Riding the vibes to victory

I have mixed feelings about the 2024 Democratic National Convention, mostly because I liked it so much.

Watching on television from afar, I saw the Democratic Party of yore represented by the Obamas and the Clintons delivering classic versions of their messages. And I saw the Democratic Party of the future represented by Pete Buttigieg, Wes Moore, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Jasmine Crockett, and an all-around deep bench of political talent. I saw a goofy, fun, balanced ticket in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. And I saw a message that was obsessed with abortion rights, health care, and beating Donald Trump. The themes were joy and freedom, the economic message was aspirational, the visions of diversity emphasized inclusion and equality, and the discussion of environmental issues was overwhelmingly focused on clean air. We got the version of Harris that we should have had in 2020: the career prosecutor who put criminals in jail and, as attorney general, tackled a wide range of wrongdoing and who fundamentally believes in imposing sanctions on bad actors.

It was a great show that demonstrated seriousness of purpose.

I’m always urging Democrats to pay more attention to the ads they run, since ads can be rigorously tested and the ad-testers aren’t under the same social and professional pressure to cook the books as the major pollsters. This was a convention that (mostly) seemed to take that to heart. Democrats on the stage talked like Democratic Party campaign ads rather than like people who’ve had their minds poisoned by push polls from advocacy groups.

You saw very clearly, in their analytical moments, that the leaders of the Democratic Party know that the American people are not obsessed with the specter of warmer weather, worry that Dems might be too left wing, do not want to overthrow neoliberalism, think that Donald Trump is a really bad guy, and would like Democrats to be chill and normal so they can vote for them and freeze out MAGA psychos, without worrying that this means big changes to their personal lives. Political revolution? Probably not. Keeping Social Security and Medicare on track while reducing the cost of widely used prescription drugs? Absolutely.

Democrats draped themselves in the flag, in the actually existing nature of the American people, and in mainstream values. It was great.

So why mixed feelings? Mostly because I want Democrats to be like this all the time. And because you can see clearly at the convention that those in charge absolutely do know how to be good when they want to. There are furious arguments about political strategy happening all the time. But with the pressure on, the same people who sometimes claim to believe that curbing LNG exports is the key to engaging youth voters are, in fact, perfectly capable of delivering a genuinely appealing message. Why not act consistently on this knowledge? Maybe in the Kamala Harris Era they will!

One of the things I argue about with a lot of my friends and peers is the relative role of public policy issues versus what I guess we’re now calling “vibes” in determining political outcomes. My sense is the vibesologists see the candidate swap as the ultimate vindication of vibes theory, but my view is that while it certainly underscores the importance of vibes, it also shows their limits.

After all, if you look at the current state of the campaign, the Harris Vibes are immaculate while the Trump Vibes are bad. The GOP nominee is ranting and raving, and Republicans are back in “frustrated mode” with their undisciplined leader and quietly (or not so quietly) wishing for a leader with less baggage who would stick to his talking points. But the actual polls and election odds are just okay for Democrats. They’re not bad — Harris is winning — but they’re not great. Harris’ polling lead is smaller than Biden’s in 2020 or Hillary’s in 2016, and Democrats are on track to lose the Senate. The vibes have swung much more than the polling, because base Democrats who were going to vote for Biden even in full Weekend At Bernie’s mode are a lot happier with the new nominee. This is a point that I made to a lot of Harris skeptics during the post-debate weeks, that if nothing else, she would guarantee a fall campaign that Democrats could be proud of.

And these vibes really do matter.

Harris has rebuilt Democrats’ fundraising advantage, for example. But even more important, by giving base Democrats a candidate they are enthusiastic about, we no longer hear as much talk about the need to make policy or messaging concessions to the left as a way of building enthusiasm.

Suddenly the Biden-Harris administration’s pro-Israel stance is something most people can live with even if they disagree, the asylum crackdown is worth cheering for, and tough-on-crime Democrats are back in style. I am sincerely glad that vibesologists are happy with this turn, but the vibes haven’t won swing voters over to a progressive message — the vibes have won progressives over to pride in the Democratic Party (which, after all, is the more progressive party), allowing the party to focus its attention on trying to assuage the concerns of swing voters. We’ve written about this before at Slow Boring, but Democrats’ leftward drift after 2012 was largely a psyop staged by left-wing advocacy groups who convinced the party that left-wing policy stances were key to mobilizing young and nonwhite voters. What happened since Harris took over is precisely that she regained ground Biden had lost with young and nonwhite voters based on her better vibes, while doing none of the leftist messaging stuff. That’s great!

I think there are two ways you can look at this. One is that Harris’ successful reconsolidating of Biden’s base has given her a narrow polling lead, plus a financial advantage, so now she can white knuckle through the next 70 days and try to scrape out a win. The other is that Harris’ successful reconsolidating of Biden’s base has given her a narrow polling lead, plus a financial advantage, so now she can execute a lightning dash to the middle that maximizes her odds of victory and of securing a governing majority. You won’t have trouble guessing which I prefer.

I thought the first three nights of the convention unfolded brilliantly, raising my expectations for night four, only to find myself confounded as the program seemed to veer off course at the last minute.

For several hours Thursday night, the core convention themes seemed to get lost. Democrats were back in the land of the everything bagel, with lengthy digressions about climate change and assault weapons bans and nary a mention of the bipartisan border security bill or Kamala Harris prosecuting transnational criminal enterprises. By the time we got to Roy Cooper (?) introducing Harris with an uninspired recounting of their work together on mortgage fraud litigation, I had a serious knot in my stomach.

