Kamala Harris: a long road to a new way forward

As I look at the presidential race, I wonder if I'm seeing an emerging majority coalition that has been inching its way into being for all the decades of my active election experience. We've come a long way.

The Washington Post's Philip Bump observed:

The country clearly exists in a moment of flux, in which, as Obama observed at the Democratic convention last week, we are fully testing the idea that a democracy built on pluralism can succeed. 

But part of the surge in enthusiasm for Harris’s candidacy is clearly rooted in her overtly representing the diversity of America. Conservative White Americans often see America’s non-White population as a unified entity colluding to strip the power of Whites. 

The shift from Biden to Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket allowed for a shift in strategy, too, from treating Trump as an opposing force to treating him as a historic outlier. Waving off Trump as “weird” has a knock-on effect, uniting those opposed to Trump’s candidacy and politics as the true inheritors of the American tradition.

... It may be that Trump helped bring to fruition the political shift predicted with Obama’s 2008 victory. His win proved to be a potent organizing force for White conservatives.

The election of another Black president in the face of that force, an election powered by a coalition strengthened by opposition to Trump, might in fact turn the page that began being written 15 years ago. It is a page, though, that has appeared in American history books multiple times before.

This reminded me of observations I made in early 2008, while watching the Hilary Clinton/Barack Obama primary.

It looks to me as though the Obama candidacy is trying to birth a national coalition which, like the Democratic one in California, doesn't quite have a secure demographic base though such a base seems visible on the horizon. This coalition must, at present, attract enough support outside its obvious members to win an election. Naturally, its leading edge is young voters, folks who live closer to that diverse and difficult demographic future older folks can envision but do not so nearly inhabit.

As Historian Bruce J. Schulman [original link is dead, unfortunately] of Boston University notes, Obama is not the first to try this. In addition to RFK, it's only fair to mention Jesse Jackson in 1988 -- at the end of 2008, will Obama have exceeded Jackson's total of wins in 11 states? ...

A long-term national progressive coalition must somehow hold together most African Americans, most Latinos, probably the majority of various Asian-origin voters, and enough whites, probably predominantly female, to make a majority. ...

Republican overreach, robbing women of our control over our bodies, has hastened the movement of many white women into this coalition. And these white women definitely vote, as do Black women.

On the other hand, it's taken long enough to get here that more and more Latinos and Asian-origin voters are beginning to vote as other immigrants have learned to before them: making electoral choices divided more on their class position in the new country than by ethnic affinities. Think Italians or Irish moving beyond hyphenated status. That's too a kind of American progress but it adds to today's progressive challenges.

But in a general way, the potential Democratic Party coalition visible in 2008, and in California fifteen years before that, may finally be coming to fruition nationally in Kamala Harris' candidacy, if we can push this candidate over the finish line.

MAGA backlash replicates birtherism in response to Obama and California reactionary nativism of the 1990s and before. Anyone else remember when California was Ronald Reagan's launch pad based on bashing hippie students? 

Coalition pluralism was the challenge in 2008; it's still the challenge today. But it can happen. It's no accident that today a Californian leads a Democratic ticket capable of confirming the possibly of a new way forward.