Why Kamala Harris Is Failing to Gain Traction With the Working Class

By Newsweek - Skyler Adleta - Aug 28, 2024 at 7:28 PM

After Vice President Kamala Harris was named the democratic nominee without a single vote of support from the people, I have been wondering one thing: What are her specific plans for addressing the malaise of the American working class?

This is a demographic that both parties are desperately trying to appeal to. While Republicans have seemingly gained much steam over the past decade with working America, Democrats continue to scramble to regain that which they've lost: a reliable working-class base. Yet after her DNC speech last week, I still don't really know what Harris' plans are or what her policy pursuits are going to be.

Here's what I did learn from her speech: I know she is really optimistic about herself. I know she believes that the middle class should relate to her. I also know that she, like almost every Democrat and some Republicans, believes Trump is an existential threat to America—a tired, belittling tidbit in the ears of the millions of working-class Americans who support Trump.

I walked away from Harris' speech feeling that the Democratic Party is so caught up in believing that all they need to do is relate to people that they believe they can escape the necessity of presenting fleshed out ideas or having plans to see those ideas through. But working-class folks are so tired of the pandering rhetoric. We want real, actionable ideas! We not only want to know that you understand our concerns; we need to have confidence that you will be able to work with us to address them.

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From the working class to the upper echelons of society, people love seeing a public figure they can relate to. As a personal example, JD Vance entering the Trump ticket filled me with some real optimism—but not because he came up from working-class roots and had a childhood similar to mine.

That alone means squat in my selection of public officials. It's because in Vance I see pragmatic governance and policy that has a chance to percolate through a divided Congress that's informed by the truths he and I share based on all we have in common. A related understanding of things without a productive mobilization of that understanding simply doesn't matter.

Harris has put forward some policy ideas. She said she is going to pass a middle-class tax break that will benefit "over 100 million Americans." But how does she intend to do this? Will it be done in a manner that avoids growing our ballooning national debt? Will this proposal be paired up with measures to protect American businesses' growth?

It remains a mystery. She simply stated that she is going to pass a tax break that will help people like me; that's apparently all we need to know. I suppose the vast trust between American citizens and politicians today should be enough to keep plebians like myself from wanting further detail.

Harris also promised to take care of the border crisis, which would have been an appealing point if she wasn't the person granted stewardship of the border as it descended into chaos. She promised to "bring back the bipartisan border deal" if elected, but to me, the person who let the fire rage at the border for years before legislation was ever pursued now promising to call the fire department once elected is a very unimpressive and empty promise.

want to see meaningful legislation enacted and a safe, streamlined and measured immigration process brought forward in our country. But if our experience with Harris is to be our guide, she's not the person to do it.

Harris needs to appeal to conservative-leaning working-class citizens who are in Trump's camp if she hopes to be elected. Yet her railing against Trump, accompanied by the phrase "We are not going back!" in response to Trump's platform is indicative of a person who completely misunderstands half of the country.

She belittles working-class Americans who view the past favorably from an economic point of view by doing this; many working-class folks remember, or have been told of, a time when desirable, living-wage jobs were widespread amongst those with or without a college degree, allowing families to have meaningful choices and secure existences.

Harris wants to transform this economic nostalgia into something that is viewed as regressive and socially backward, ultimately diminishing our actual longings by portraying them as false ones.

I would challenge Democrats here: Do you really think half of the country's nostalgia is centered around backward social norms or oppression?

I don't know a single conservative in my personal life who craves segregation. I don't personally know any conservative who doesn't want women to have the opportunity to work and achieve a powerful and satisfying career. All of this gas-lighting by Democrats misses the mark and works to alienate their party from half of the country.

Do you want to know what most conservative, working-class people that I know want? Peace and meaningful choices. We want to be able to afford groceries and go on vacations. We want to be able to pursue a variety of jobs with powerful earning potential and lasting security. We want to be able to purchase a vehicle if the time to do so has come, instead of being walled off due to high interest rates. We want a leader who will work swiftly and aggressively toward global peace.

Personally, I want a leader who thinks highly enough of me to explain in some detail how they plan to address these very bipartisan and reasonable longings, instead of diminishing them.

Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have now had their big national moments at their respective conventions. Despite Harris' apparent belief that she can win working and middle America without communicating a clear path forward, her inability to do so will likely be the reason she fails to win our support in meaningful ways.

