The search for the mythical “Cheney Democrats” behind the Harris campaign

It seems that the Democratic consulting class—DC’s immortal swamp-things—has only one idea: to put his campaign in the political spotlight. In 2024, that means trying to win over the so-called “Cheney Democrats”—whatever the hell that means. This strategy apparently requires you to ignore your base on domestic issues and it’s terrible foreign policy by financing Israel’s genocide. In our polarized political moment, this is electoral suicide.

The Harris-Walz ticket is running a campaign rooted in the fantasy that a centrist wing of the GOP is dismayed by Donald Trump. For this to work, Trump would have to be an outlier and a significant portion of the GOP would have to look for an alternative.

Those sensible Republicans are gone, if they ever existed. Liz Cheney lost her re-election bid (against a Trumpist stick) by 30 points, the second largest loss for an incumbent in US history. The modern day GOP base is proudly nativist and bloodless. Republican politicians don’t offer health care or higher wages. Instead, they are spending this election season salivating over a pogrom against a small Haitian community in the Midwest. (Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who was once harshly reprimanded for praising Strom Thurmond’s segregationist campaign for the White House, is not punished but promoted in today’s GOP.) Republicans would sooner gargle kerosene than question their own racism and sexism to vote for him. Kamala Harris. Some of these may have been Obama voters, but if they haven’t already become Democrats, they certainly won’t be voting now.

Many of those who shouted with joy—yes, with joy! — when Biden stepped down and Harris and Walz stepped up, they’re now backing off. Harris needs the base to turn out, and we already know that Harris is bleeding votes, especially in battleground states like Michigan, by weaponizing Israel for genocide. Young people stay home or vote third party because they are told they have no choice to change the morally repugnant policies of the Middle East. In Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania, about 35 percent of Democratic voters said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate if the candidate supported a gun embargo, while only 5 percent were less likely. August poll by the Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding. And in October vote Among the Arab Americans most likely to vote, Trump leads Harris 46-42.

I have no doubt that the Harris-Walz team knows they are alienating many young and Arab American voters. And now we know that Biden is saying in private what so many critics say in public: that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is refusing a cease-fire and starting a regional war, in part because of Trump’s presidency. Despite this, the Democratic administration is still arming it. Netanyahu is humiliating Biden for the world to see, and Harris is not breaking with Biden’s Israel policy. In the face of such an obvious blunder, the Harris campaign insists on sticking its chin out.

This is not incompetence. Like Dan Denvir from the podcast The Dig he tweeted“What we are seeing is not so much Democratic Party elites ignoring the antiwar demands of their constituents as a concerted backlash against the party’s antiwar base. They want to silence and demobilize their base so that the partisans can continue an endless Israeli war abroad.”

This is a betrayal of everyone who fears another Trump membership and works to make sure it never happens. The Harris campaign is sickening its base because it refuses to accept positions that could get into all-important votes at the Cheney camp in Wyoming or at fundraisers on the Upper East Side.

There’s another campaign that could have been run, one that the Democratic Party might not have been built on: one that broke with Biden early on in Palestine, one that opposed the execution of Marcellus Williams, one that didn’t run to the right. on immigration, opening the door for Trump/Vance to take the issue to an even wilder place. It’s easy to blame their campaign manager — Uber VP and DC technocrat David Plouffe — for trying to robotically triangulate Harris’s position. The campaign is clearly afraid of upsetting Zionists – both of the Jewish and Christian variety – and of raising people’s expectations with a bold economic vision. They play preemptive defense instead of attacking. They are hoping that Trump will say some crazy enough things and Vance will make more and more people hate the sight of his face and they will win. Walz, a former defensive coordinator, should know that the only thing preventing a defensive defense is winning. This is a basic choice. And the Harris-Walz campaign is considered very far from the basics.