Kamala Did Not Represent the Center

Pandering is no substitute for understanding

In the wake of political losses, seemingly every pundit feels compelled to write one version or another of the same essay: “Why the election results prove the losing party should move towards my priorities.” Freddie deBoer provides a representative example this cycle. This time, I am no exception: in the wake of Trump’s victory, I feel compelled to speak to the nature of the election. My aim is not to provide a full picture of why Democrats lost and why Republicans won, but to reflect a sentiment I believe many centrists felt towards Kamala, the candidate I voted for, aiming to outline what “Kamala ran towards the center” missed.

Below the essay, you will find a brief rundown of some of my specific policy disputes with progressives, as well as my original essay published when the Democrats nominated Kamala, outlining why I felt so alienated by the choice.

---

Kamala did not represent the center

There is not a single moment this election that I felt heard or represented by Kamala Harris. Not one.

But—people, and especially leftists, will say—you're a centrist! she ran to the center, did she not? spoke of unity, focused on fundamentals, stayed disciplined? And I confess: she did. But let's consider the nature of that "running to the center": well-oiled, precisely tuned gears of the Machine, turning and calculating that to win the vote, they needed to present as Normal.

Not that they were ever wrong. Not that any of their priorities were mistaken, that they had ever seriously overstepped, that they needed any serious re-examination. Just that they needed to slow-walk things, to be calm, to rely on running against Trump and repeating platitudes hoping to Walz into the presidency.

"What will you do differently from Joe Biden?" A bold answer from Kamala: I'm not him, and I'm not Trump. Great. "What are we to make of your positions during the 2020 primary?" Well, it's not 2019 anymore, is it? "Did you ever, even once, go too far?" A laugh and a charming slice-of-life quip.

The Democrats tried to run an election on vibes alone. Kamala is brat. Kamala is normal. Kamala is all things to all people. Kamala is with the good guys and against the bad guys, with the good things and against the bad things, and shouldn't that be enough?

Look, I've been adamantly against Trump from the day he entered the national scene. I have never wavered on that. But I spend my time and my energy writing, shouting, begging someone to listen that people do not trust the Machine, and they do not trust it for good reason. Young, educated professionals are far to the left of the average American, and they are the ones in control of every institution. Institutions systematically represent their views, treating them as natural and everyone else as aberrant.

I'm on the fringes of that group, right-wing by young, educated professional standards, dead center by the standards of the country. And it's frustrating, alienating on a deep level, to go to law school and watch prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters and people who want to tear gifted education down treated as sane and normal and Respectable while knowing that if I don't voice perspectives sympathetic to the majority of the country, nobody will voice them at all.

Kamala Harris never represented me. The Democrats never signaled to me that they heard and understood my voice and voices like mine, only that they wanted to pull the right levers and press the right buttons and twist the right knobs to convince that mystical creature, the Centrist, that they were on their side. I don't know what will happen under what looks to be four more years of Trump. I don't think it will be as dire as the worst predictions, and hope it won't be, but I remain now as ever wholly convinced that he is temperamentally unfit to be President and the country is a more volatile and uncertain place with him in charge.

But what I hope is this: the Democrats don't take this moment to lament to themselves how everyone fell victim to misinformation and imagined grievances, that they were fine and good and the people were the problem, that their problem is they were simply not pure-Left enough. Now is the time for recognition that they fundamentally, wholly failed to understand and reach the frustrated center. They have four years to get serious about doing so.

---

A minimal list of disputes

Where in specific do my priorities not align with progressives?

Rather than providing a comprehensive accounting, I would like to present a partial, limited list representing four priorities I hold with unusual vehemence, priorities Kamala Harris either opposed, misunderstood, or ignored. I do this not so much to convince people towards my positions as to emphasize that my tensions with Harris are substantive, not imagined. Centrists tend to be political pragmatists, with neither the Democratic Party or the Republican Party being natural homes for them. The nature of coalitional politics means that centrist priorities are unlikely to rule the day for a party well to their left, but people aiming to appeal to the center should at least understand them.

1. I support excellence in education: selective high schools, gifted courses, ability grouping more broadly. Progressives have torn many of these down. Examples:

• The destruction of Thomas Jefferson High School

• Seattle shutters its highly capable cohort program

• San Francisco policymakers’ fight against eighth grade algebra

2. I oppose spurious disparate impact lawsuits from the Biden Department of Justice against South Bend and other police/fire departments, and want the government to settle and repair the damage caused by failures like the FAA's hiring scandal.

3. I oppose economically senseless price controls.

4. When unions like the dockworkers threaten to grind the economy to a halt in service of resisting automation and improvements, I want a president who will fight them, not yield to their every whim.

I could say much more, but those are a start. If a candidate disagrees with me on them, fine. But I want them to at least understand my objections and handle them honestly and directly. Kamala Harris did not.

