Kamala Harris has united her party, now she must transcend it

This summer’s Republican and Democratic nominating conventions were anything but conventional. Absent from both were the personal rivalries and factional infighting that usually flare up when these coalition parties gather to anoint their standard bearer.  

What explains these rare displays of party cohesion? That would be Donald Trump’s genius for polarizing Americans.  

July’s Republican convention in Milwaukee looked like a gaudier and more raucous version of a Chinese Communist Party plenum. Speaker after speaker acclaimed Trump as their party’s great helmsman as he looked on approvingly from his imperial box.  

Trump’s third nomination essentially was a mass conversion ceremony in which Republicans swore fealty to his brand of apocalyptic populism. Peruse their platform, and you’ll see that Republicans no longer stand for free markets, small government, individual autonomy, fiscal rectitude, judicial restraint and muscular U.S. leadership for a freer world.  

Instead, the Republican Party has degenerated into a groveling cult of personality. There’s no room in today’s Republican Party for anyone who questions Trump’s firehose of lies and insults, including his grotesque claims that America is in the terminal stages of national decline.  

To hear voices of Republican dissent you had to tune into the Democrats’ convention in Chicago. 

“Donald Trump has suffocated the soul of the Republican Party,” former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) told delegates last Thursday night before endorsing Kamala Harris.  

Kinzinger was one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 coup attempt. MAGA zealots have hounded him and all but one of the others out of office for putting their duty to defend the Constitution above loyalty to Trump.  

Trump’s GOP conquest in Milwaukee galvanized the anti-Trump party in Chicago. Harris cruised to the nomination unopposed despite not having campaigned for the job or won a single vote in the primaries.

President Biden’s delegates were elated by the opportunity to rally around a relatively young (59 years-old) nominee who has swiftly reenergized core constituencies and erased Trump’s summer surge in the polls. 

The paucity of dissent left me wondering if I was really at a Democratic National Convention. In yet another stroke of good fortune, threats by anti-Israel protesters to disrupt the convention fizzled.  

While the Trump Republicans are now severed from their own party’s past, Democrats had no problem fitting Harris into their party’s traditional narrative of civic inclusion and liberal pluralism.

In Milwaukee, the only living GOP president besides Trump — George W. Bush — was conspicuous by his absence. Nor were prominent Republicans from other administrations heard from. 

In Chicago, prime-time speeches by former Presidents Clinton and Obama as well as Hillary Clinton and Michele Obama underscored the continuity of Democratic principles and placed Harris squarely in the party’s pragmatically liberal mainstream. 

She drove home the point in an eloquent acceptance speech Thursday night. Harris introduced herself as the mixed-race child of immigrants growing up in a working-class neighborhood of Oakland. It was a classic “only in America” story of social mobility.

Sounding nothing like the “San Francisco radical” of Trump’s fancy, Harris steered clear of identity politics. She didn’t complain of discrimination or structural racism or dwell on the ceiling-shattering nature of her quest to become the first woman president.  

Instead, she stressed her background as a prosecutor and identified herself with a working middle class that believes in the American dream, plays by the rules and expects others to do the same.  

Calling U.S. democracy “the most important story ever told,” Harris rebuked Trump for “denigrating America” as a failing country, as well as for dallying with dictators rather than standing by U.S. friends abroad. 

Harris’s unabashed patriotism stands in refreshing contrast to the low esteem in which many college-educated elites hold their country. Her unequivocal support for Israel’s right to exist and condemnation of Hamas terrorism also sets her apart from the progressive left.    

For Harris, the Chicago convention was a coming out party that at last put her determined yet joyous persona front and center. Unlike Trump, she seems to be enjoying herself.  

Crucially, her speech showed she’s reaching beyond her party’s base to the swing voters in battleground states — moderates, independents and working-class voters — who will pick the next president.

Even so, she has a lot more work to do. Over the next two-plus months, Harris will have to assuage doubts about Democrats that, along with his age, fed cratering public confidence in Biden.

That means rebuilding voters’ trust in her party’s ability to manage a dynamic and growing economy, expanding opportunities for Americans without college degrees, getting public debts under control, embracing a more realistic transition to clean energy and taking center-ground positions on cultural issues like immigration, crime and what kids are taught in school. 

It also will require doing things party activists won’t like. For example, she needs to ease up on the hackneyed rhetoric about corporate greed and price-gouging that makes her sound like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) circa 2010.  

Having united her party, Harris’s job is now to transcend it — to become a national rather than a partisan leader, someone who can bind together a country fractured by Trumpian malice and rage.    

Steeped in declinist pessimism and nostalgia, the Republicans have lost faith in America’s ability to turn diversity into a source of national dynamism and self-renewal. Harris and the Democrats still believe America is working as it should to make freedom and democracy work for all citizens. In that optimism lies their best hope for victory in November. 

Will Marshall is president of the Progressive Policy Institute.