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July 29, 2024 - 8:30pm
Kamala Harris’s presidential bid has hit a sugar high. Her campaign announced that it has raised $200 million in its first week in existence. That’s an extraordinary sum, given that the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee combined raised $264 million between April and June of this year. A sign of grassroots engagement, this influx of donations aligns with recent polling by the Wall Street Journal which shows a surge in enthusiasm among Democratic voters now that Joe Biden has stepped aside.
Harris’s cash infusion didn’t fall out of a coconut tree. Like other parts of the Democratic establishment, elite donors had a marriage of convenience with Biden. When they thought that he was the most viable general election candidate against Donald Trump in 2020, they consolidated behind him. Those very same elites successfully discouraged any serious primary challenges to Biden in the 2024 cycle but broke with him after the June debate with Trump.
But this elite donor class now rallying around Harris could push her campaign in a direction that risks alienating working-class voters. These donors might, for instance, urge her to return to the “boardroom liberalism” of the Obama era by backing away from populist economics. The progressive economic analyst Matt Stoller has raised precisely this worry in a piece today for Compact, noting that major donors are pressing Harris to eliminate tariffs on goods from China as well as reverse the Biden administration’s aggressive approach to antitrust policy. A return to neoliberalism, Stoller warns, could “fracture the Democratic coalition”.
Elite donors could also raise risks for Harris on cultural politics. Essential for Biden’s victory in 2020 was his ability to seem at a distance from the vanguard of Left-wing identity politics. Harris ran well to the Left of Biden on social issues in the 2020 Democratic primary. In November 2020, she released a video dismissing “equality” and praising “equity”, which prompted Trump critic Andrew Sullivan to wonder whether she was endorsing “full-on Marxism”. Theoretically, she could try to reset her image on cultural issues for the 2024 election, but some major pro-Harris fundraising efforts have now tried to place her campaign firmly in the constellation of starry “wokeness”.
Consider, for instance, the gargantuan “White Women: Answer the Call” fundraising and organising Zoom event for Harris. This event’s organisers claim to have raised millions of dollars for her campaign and to have engaged thousands of volunteers. Saturated with invocations of “privilege”, the “patriarchy”, and “doing the work”, the event itself seemed like a re-education seminar from the summer of 2020. This kind of campaign might appeal to an NPR listener with a cultural studies degree, but it would seem obscure — maybe even weird — to a factory worker in Grand Rapids.
Working-class voters have shifted away from the Democratic Party over the past 30 years. In 1992, Democratic Congressional candidates handily won voters who had not graduated from college; by 2022, they lost that group by over 10 points. As the Democratic Party has increasingly become the redoubt of the educated elite, it has lost ground with the blue-collar voters who used to form the core of the party.
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