---

Yes, I will vote for Kamala Harris (published 24 July 2024)

Yes, I will vote for Kamala Harris. Someone sent me this comic the other day, though, and I confess I've lost my patience. I will vote for Kamala Harris. But in return—well, as my relief at Biden dropping out a year too late has settled into disgust, I do have a few words.

For my entire adulthood, Donald Trump has been on the ballot. Like many Utah Mormons, I needed only to see him to hate what he had to offer. He is vulgar, self-absorbed, dishonest—look, I'll bore you if I continue. You've heard it all before. I did not need the media to see his flaws, but many better writers than me have already laid them out in detail. Subsequent events have only confirmed those flaws.

I voted McMullin in 2016, alongside 21% of Utahns, watching family leave the Republican Party in response to Trump. By 2020, then in Omaha, I'd made my reluctant peace with the two-party system and voted Biden. Since 2015, I have wanted Trump off the ballot, out of the picture, far away from US politics. Now I am in Pennsylvania, I have a platform, and I can hardly pretend my vote and my voice don't matter this time around. So yes, I will vote for Kamala Harris.

With that clear: who, precisely, will I be voting for?

I will vote first, it must be said, for a Machine: the Machine that has the allegiance of the bulk of my country's civil servants and professional class, no matter who is in office; the Machine that coiled up tightly around Biden while it thought it could hide his decline, then spat him out with a thousand beautifully written thinkpieces when it realized it could not. I will vote for a Machine that sneered at a few of its more independent-minded members—Ezra Klein, Nate Silver, others—when they pointed out the obvious truth that Biden should have dropped out a year ago. I will vote for a Machine that knows it needs my vote but can hardly hide its scorn for independent voters who push against parts of its plan, one that put an ostensible moderate in office before crowing about accomplishing the furthest left political agenda in decades.

I will vote for a Machine that now invites me to line up behind one of its very own, a politician who long ago sold any semblance of individuality for its promises of power. I will vote for an individual who secured her first public office via an affair with a man twice her age, then climbed until she became a prosecutor who flinched from her own record when prosecution became unpopular and who will wear it proudly now that the winds are shifting. I almost flinch to point it out—as if it is uncouth to notice the compromises people make for power, but not to make those compromises in the first place.

I will vote for an individual who made disingenuous, pre-planned accusations of racism (buy her T-shirts!) against the man who would later coldly, calculatingly invite her to be his running mate, then laughed it off with "It was a debate!" I will vote for someone whose voting record was further left than almost any other Senator, who has never met a progressive platitude or invented census demographic holiday she does not embrace, but who I am expected to treat as a sort of moderate because she does not actively want to destroy capitalism. I will vote for someone who has never once shared a political idea that inspired or excited me, a weathervane who panders to whoever promises power. I will vote for someone I and all who voted in Democratic presidential primaries resoundingly rejected once before, a plastic candidate who elected long ago to become simply an avatar of the Machine.

I will vote alongside millions who made the same weary calculation, the same pivot, people who have shrugged and moved, unburdened by what has been, from Dark Lich Brandon memes to coconut trees and visions of what can be. The Machine does so try to make itself Cool, and many convince themselves it succeeds. I will vote for Kamala and not a candidate who emerged out of a hard-fought primary because the Machine grew overconfident and was left scrambling when everyone saw an octogenarian act like an octogenarian.

I will vote for Kamala because after and despite all of this, the Republicans remain unworthy of defeating the Machine. They repel the talented and capable, they decry their opponents' abuses of power before abusing every shred of power they get their hands on, they have for a decade built a tragicomic cult of personality around an old man who has always been unfit to rule. I will vote, and I will encourage others to do the same, to vote against the Republicans until the message well and truly sinks in that I have been sick of Donald Trump and his effect on politics for a decade, as sick of hearing that my objections to him are "Trump Derangement Syndrome" as I am of hearing that I ought to blind myself to other candidates' flaws because he exists.

I will vote for Kamala Harris, but if she loses, it will not be my fault, nor the fault of any other disillusioned moderates and eccentric swing voters. It will be the fault of a Machine that for the third election in a row with (in its telling) Democracy itself on the line convinced itself that it could do no better than Kamala Harris, that bare lip service to moderation is enough. If she wants a shot at winning an election she's currently losing, she should give centrists clear, convincing, genuine reasons to vote for her and not simply against Trump. She should understand that her circumstances are unusual and handle criticism with grace.

I will vote for Kamala Harris. But I won't pretend to like it.

---

I stand by every word of my July essay. It is how I felt all election season; Harris did nothing, at any point of her campaign, to seriously challenge that sentiment. I am disappointed Trump won the presidency and frustrated that he continues to be a force in American politics. If Democrats want to defeat him properly, they should be prepared to do more than simply pander to the centrists whose votes they want.

You cannot properly reach people you neither respect nor understand, no matter how carefully you focus-group your appeals to the center. The Democratic Party has the next four years to figure that out.