About the writer

Skyler Adleta is an electrician in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

Skyler Adleta

© 2024 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC

Kamala Harris' Weird Speech Had No Substance

By Paul du Quenoy Aug 23, 2024 at 2:56 PM

Kamala Harris Details Plan To End Gaza War And 'Defend Israel'

In a weird, platitude-drenched speech last night, Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic Party's nomination as the America's first diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) candidate for president. That's an unpopular opinion. Democrats inherently reject any mention of the centrality of DEI to Harris' life and career as "racist," while scarcely hiding that it is also a highly effective means of muting any discussion of her competence, experience, and qualifications.

Too many Republicans fall for that cheap ploy and avoid the subject for fear of being called "racists" by Democrats. But the fact remains that in 2020, President Joe Biden chose Harris as his running mate solely because she is a woman of color.

It did not matter that Harris' own campaign for that year's Democratic nomination was a miserable failure that polled in the low single digits and that she ended it before any primary due to a lack of funds. It did not matter that her four years as California's junior senator were utterly unremarkable apart from championing DEI initiatives and viewpoints.

It did not matter that her tenure as attorney general, in which, she told her listeners, she always represented "the people," resulted in hundreds of convictions, mostly of poor minorities, that were later overturned due to evidence withheld by her office.

It did not matter that her start in public life was given to her during her affair with former California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. What mattered was that Biden, with his own campaign struggling, badly needed Black support in the 2020 South Carolina primary, and cut a sleazy backroom deal to place a Black woman on the ticket in exchange for that support.

Until just over a month ago, Kamala Harris was a bad joke—unpopular even among Democrats, with a favorability rating and polling numbers lower than Biden's, and a reputation among senior and junior administration staffers alike as a deeply insecure woman who lashed out so acerbically that her vice presidential office had a 92 percent turnover rate.

Harris' only major assignment, as "border czar," was an unmitigated disaster that allowed over 7.2 million illegal migrants to come into the United States after she forcefully told them on television, "Do not come."

Harris reportedly complained that she was kept out of the limelight, not given significant responsibilities, and generally treated by Biden as an insurance policy—the chaotic, cackling alternative America would suffer if anyone ever dared try to push him out. Only when the incumbent president—whose continuing presence in office remains glaringly unexplained—proved to be so far gone that he could not possibly continue without a catastrophic loss to Republican nominee Donald J. Trump did Harris get her chance at the top job, without a single vote cast in her favor.

Democrats assembled in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention clearly did not mind being disenfranchised by this palace coup. As Harris' increasingly nasally HR voice unrolled the speech, they clapped and cheered and chanted like trained seals at every vapid line, maudlin sob story, vague promise, and "daughter of the people" pose that emerged from the podium.

Harris consigned Biden—who was given a bum rush in a late-night spot on the convention's low-profile first evening—to a perfunctory "thanks and I love you" and only mentioned him once after that. At times, especially when she talked about the 2024 election as a "fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past—a chance to chart a new way forward" it sounded like she was running against Biden, who, with Harris as his No. 2, has been in office for the last three and a half years.

There was no sign of any critical listener on the convention floor, but voters should ask exactly where she was and what she was doing when the home, fuel, and grocery prices that she promised in her speech to reduce so drastically increased.

While Harris talked at length about her divorced parents and squalid upbringing, she uttered hardly a word about her tenure as vice president, what she has done in that role, or how she would use the presidency to keep her promises to create opportunity, enlarge the middle class, and unite the country.

She scare-mongered on abortion, falsely stating that Trump will seek a national abortion ban, and on guns, pledging to restrict their use and availability despite the horrific gun crime rates in Democratic-run cities, especially in her native California.

Despite her atrocious record as border czar, Harris pledged—once elected and not now or at any other time during her vice presidency—to bring the migrant crisis under control. She pledged to use lethal military force to stand up to our enemies, something the Biden administration, of which she was admittedly never a very valued part.

It has yet to do and certainly did not do in early 2022, when the addled president remarked that he would not react too strongly if Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, or earlier, when it tried its best to pay billions in tribute to Iran in exchange for empty promises not to complete its nuclear weapons program too soon.

With her party beset by division over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Harris promised security to Israelis and statehood to the Palestinians, again without any plan to achieve this virtually impossible goal, and claimed to be "working around the clock" on a ceasefire deal just days after the Biden-Harris foreign policy team yet again returned home empty-handed.

"Never let anyone tell you who you are," Harris boasted as advice from her late mother. American voters need to ask themselves whether they really know who she is, or if she even knows.

Paul du Quenoy is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.