraq War, the Great Recession and the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court? Your guess is as good as mine.
The bigger picture is that the Harris campaign clearly believes that its path to victory runs directly through securing a new crop of former Republican voters who can’t countenance four more years of former President Donald Trump but who don’t like the substance of Democratic policies. Virtually every single strategic move that the Harris campaign has made since picking Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate in early August has seemed designed to appeal to disgruntled conservatives, from her law-and-order acceptance speech at the DNC to her refusal to allow any daylight to filter in between her and the Biden administration’s blank-check-writing fealty to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s regional war of retribution.
Yet in doing so, Harris has unwittingly leaned into everything that independent voters hate about DC politics—the inauthenticity, the refusal to answer direct questions, the casual jettisoning of past policies and stances in a mad dash to chase public opinion around as if she has no power whatsoever to shape it. It’s like someone sat her down in late July and told her that in order to win she had to basically renounce the person that she had been throughout her entire time in the U.S. Senate and to walk back the positions she staked out when she sought the presidency in 2019 one by one.
The trouble with all of this as a theory is that it is wrong. Nearly everyone who was going to ditch the Republican Party because of Trump has already done so, likely years ago. If anything, it is Republicans who have been gaining in surveys of partisan identification during the Biden administration—a fairly standard and unsurprising development but one that should have put the kibosh on the idea that there are further gains to be had among Never Trump Republicans and independents. Harris is trotting Liz Cheney out to squeeze water from a desiccated desert rock.
It’s not that Harris should be running a full-throated progressive campaign like vintage Elizabeth Warren, now a Massachusetts Democratic senator. It’s not the moment for that either. But there is no meaningful constituency out there yearning for the Bush-Cheney years. There is, instead, a seemingly insatiable appetite for populism that the Harris campaign seems uniquely uninterested in responding to. So rather than telling us what’s wrong with the United States and who is responsible for it and how she’s going to fix it, she’s cleaving tightly to the radioactive Biden administration while leaning heavily into the Tulsi Gabbard Theory of Politics—the idea that all wavering partisans need is to see one of their own switch sides so that they can have permission to do it too.
I truly hope I’m wrong and that believers in the Liz Cheney Magic Republican strategy get to triumphantly tweet this article back at me a thousand times on the night of Nov. 5, but from where I sit Harris has lost the plot and we may all pay a very steep price for that miscalculation.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.