What People Get Wrong About Harris in 2020

Here's a quick post about something I think a lot of people get wrong about Vice President Kamala Harris's 2020 campaign for the Democratic nomination.

Folks like Nate Silver look at how she dropped out fairly early during the 2020 cycle and sight that as iron clad proof that "she's bad at politics", but a presidential nomination isn't like being on Survivor where the longer you last the better you've done at all. 

Instead it's more like a poker game at a tournament where there are some high risk/high reward strategies that maximize your chance to win but mean you could go bust quickly, and some strategies (like how I play poker, you just never bet) that maximize the time you stay in but make it really, really unlikely you'll win the table/tournament. 

To review, after Harris's big break out debate moment where she knocked Biden she got a ton of free media coverage and her fundraising surged. Hoping to maximize her advantages of this major break she went with a high risk/high reward strategy of staffing up nationally in order to maximize her chances of winning if she caught fire and she pulled an upset in an early state and/or had to hang in for a long drawn out battle. Unfortunately for her the debate moment turned out to be a one off moment, not a major breakthrough with the public or donors and so the money ran out fairly quickly (a national campaign staff leads to quite the "burn rate" for a campaign) and so she had to drop out. 

Meanwhile a candidate like Amy Klobuchar went with the low risk strategy of conserving her money for the long run and so she was able to stay in much longer. Under the "Survivor Model" this means she ran a better campaign, but in reality Klobuchar had little campaign infrastructure (even in her own state) to be able to take advantage of a break through if she got lucky and one occurred.

In other words her strategy kept her in race for a while, but she was never a major threat to Biden once the field narrowed, hence why she quickly dropped out and endorsed him. Meanwhile Harris going "all in on" that early great hand didn't work out, but it was still a smart move if she wanted to actually win the big enchilada and not just stick around in the game for as long as possible

You can see other good examples of how the "Survivor Model" doesn't hold up in past races as well. Under this theory in 1988 Jesse Jackson ran a great campaign and thus he was a very skilled politician, after all he took it all the way to the convention, the last Tribal Council! Likewise Jerry Brown in 1992 held out the longest against Bill Clinton, and thus ran a great campaign as well. But in reality The Duke's real threats in 1988 were people who dropped out early due to scandals like Gary Hart and Joe Biden not a factional candidate like Jackson, who never appealed much to the party other that his coalition of some white liberals and black voters. Likewise the candidates who had a chance to actually beat Bill Clinton in 1992 were probably guys like Mario Cuomo (who dropped out before New Hampshire), Tom Harkin, and Bob Kerrey not a candidate like Brown who appealed largely to just his own personality based faction and people who hated The Big Dog, or Paul Tsongas who was pretty out of step with the mainstream of his party on a number of issues.

First GOP Debate Review

Hello, is this thing on? 

I haven't been blogging much anymore for various reasons but the fact that I actually took the time to watch the GOP's first presidential debate makes me feel obligated to write something up about it. So here goes:

Well that was awful. One thing that struck me as an overall theme of this Trump-lacking debate was how very much it is now Trump's party (with some notable dissents). 

To keep things quick, and because I've decided to write this without looking at other people's reaction online let's just do bullet points.

• The narrative divide: There's a pretty giant divide in the GOP these days between old schoolers like Mike Pence who talks about a sort of Reagan's idea of "Morning in America" moment they want to bring about (the former VP seems to have mentioned Dutch more than five times) and folks like Vivek Ramaswamy arguing for a Trump style "American Carnage" master narrative. To put it simply this is a major change for the optimism of presidents like Reagan and the Bushes of my younger days. 
• Vivek Ramaswamy seems to have "won" the debate: That is he probably got the most camera time and really raised his profile. I'd expect a "bump" in the polling, but I doubt that will last. Why have this know-nothing internet celebrity figure when you can have Trump, the platonic archetype?
• DeSantis did fine, which probably means he "lost" the debate: Sure he did a decent job of delivering his lines, but I didn't see much to change the current dynamics with Trump as front runner and him as a distant second. It's not the end of the world, RDS can still win, but this is yet another blown opportunity for him.
• The crazy doesn't stop: It's kind of wild that "bomb/invade Mexico" has become a mainstream position of various GOP candidates for president. That seems like a really poorly though out idea. It's also sad, Mexico isn't a failed state, it's a country with problems but nice stuff too.
• Less of the "woke" stuff: Nobody really used that term, and there was just one question about trans people, I don't know what this means but I expected more.
• Everyone else: Well Christie was fun yelling at Ramaswamy, but a lot of meh other than that. 

In conclusion? It's still Trump's party and you can cry if you want to.

Feel The Bidenmentum!

One thing I've noticed recently is that there's been a number of liberals, often in the media, pushing the idea that it's time for Biden to hang up his spikes and let someone new run in 2024. Michelle Goldberg wrote a typical example of this recently, citing Biden's age as a major campaign liability due to media optics:

...chances are good that Biden’s competitor will be someone much younger, like Ron DeSantis, who will be 46 in 2024. Barring some radical shift in the national mood, the candidates will be vying for leadership of a deeply dissatisfied country desperate for change. For Democrats, the visual contrast alone could be devastating.

I understand her point, people oftentimes use the term "cringe" about Biden for real reasons. But here's where I think the Biden haters are wrong, there's just no good reason to assume that voters actually care about this stuff.

Afterall, Biden was the so called "cringe" candidate of the 2020 nomination cycle who ended up winning pretty easily despite what could be best called a "minimalist" campaign (Minnesota is a good example: his entire enterprise seems to have consisted of 30 people in a bowling alley for their election night party, while Bernie Sanders supposedly had hundreds of dedicated activists all over the state. And Biden won.)

Moreover these sorts of analysis suffer from a version of what Matt Yglesias calls "The Pundit's Fallacy", that is the idea that the key to winning elections is to do whatever the author of a given piece of punditry wants that politician to do. In Goldberg's case not replacing Biden with someone, "...like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia."

Meanwhile, unlikely speculation about television optics, the advantage of incumbency is a very real thing. There's a reason why only three incumbent presidents lost reelection since the Second World War. Given a choice of "more of the same" or "time for a change" the American electorate, for whatever reasons, tends to favor not rocking the boat baring something like a bad economy or a devastating pandemic. In fact, while the historical comparisons are less helpful, this seems to be a theme throughout American history going back to the 1790s.

To be fair Goldberg, and other's, argument is that voters will desperately want major changes in 2024, but I really don't see that. The 2022 midterms were hardly a change election with incumbents doing pretty well. As far as I can tell the degree people express dissatisfaction in polling seems to be more of a COVID hangover than people calling for a whole rethinking of the welfare state.

Finally, I think Goldberg is a bit presumptuous to assume that her preferred candidates would end up replacing Biden. Instead of Warnock the Democrats might very well end up with Bernie Sanders, an even older white guy! Or Kamala Harris who, for better or for worse, is deeply tied to the Biden Administration already. Or even some dark horse type candidate like JB Pritzker. The one thing you could count on is it would be a crazy free for all with everyone and their mom running that could easily turn into a progressive policy auction just like the 2020 cycle where the new nominee is stuck with a bunch of deeply unpopular positions.

I'll stick with the advantages of incumbency thank you very much.

Anything of course can happen. For all we know Biden might have a heart attack tomorrow. But the reality is that Biden is the Democrats best shot at holding on to the White House. People who claim that democracy hangs in the balance in the election of 2024 should act like they really believe this and get onboard the Biden Train.