Brat Summer
A strange, almost cult-like fervor fell upon progressives on that fateful Sunday in July when Joe Biden, having opted-out of the presidential race, endorsed his vice-president, Kamala Harris, to take his place.
Almost immediately massive donations came pouring-in, to the tune of at least a billion dollars, in the days and weeks following the endorsement1.
And almost immediately the media narrative became that of Harris as the “joy” candidate2; the “coconut tree” candidate; the “Brat Summer” candidate3. In short, the American media was vibin’ with the Kamalanomenon4.
The sudden turn in her popularity is almost astonishing. During her first year as V.P., Harris' public approval ratings sat at 28%, making her one of the least popular vice-presidents in modern history—lower than Dick Cheney, who was reviled by Democrats.
In fact, she gave the “coconut tree” speech itself at a swearing-in ceremony for the commissioners of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics (PACAEEEEOH, for short) in May, 2023—the type of thankless and perfunctory task, that Chief-Executives will use to curry favor with Congressional caucus members, or their constituents. But here performed by the Vice-President, presumably because it was too taxing on Biden.
Whereas in the previous three years, she was a barely-there member of the Biden Administration, suddenly in summer of 2024, she was the happy embodiment of Democrats’ hopes of vanquishing their loathed enemy, Donald Trump5.
2020
The suddenness and ferociousness of Harris’ support was almost like an old Soviet psychological operation or some cultish kirtan, comprised of reality-denial, confirmation bias, historical revisionism, and gas-lighting: that she “was never the Border Czar”6, that she is “among the most qualified” candidates in recent history7, etc.
Millions of progressive supporters, almost overnight, fell in the thrall of the Harris campaign. Whatever her previous faults and deficiencies, they were forgotten in a haze of electoral delirium. Democrats had to believe she was the best person to take on Trump (even if she wasn’t)
Yet Harris was, objectively, amongst the weakest V.P.s turned presidential candidates since Walter Mondale.
Kamala Devi Harris was born 1964 in Oakland, CA to a mother from Madras in India, and a father from Brown's Town in Jamaica.
She graduated from UC Law in San Francisco in 1989, after which she became a Bay-area prosecutor eventually working under Terence Hallinan, the storied San Francisco District Attorney.
Her first run at elected office was to oust Hallinan as the DA in 2003. The election consisted of two rounds. In the first round she received 34% of the vote, while Hallinan received 36%. The third candidate was Bill Fazio, a former prosecutor turned defense attorney, who received 30%. All three were Democrats.
In the second round she beat Hallinan with 56% of the vote.
Seven years later, in 2010, Harris then ran for California Attorney General. That contest was more competitive, barely beating Republican Steve Cooley, with 46% of the vote to Cooley’s 45%. Cooley had the advantage of name recognition as the DA for Los Angeles. But Democrats swept state-wide offices that year combined with support from then-president Obama and she made it over the line.
Harris remained CA Attorney General until 2016, when she ran for U.S. Senate. Her Senate run was fairly mundane. CA has an open primary for that office and she came out ahead of dozens of other candidates, with 40% of the vote. The next closest candidate, Loretta Sanchez, only received 19%.
In the general election she handily defeated Sanchez, a fellow Democrat with over 60% of the vote.
In other words, up until 2019 when she decides to run for president just two years after assuming the Senate office, she exclusively had been a candidate in friendly political territory, with the support of political insiders, including the President himself.
And yet her 2019 candidacy faced challenges from the start. Harris and her closest advisers were indecisive about which states to target, issues to emphasize and which opponents to go after, all the while refusing to make difficult personnel choices and impose order on an unwieldy campaign.
When she entered the race in January of 2019, she wagered that the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire would be less significant to her political success than South Carolina, with its predominantly black Democratic electorate. In this view, a strong performance in South Carolina, which votes fourth, would catapult her into Super Tuesday states like California, boosting her momentum.
Harris' campaign message was influenced by extensive polling, which suggested that the word “truth” resonated strongly with people. Consequently, she named her 2019 memoir “The Truths We Hold” and incorporated a similar phrase, “Let’s speak truth,” into her early campaign speeches. However, she eventually abandoned this slogan, believing that voters preferred something more concrete.
