Speaking on Thursday at a town hall sponsored by Univision, Vice President Kamala Harris trumpeted, as she often has in recent weeks, the support she has from anti-Trump Republicans. But if the rhetoric was familiar, Harris tarted up the talking point by adding a surprising name to the list. Harris boasted that she’s been endorsed by “200 Republicans who worked with and for both Presidents Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney; including Liz Cheney, the former congresswoman, and her father, the former vice president, Dick Cheney, who is supporting me; former members—very esteemed members, including generals—of the national security community.  I have the endorsement and support of Alberto Gonzales, most recently, who, of course, was attorney general.”

Given the venue she was speaking on, Harris probably brought up Gonzales as an example of a prominent Latino Republican. But this gambit was tone deaf. Gonzales hasn’t held public office since 2005, so he’s an obscure name—and, in fact, an infamous one for those who do remember him. Gonzales was one of the most hideous ghouls of George W. Bush’s War on Terror, specializing in developing legal rationales for warrantless wiretapping and torture. Gonzales authored the notorious “torture memos” that argued that fighting terrorism “renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.” In 2007, Gonzales resigned after allegations that he had lied and stonewalled congressional investigations. Prior to his resignation, both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate stated they had lost confidence in him.

In other words, Gonzales is a thoroughly disgraced figure whose endorsement is worthless. Harris might as well make a bid for the Greek-American vote by announcing that she’s been praised by the ghost of Spiro Agnew.

By itself, Harris’s invocation of Gonzales is a minor enough misstep, but it falls into a broader pattern. To a distressing degree, Harris has been spending the closing weeks of her campaign trying to win over Never Trump Republicans, at the expense of highlighting her own economic populism and defense of abortion rights.

This tactic inevitably calls to mind Hillary Clinton’s singular focus on Trump’s unfitness for office—an issue her campaign elevated as a way to win over suburban college educated Republicans. As Senator Chuck Schumer notoriously declared in 2016, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Schumer’s math was ridiculously wrong for an obvious reason: non-college educated voters outnumber college educated voters by nearly two to one (64 per cent to 36 per cent). So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Clinton lost in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin. The only thing that keeps the Democrats viable is that they have strong support from non-college educated Black and Latino voters, but polling over the last few years shows that support from these groups has also been eroding.

One big reason Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 was she neglected the working class base of the party at the expense of trying to win converts from Never Trump Republicans. Democrats are now starting to worry that Harris is heading down the same path.

Writing in The New Republic, Greg Sargent notes:

Some Democrats worry, for instance, that the party still isn’t doing enough to engage low-propensity Black and Latino voters, particularly young men. There is time to repair this. Democrats also wonder if they failed to define Trump early in the cycle, letting him slowly rehabilitate his favorability numbers. Still others fear they didn’t remind voters early on of the horrors of Trump’s first term, leaving them with rosy memories of his presidency—including blue-collar voters’ fond impressions of the Trump economy. Those latter two problems may not be repairable in time.

As Sargent suggests, a messaging shift could still help win back some of the low-propensity voters, who tell pollsters they are leaning Trump but who are by no means lost to the Democrats.

In Jacobin, Branko Marcetic offers a much more dire assessment:

For weeks now, it’s been clear the Harris campaign has decided that it’s going to rerun the Clinton 2016 strategy on the off chance that that year really was a fluke, and that Trump really is so hated that Americans will have no choice but to vote for his opponent. It didn’t work in 2016, but this time . . .

Can we count on you?

In the coming election, the fate of our democracy and fundamental civil rights are on the ballot. The conservative architects of Project 2025 are scheming to institutionalize Donald Trump’s authoritarian vision across all levels of government if he should win.

We’ve already seen events that fill us with both dread and cautious optimism—throughout it all, The Nation has been a bulwark against misinformation and an advocate for bold, principled perspectives. Our dedicated writers have sat down with Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders for interviews, unpacked the shallow right-wing populist appeals of J.D. Vance, and debated the pathway for a Democratic victory in November.

Stories like these and the one you just read are vital at this critical juncture in our country’s history. Now more than ever, we need clear-eyed and deeply reported independent journalism to make sense of the headlines and sort fact from fiction. Donate today and join our 160-year legacy of speaking truth to power and uplifting the voices of grassroots advocates.

Throughout 2024 and what is likely the defining election of our lifetimes, we need your support to continue publishing the insightful journalism you rely on.

Thank you,
The Editors of The Nation

Donate

What does that look like in practice? It looks like dropping the “negative” label of weird and performing civil disagreement instead. It looks like giving up on exciting the party’s progressive flank—actively thumbing your nose at them, in fact—and explicitly pivoting to trying to win over Republicans instead. It looks like rolling out white papers and policy positions that few will read, while rarely talking publicly about what you would actually do when given the chance at a public forum. Like running to Trump’s right on immigration and foreign policy, even calling Iran, absurdly, the country’s most dangerous adversary and suggesting you might launch a preemptive strike on it.

While Marcetic makes many good points, he goes too far. Unlike Hillary Clinton in 2016, Harris does have a genuine economic populist agenda. In contrast to Clinton, Harris isn’t avoiding crucial states like Michigan and Wisconsin. Nor is Harris unwilling to foreground labor unions as a crucial part of the Democratic Party’s coalition.