U.S. Vice-President and Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks at West Allis Central High School during her first campaign rally in Milwaukee, Wis., on July 23.KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/Getty Images
Vice-President Kamala Harris has the nomination all but wrapped up and the donors are back. She has a good chance of mobilizing key segments of the Democrats’ base. Charli XCX says she’s brat and marketers are making TikToks to the tune of Chappell Roan’s Femininomenon.
But the new candidate still faces a massive problem. It’s the incumbents’ problem. And it is weighing down her campaign from the start even though she isn’t Joe Biden.
It’s the same problem that has helped turf the government in Britain, roiled politics in France in ways that lifted the far right and far left, and has Justin Trudeau’s Liberals running far behind in Canada.
The cost of living is now the No. 1 issue for nearly every voter demographic in the United States. Prices have gone up 19.5 per cent since Mr. Biden took office as president in 2021.
In the U.S., and many Western countries, there is one group that seems to be particularly angry about the way the economy has affected their prospects: young men. Around the world, incumbents have found it hard to find a message that convinces young men they can make the economy work for them.
That is not a small matter for Ms. Harris and the Democrats.
Young voters made the difference for Mr. Biden in 2020. Voters under 30 cast their ballots for Mr. Biden by a 59-35 margin over then-president Donald Trump, and importantly, they showed up to vote at a rate not seen since the 1960s.
But Mr. Biden’s youth movement has weakened. Many young men left it. In 2020, Mr. Biden beat Mr. Trump by 26 points among men under 30. In April, the twice-a-year Harvard Youth Poll of 2,010 Americans aged 18 to 30 found the President’s lead among young men had shrunk to six percentage points.
His Vice-President starts her campaign facing the same problem.
Ms. Harris does have several possible ways to gain. The sharp cleavage in U.S. politics means mobilizing your own lukewarm supporters to go vote on election day.
The Vice-President has always been a better campaigner for abortion rights than Mr. Biden, and the full or partial abortion bans enacted in 21 states since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022 have made abortion a motivating issue for many voters, especially women.
Ms. Harris’s rapid consolidation of the nomination reflected her strong support in key demographics in the party’s base, notably Black women. The organization Win With Black Women reportedly hosted more than 44,000 people on a Zoom call Sunday and raised US$1.5-million in three hours.
And then there’s the argument that Mr. Trump represents chaos, a threat to democracy – and another older man from politics of the past. On Tuesday, her speech to Democrats had all of that, and chants of “we’re not going back.”
But the cost of living is still the biggest issue for the electorate, as it is for most voters in the Western world. The politics of young men, in particular, appear to have been affected. The results in other countries suggest they aren’t as swayed by concerns about chaos.
As Vice-President, Ms. Harris is tied to Mr. Biden’s economic record. The anger about the cost of living is as much about who was in charge when prices rose and what policies led to it. In a sense, it’s not about inflation any more – it is about the way past inflation made prices higher today. They are still high, and for a lot of people, wages haven’t caught up. House prices are high by past standards. For many young men looking forward, economic prospects look bleak.
Ms. Harris and her campaign team aren’t going to come up with a policy that is going to bring prices down. In her speech on Tuesday, Ms. Harris spoke about affordable health care and affordable child care and senior benefits, an effort to offer voters social policies that might help some people make ends meet – making similar arguments to Mr. Trudeau’s government in Canada. But young men in their 20s don’t tend to make use of those programs.
That means the Vice-President must find something else to offer, something that separates her from Mr. Biden’s record and offers hope to young men that their prospects are going to start looking better – the winning message that has eluded incumbents around the world.