Why Does Kamala Harris Keep Courting Republicans?

There are a bunch of reasons.

Over the last weeks, Kamala Harris’ campaign has consistently been pumping out messages designed to court Republican voters. She’s touted Republican endorsements and campaigned with former GOP anti-Trump House member Liz Cheney. She’s promised to appoint a Republican to her cabinet, explaining, “I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion.”  She’s said she will create a bipartisan council of advisors to discuss policy.

Needless to say, I do not want Harris to be listening to Republicans on policy. If I wanted Republicans to have a voice in policy, I would vote for Republicans. Many other progressives also find this messaging irritating, or worse than irritating. Nina Turner, a former Bernie Sanders surrogate, spoke for many when she suggested on twitter that Harris should embrace popular progressive policies like Medicare for all (63% support from swing voters) or an arms embargo on Israel (61% support) rather than engaging in bipartisan signaling.

Again, I get the frustration and share it to some degree. But I also understand why Harris thinks bipartisan signaling is good politics. Since many progressives seem to believe that Democrats are willfully perverse when they court Republicans, I think it’s worth going through the rationale.

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The electoral college means Harris needs to win conservative votes

I think most people are aware by now that the electoral college (at least at the moment) favors Republicans. Trump won in 2016 despite losing the popular vote. Most analysts believe that Trump’s electoral college bonus will be less this time out. But he still probably has an advantage.

This means that the swing states are all more right-leaning than the electorate as a whole. You can see this in 538’s averages. Harris is ahead nationally by 2.4 points. But her lead in NV, WI, MI, and PA is only +1. She’s -1 in NC and GA.

So, to win a very close election like the one we’re in right now, Harris has to win over voters who are more conservative than the electorate as a whole.

Now, there are various ways to try to do that. You can, for example, emphasize issues with crossover appeal—and that is what the Democrats have done with abortion rights, which are popular even with Republicans. Harris has also proposed using Medicare to pay for home health care visits. That’s a solid progressive proposal that would be a huge benefit to people across the political spectrum, not least to Republican voters, who tend to be older than Democrats.

Yet, the Medicare expansion has barely been discussed in the press, and it hasn’t been much talked up by progressives on social media either. If progressives don’t embrace and defend progressive proposals, there’s little incentive for the campaign to tout them.

More, even though Democrats are on the right side of abortion—a very important, very energizing issue—they’re still just about even in the polls. That’s because partisanship often overcomes policy. Republican partisans will refuse to believe that their representatives are anti abortion, or they’ll decide that partisan identity is more important even than an issue they care a lot about. Republican candidates, of course, can try to obscure their actual commitments, or use vaguely pro choice language to try to give Republicans on the fence an excuse to tip their way.

This is why simply adopting popular progressive policy positions—like Medicare For All—isn’t a no brainer. M4A—and ending arms to Israel too, I’m afraid—may poll well, but they are both likely to activate impassioned partisan opposition, and the fallout there can be unpredictable (opposition to M4A certainly energized Republican voters in the past.)

Again, there’s no progressive policy that has as strong a track record of winning elections as abortion rights, and even that isn’t moving the needle that much.

So, if policy isn’t going to do it, what else is there?

Well, one tactic is to present yourself as a reasonable centristy compromiser who’s willing to work across the aisle.

For people who follow politics closely and are strong partisans, this rhetoric of compromise seems naïve, not to mention enraging. Who, you (and I) ask, believes this horseshit? Republicans aren’t going to buy this; stop pandering to them and pander to us!

And it’s true that, especially recently, it’s unclear how much bipartisan messaging moves the needle. On the other hand, independents are more and more likely to say that they are alienated from or disgusted with both parties.

When Harris says that she wants to listen to a range of opinions, and that she’s open to pragmatic problem solving regardless of partisanship, she’s not just trying to appeal to Republicans. She’s trying to appeal to independents who dislike partisan politics by telling them she’s sick of partisan politics too.

Will that work? No one knows! But Harris’ team obviously feels it’s worth trying, and it’s not hard to see why.

Why don’t Republicans moderate too?

Democrats and progressives will sometimes ask why only Democrats move to the center. Why are we always expected to moderate, while the other side just becomes more extreme?

One answer is that Republicans do try to moderate, or at least pretend to. Trump has notably tried to disavow the most rabid forced birth part of his coalition, claiming he wouldn’t sign a federal abortion ban. This has in fact led to a great deal of criticism, anger, and soul searching from the right.

Most pro life ghouls will still vote for Trump (as most Democrats will still vote for Harris). But it’s worth noting that Trump’s decision to abandon hard-core pro-life messaging is a lot more aggressive than Harris’ promise of a bipartisan advisory board.

More importantly, though, Republicans don’t do as much moderating because the electoral college gives them an advantage—and because they aren’t actually as committed to winning.

Republicans claim that a Harris presidency would be a disastrous apocalypse and that they will do anything to stop her. But they don’t act like it. The Democrats pushed their incumbent president out of the race because his polls weren’t great. Trump’s polls have never been great; he’s very personally unpopular, and he’s incredibly scandal ridden. But he cruised to victory in the primary with little resistance.

In part that’s because Trump’s implicitly blackmailing the party with a potential third party run. But the lack of soul-searching and hand wringing compared to Democrats is also telling. Republicans don’t feel like they need to moderate because they’re not really terrified of what happens when Democrats win. They know that (for example) Harris isn’t going to round them up and shoot them. Democrats have no such assurances. That’s why the Democrats have been relentlessly, obsessively focused on winning for the last eight years—enough so that, again, in a virtually unprecedented step, they dumped their incumbent president for a candidate with a slight polling edge.

Maybe not right, but reasonable

None of this is to say that Harris is in fact pursuing the optimal strategy. I think she could, for example, embrace federal cannabis legalization. That’s a policy likely to generate a lot of headlines and little backlash which is also extremely popular—medical marijuana has an astonishing 88% support, and recreational cannabis has 57% support.

Harris should also, in my opinion, distance herself from Biden’s horrific Israel policies, which are immoral, unpopular, and expose her to huge downside risks as the situation in the Middle East becomes more and more unstable.

But even if she did these things, she’d probably still want to try to signal moderation, and she’d still be trying to get Republicans and independents to vote for her. That’s not because she’s perverse, or hates her base, or doesn’t want to win. It’s because, thanks to the electoral college, she needs to win some right leaning voters to win. That sucks, and it’s unfair, and a blight on our democracy. But it’s the current state of play, and if we want to win elections and have a chance to push better legislation, denying it isn’t helpful.