In the end, I voted for Kamala Harris, but I always knew she was destined to lose. After all, if Harris was having trouble convincing me – a mixed-race gay Northern Californian – to get behind her, her chances were worrisomely slim. And the Harris campaign – rushed and reckless, relying on the same tired playbook that failed Hillary Clinton in 2016 – appears to have lost the vast American middle in spectacular fashion.
Harris had plenty more to offer – if only she hadn’t been so afraid to let it loose
The biggest problem for Harris is that she wasted every opportunity to make herself seem interesting. Here is a woman born to immigrants, educated at both Howard, among the most prominent of America’s historically black universities, and California’s public higher education system; a big-city prosecutor with a nifty millennial, multi-racial family who somehow managed to still appear banal and out of touch. A woman overflowing with #intersectionality – with stakes in endless communities, yet never seeming to truly belong to any. A candidate whose race and gender were her most crucial selling points, even as her campaign – along with Harris’s celebrity proxies and media surrogates – refused to engage with what her race and gender might actually mean.
I waited for a reason to make Harris my own, but found it hard to find one. Her campaign – mired in cowardice and timidity – continually danced around her most unique selling points without ever really hitting the dance floor. This is why Harris performed so poorly among crucial voting blocs like black and Jewish voters who will inevitably be blamed for her loss.
Rather than authentically engaging with race and class and gender and religion, Harris stuck to a well-edited script of middle-class modesty that never quite worked with her sleek suits and multiple Vogue covers. Her campaign may have tried to play her as ‘moving beyond’ identity politics, but her real mistake was that voters never learned what all of these identities actually meant to Harris.
Rather than speak openly about her distinct racial heritage, her immigrant parents, her marriage to a white man – any attempt to pierce Harris’s racial veil was shut down and silenced.
I wanted to hear Harris talk about her mixed-race family – not her fake tenure flipping French fries at McDonald’s. Trump directly challenged Harris’s racial bona fides – crudely and with vulgarity. But instead of bravely taking Trump on – perhaps her own version of Obama’s now legendary “More Perfect Union” speech in 2008 – Harris merely dismissed her rival, insisting such talk was just ‘the same old show’ as a plaintive mainstream media looked on.
The same thing happened for Harris with gender – and with Jews. Harris is 60 and childless, another American anomaly which the Trump–Vance campaign tried to weaponise against her. JD Vance was clearly churlish when bemoaning ‘childless cat ladies’. But he offered Harris an opportunity to open up about not having children, how this has shaped her worldview and what it might mean for the increasing number of other Americans like her.
Harris stuck to a well-edited script of middle-class modesty
Instead, Harris clapped back with charges of misogyny while talking up a parentage to stepchildren who were nearly grown when she married their father. All around were quaking gasps of lame ‘how dare he’ when Harris should have been brave and vulnerable and told us how she feels not having kids of her own. Aren’t feelings, after all, what progressives care about most?
The same thing with Jews and Israel and Judaism. My mum is Jewish, my dad African-American – another Harris-world similarity. She and me and we are not like most American Jewish families – particularly at a moment when Jewish families are enduring unimaginable levels of antisemitism.
As she and Biden dithered over their support for Israel, Jews needed to clearly hear what being part of a Jewish family has meant for Harris. We Jews needed to know how, and why, she is – even if by marriage – one of us. Instead, the Harris campaign sent out husband Douglas Emhoff as the nation’s top Jew, while approving deep dives into her journey through the Black Church.
Ultimately, Harris’s entire campaign these last five months has felt contrived and expedient, rather than profound and personal. When the numbers come up showing that many Black and Jewish voters backed Trump, they’re bound to be blamed for failing to deliver Harris the White House. But the blame is all on Harris. Voting for an end to Trumpism may have been enough for folks like me to check ‘Harris’ at the ballot box, but most people needed more. Harris had plenty more to offer – if only she hadn’t been so afraid to let it all loose.
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