Throughout much of the year she concentrated on competing against Biden in South Carolina and beyond. However, her campaign did not foresee that he would maintain strong support among voters.
Then in the first Democratic debate in June, she tried to knee-cap him: “I do not believe you are a racist…but you also worked with them to oppose busing. And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bussed to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
Harris was describing Biden’s remarks in which he recalled his “civil” working relationships with segregationist senators such as James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman E. Talmadge of Georgia.
And while she briefly surged to the top of the field, her attack on Biden did little to improve her prospects. In fact it was the high water-mark of her campaign. Five months later, she was out of the race.
Her assumptions about the issues that would inspire Democrats were muddled: she began running on a tax cut aimed at lower- and middle-income voters and then turned to a pay raise for teachers.
However, these proposals failed to captivate voters, particularly those drawn to the policies of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Consequently, Harris soon began to downplay her once-prominent proposals.
At one point, she tried to emphasize a practical agenda, focusing on issues she claimed kept voters awake at 3 a.m. Still, the NY Times referred to her as “an uneven campaigner” who “changes her message and tactics to little effect.”8 Her aides joked about the numerous slogans and catchphrases she used, with one noting how the “speak truth” spring transitioned into the “3 a.m.” summer, leading to Trump-centered “justice” winter.
But somehow, shockingly, Harris’ political future would get a new life as Biden’s choice for V.P.
Biden
When George Floyd died in police custody in the summer of 2020, it became a political liability for a candidate in the Democratic primary to be an elderly white man. Democrats were peak racial revolution then. So the activists within the Democratic party who populate the lower echelons of policy-making and execution9, were skeptical of Biden.
He needed a black woman, if he was to maintain the support of these activists. But ideally someone who was not a purely left-wing ideologue and could demonstrate some more centrist credentials. He got both in Harris.
It’s hard to imagine, though, the Joe Biden of 1988 caving in to pressure from his left wing. That Joe Biden would not have wanted or cared about the support of left-wing activists whose only other choice would have been a distant-second Bernie Sanders. But 2020 Joe Biden was well into his senescence and under the spell of his lefty advisors, so picking the worst candidate in the field, who heavily implied he was a racist to his face, made sense to him somehow.
Yet there was an original sin at the birth of the Biden/Harris administration. On the same afternoon he was sworn in as the nation’s 46th president, Joe Biden undid several of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
The list of orders included renewing DACA, stopping construction on the border wall and putting a moratorium on deportations.
“I’m not making new law. I’m eliminating bad policy,” Biden said while signing the orders.
Subsequently, the Biden/Harris Administration issued a series of immigration enforcement, policy and rule changes that would essentially dismantle immigration enforcement at the southern border in its entirety.
When historians examine the key factors behind Trump’s second victory in 2024, they will likely highlight the Biden administration’s decision to allow over 7.3 million illegal immigrants into the U.S.
These immigration policies negatively impacted Harris’ prospects in two significant ways. Firstly, Biden was elected on the presumption by most voters that he would be a steady hand, wisely guiding the ship of state after the tumult of the Trump years.
By effectively opening the border to anyone who could cross it as one of his initial actions, Biden undermined this perception of competence.
Secondly, the obvious consequences of allowing millions of people from the poorest regions of the world to enter the U.S. without proper documentation, background checks, or means of support, and then transporting them to various towns and cities across the country at taxpayer expense, would make even open border advocates uneasy. This includes increased strain on schools and hospitals, as well as the compounded tragedy when a migrant commits a violent crime, which might not have occurred if Biden had not opened the border in the first place.
Not to mention the safety of our cats and geese!
Combine these along with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, and the grinding effects of inflation on Americans’ pocketbooks and it strains credulity to think that a candidate so closely associated with the Biden Administration would have the slimmest chance of winning without a radical break.
Kamala Harris offered neither.
2024
So why did the Kamalanomenon train go off the rails?
For starters, Harris was a bad candidate. I don’t mean her policies were bad, necessarily. But she clearly had trouble selling them. In interviews, she had a tendency to give word-salad answers while trying to avoid giving concrete ones which might contradict something she said previously10. She famously bombed in an interview with Lester Holt in 2021, in which she struggled to articulate the administration’s strategy for securing the border.
