How Kamala Can Win In 2024

What the Vice President should and shouldn't do to secure victory

Sometimes, doing well in politics can be as simple as giving people what they want.

In less than two weeks time, just the mere presence of Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket has completely turned the race on its head. The size and speed of her surge in the polls has outdone the expectations of all observers, including those (such as myself) who had long advocated for a new candidate in Joe Biden’s stead. In the matter of only days, the race transformed from an impending Trump blowout to an effective tie to the first true Democratic lead in nearly a year. Republican leads in the deciding swing states have been slashed and, in some cases, outright reversed. Base enthusiasm, at least as measured through fundraising and volunteering, has surged to historically unprecedented highs. Both betting markets and leading statistical models have begun to show the Vice President as the favorite. No matter what happens next, the launch of the Harris campaign will go down in the history books as a historic electoral turnaround, with few (if any) precedents for our modern, polarized age.

And it may have been the easy part.

For as much ground as the Democrats have managed to make up since Biden dropped out, almost all of it has just been because of who Kamala is (i.e., not Trump or Biden). Very little has been about how she’s actually campaigned. This has been enough to get her into contention, but it won’t be enough to win the election by itself. You don’t need to believe the right wing cope that her recent rise in popularity is just a honeymoon phase to know that the job is far from over. Actually landing the plane to win this election, to say nothing of winning it by a large enough margin to claim an actual mandate, will require Kamala to thread a very tricky needle. She will need to find a way to meaningfully break from Biden without looking unprincipled. She will need to refashion her image while finding a way to avoid being defined by her opponents. And she will have to craft messaging that meets the moment without being too clever by half.

It’s a task without any modern precedent, but that doesn’t mean it has to be difficult. Here are some of the ways the Harris campaign can accomplish it.

Step One: Savage the Supreme Court

For almost a decade now, the defining advantage Democrats have held in national elections has been the presence of Donald Trump. Contrary to the hopes of coastal conservatives who want nothing more in their lives than to feel accepted, their standard bearer has never once been popular. He has been opposed at every turn by an anti-Trump majority, which, despite shifts major in size and composition, has never gone and likely will never go away. This is a powerful majority—one that nearly elected a deeply unpopular Hillary Clinton to the presidency in 2016, savaged the GOP in 2018, took the presidency away from Trump in 2020 and delivered Republicans the worst midterm result in generations for a party in power in 2022. There are few precedents for this kind of consistency in American politics. For as much as some may mock it as old hat, Trump hating doesn’t just work. It’s one of the most reliable strategies in modern political history.

And he’s still not even Kamala’s best target this year.

Across the entire political world, the most promising subject for Democratic attacks is, without a doubt, the U.S. Supreme Court. As shown below, the high court has grown to become tremendously unpopular over the past number of years, plummeting to depths far deeper than many may be aware of.