Then the vice president came to the stage and knocked it out of the park.

You can see at every big rally since she became the nominee the charismatic qualities that made her a rising star back when she was attorney general of California. But she also showed political sense and discipline. The moderate biographical themes of the first three days made a return. She recapitulated points made over the course of the week by several “Republicans for Harris” speakers about Trump’s basic abdication of duty. And she addressed the war in Gaza in a way that really underscored how damaging it is to have a president with such a limited communicative range. On the one hand, she communicated more empathy toward Palestinians than Biden does.

And on the other hand, she defended the administration’s policies in a way that I also don’t think Biden really does.

The trick of trying to pursue a moderate course of action on any subject is that if you don’t actively occupy the discourse space, attention naturally flies to extremes. The notion of a quiet, low-key presidency is abstractly appealing, and I think it actually served Biden very well in concrete Congressional negotiations. But it’s a fundamentally weird way to do the job, and Harris showed that actually explaining your position has some real dividends. Going forward, I hope it’s something she’ll try on energy policy, where I’ve always felt Biden has been weirdly sheepish about expressing exactly how moderate and sensible his approach has been.

What I actually found most impressive about the speech, though, was what it didn’t do, namely recount the laundry list of Democratic Party policy demands.

Harris has opted against the kind of hard shake of the etch-a-sketch that I proposed. What I understand from conversations with people in and around the campaign is that they just don’t think it makes sense to try to disavow the proposals that are in the Biden administration’s budget requests. But that doesn’t mean they need to spend their time affirmatively avowing them. Harris described a vision for an “opportunity economy,” had a brief high-level mission statement in which she vowed to “end the housing shortage and protect Social Security and Medicare,” and clearly elevated the Child Tax Credit above other new programmatic ideas — if for no other reason than there is bound to be a big tax policy negotiation over TCJA expirations.

The omissions are smart in a way that’s easy to neglect precisely because they are omissions. Nothing terrible happened during what I thought of as the weak part of the convention, but it was a reminder that the default mode of the Democratic Party is a kind of frenetic and unfocused level of policy ambition. Inclusiveness and egalitarianism are core progressive values, but that tends to lead to internal disorganization as nobody wants to take charge, make decisions, and tell people no. Insisting on a short speech that did not make space for every single vaguely plausible thing that could have been in there was a gutsy call. And when Democrats set priorities and focus in on a handful of good points, they are dramatically more effective than when they drop into laundry list mode.

“When we fight, we win” was one of the key catchphrases of the convention. But I’m often reminded of Frederick the Great’s dictum that “to defend everything is to defend nothing.” When Democrats genuinely fight to win, they choose their battles. When Democrats try to advance on all fronts simultaneously, they actually aren’t fighting at all, they are flailing. We got three nights of fighting, half a night of flailing, and a killer closeout speech.

I think we should all keep two points in mind over the next 70 days.

One is that everyone tends to underrate how good it will make them feel to win. I acknowledge that nobody wants to eat shit on their personal pet topic. But if you don’t like Donald Trump, you will feel really good about Donald Trump losing. He’s a despicable character. It would be awful to have him back in the White House, and it would be great for the country if he were discredited and gone from public life. Trying to defeat him is genuinely a high calling, and nobody should feel ashamed or hesitant to trim their sails on any particular topic in pursuit of that victory.

The other is that the policy agenda really is limited by Congress.

Right now, the most likely outcome is President Kamala Harris and a narrow GOP Senate majority. That means no progressive legislative priorities of any kind and an incredible amount of going, hat in hand, to Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowksi to ask for their help in getting people confirmed. It’s good to think now about what concessions Harris will be willing to make to those two (on, for example, fossil fuel extraction issues) when she needs their help, and to the extent those concessions are smart politics, just make them now, when moving to the center maximizes the odds for Jon Tester and Colin Allred.

I’ve got some more specific thoughts on this that I’ll share later, but the broad point is that given the lay of the Congressional landscape, you aren’t actually giving up on anything by articulating a restrained policy agenda. The circumstances are just not that objectively favorable. The Harris who wants to beat Trump, protect Social Security and Medicare, sign a bipartisan border security deal, and plug away on housing policy is a very electorally appealing figure and also is realistically plumbing the limits of what any new administration is going to be able to achieve, no matter how ambitious its stated agenda. At the same time, electing a woman to the White House would be a historic achievement and so would driving a stake through Trump’s political career.

The vibes genuinely are good right now, because deep down, Democrats really do hate Trump and want to beat him, and love having a dynamic nominee they’re proud of and think is a good role model for Americans. We will inevitably see takes that the vibes “need to” be marshaled into some kind of Warren-esque big structural change or that it’s objectionably vacuous to run a campaign based largely on a renewed spirit of liberal patriotism. I’d like to see Harris tune that out.

It’s actually a staggering achievement to make liberals run as the party of patriotism and the authentic American spirit, and we’ve been through a rocky and chaotic period — people don’t necessarily want a lot of disruptive policy change. Be a good vibes president who wins and takes care of practical problems and doesn’t wildly overpromise. People were cheering their asses off for this version of Harris Thursday night, and it’s worth really hewing to that vision and seeing how far it takes us.

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