And maybe that works for a lawyer, and certainly many politicians have law degrees. But if you’re even a middling politician, at some level you have to be able to connect to people, especially those whose votes you have to win-over, and who aren’t fanatical ideologues who will enthusiastically vote for you because your name isn’t Trump.
Which leads to the second reason: her dearth of adversarial press appearances, not only in this campaign, but throughout her Vice-Presidency. Almost as soon as she joined the Biden campaign, she was hidden from the press like some secret love-child.
For a candidate who did not go through the traditional primary process, initially shying from the press did her no favors.
Even after her campaign acceded to do more interviews she refused to clarify any serious positions and transitioning to a more open approach with interviews failed predictably.
“Harris was shaky, unreliable, and inexperienced,” said former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer to the Washington Examiner.11 “Walz is a junior varsity player who wasn't ready for the major leagues.”
Harris and Walz have primarily engaged with friendly platforms like The Tonight Show, The View, the Call Your Daddy podcast, and the Howard Stern Show. However, their lackluster performances, even in the face of mostly soft questions, drew criticism and highlighted the reasons behind Harris’ earlier decision to keep out of the spotlight.
Since the summer, when Harris and Walz had their first interview with CNN as the 2024 Democratic nominees, Harris’ media appearances have been carefully managed, while Walz has participated in fewer interviews.
The challenge for Harris and Walz was that, according to Fleischer, “neither is truly prepared to assume the roles of president and vice president.”
Doug Heye, former communications director for the Republican National Committee, believes that Harris’ performance during her media appearances illustrates why she “hasn’t done many interviews.”
“She simply isn’t good at them,” Heye told the Washington Examiner. “In a supportive environment, with a question designed for her to excel, she still fell short.”
Referring to Harris’s appearance on The View, Heye pointed out that she failed to distinguish herself from President Joe Biden, despite polls indicating that voters are seeking change. He argued, “If she can’t provide substantive answers about her plans for the economy or what she would do differently from Biden, then she’s not a strong candidate.”
The third reason: her choice of running-mate. For all the artifice of casting him as “America’s coach,” the truth is that Tim Walz is the liberal governor of a deep-blue state, Minnesota. CNN called him a “progressive champion.”12 And, in fact, it only takes a few minutes of Googling to find that out, it’s not even an open secret. One only has to look at the ideological tilt of the bills he signed as governor, once Democrats had the majority in the state legislature.
Not to mention that he oversaw the destruction of Minneapolis during the summer of 2020. Records and past public statements show that officials in that city described the governor’s initial response as noncommittal.
Records obtained by the NY Times13 show, the mayor considered sending out a news release detailing his request: “I’ve reached out to Governor Walz to request the assistance of the Minnesota National Guard to help de-escalate and prevent any further conflict.”
But Walz did not agree to send the Guard the first night and looting and arson continued.
Ultimately it’s hard to believe that more moderate voters, as one finds in Wisconsin and Michigan, would be overjoyed in Walz’s response to the rioting in 2020. If anything, they would have trepidation with a ticket fronted by a liberal Californian, add a liberal fire-brand running-mate and a vote for Harris-Walz become harder to justify.
Just one of these factors would have imperiled a competant presidentail campaign. Combine them all, and the unfocused and ersatz one run by Harris and you get the pitying results we saw on election night.
https://apnews.com/article/harris-fundraising-democrats-trump-fbc14aa926444b4f961f579c63811766
https://time.com/7018346/kamala-harris-joy-campaign-benefits-essay/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brat-summer-tiktok-trend-kamala-harris-campaign/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/opinion/kamala-harris-atlanta-rally.html
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/11/a-wave-of-optimism-is-sweeping-the-democrats-are-the-good-times-really-about-to-roll-again
https://www.voanews.com/a/harris-was-never-border-czar-experts-say-despite-republican-claims/7711579.html
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/kamala-harris-president-biden-19565872.php
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/29/us/politics/kamala-harris-2020.html
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/09/david-shor-democrats-privileged-college-kid-problem-514992
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6317854495112
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/presidential/3182431/harris-walz-missteps-media-blitz/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/08/politics/tim-walz-minnesota-governor-progressive/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/us/tim-walz-george-floyd-riots-minneapolis.html