Behind the Harris Campaign’s Quest for the Mythical “Cheney Democrats”

The Democratic Party’s consulting class—the immortal swamp-things of D.C.—always seem to have only one idea: to steer their campaign to the political center. In 2024, that means trying to win over the so-called “Cheney Democrats” — whatever the hell that means. This strategy apparently requires ignoring your foundation on internal issues and terrible it’s on foreign policy by funding Israel’s genocide. In our polar political moment, this is electoral suicide.

The Harris-Walz ticket is running a campaign based on the fantasy that there is a centrist wing of the Republican Party that is terrified of Donald Trump. For that to work, Trump would have to run, and a significant portion of the GOP would have to look for an alternative.

Those smart republicans are gone if they ever existed. Liz Cheney lost her re-election bid (against a Trump puppet) by 30 points, the second largest loss of a sitting member of Congress in US history. The current GOP base is proudly nativist and out for blood. Republican politicians are not offering health care and higher wages. Instead, they’re spending this election season drooling over the pogrom of a small Haitian community in the Midwest. (Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who was once roundly reprimanded for praising Strom Thurmond’s segregationist campaign in the White House, is not punished but promoted in today’s GOP.) Republicans would rather gargle than challenge. their own racism and sexism to vote for Kamal Harris. Some of these people may have been Obama voters, but if they haven’t become Democrats, they certainly won’t be voting for one now.

Many of the same people who shouted for joy—yes, joy! — when Biden left office, and Harris and Waltz came forward, now they are rebounding. Harris needs a base to get out, and we already know that Harris is losing votes, especially in battleground states like Michigan, by weaponizing Israel’s genocide. Young people will stay home or vote third party because they are told they have no electoral avenues to change morally repugnant policies in the Middle East. In Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania, about 35 percent of Democratic voters say they would be more likely to vote for a Democratic candidate if that person supported an arms embargo, compared with just 5 percent who are less likely to vote. according to August survey conducted by the Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding. And in October poll among Arab Americans, who are considered most likely to vote, Trump leads Harris 46 to 42.

I have no doubt that the Harris-Walz team knows that this is alienating many young and Arab American voters. And now we know that Biden is saying in private what so many critics have said in public: that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is rejecting a ceasefire and launching a regional war in part to hand Trump the presidency. And yet, the Democratic administration is still arming him. Netanyahu is humiliating Biden for the world to see, and Harris will not back down from Biden’s Israel policy. Faced with such an obvious blow, Harris’ campaign insists on sticking its chin out.

This is not incompetence. Like Dan Denver from the podcast To dig tweeted“We are witnessing not so much the elites of the Democratic Party ignoring the anti-war demands of their voters, but a coordinated reaction against the anti-war base of the party. They want to silence and demobilize their base so that the party elites can wage Israel’s endless war abroad.”

This is a betrayal of every person who fears another Trump term and works to make sure it never happens. Harris’s campaign is nauseating its base because it refuses to take positions that could cost them those all-important votes at the Cheney complex in Wyoming or among Upper East Side fundraisers.

There is another campaign that could have been run, a campaign that the Democratic Party may not have been built for: the one that early rejected Biden on Palestine, the one that opposed the execution of Marcellus Williams, the one that didn’t move to the right on immigration, opening the door for Trump/Vance to take the issue to an even crazier place. It’s easy to blame their campaign manager — Uber VP and D.C. technocrat David Plouffe — for trying to robotically triangulate Harris’ positions. The company is clearly afraid of angering Zionists—both Jewish and Christian—and raising people’s expectations with a bold economic vision. They play defense, not offense. They are hoping that Trump will say enough crazy things and that Vance will make more people hate the look on his face and they will win. Waltz, a former defensive coordinator, should know that the only thing stopping you from preventing a defense is winning. This is a basic election. And the Harris-Walz company seems way off base.