Kamala Harris could have won by running harder to the left
Once again, claims that eligible voters are only available to the center or right are extremely misleading.
Over the past few days, online discourse has once again been relitigating whether Kamala Harris ran too far towards the center or towards the left. This is mostly happening, it seems, because centrist activists like The Searchlight Institute’s Adam Jentleson are interested in challenging the widespread impression that she tacked too hard to the right during her campaign.
The main problem with this debate, in my view, is that these vague ideological identifiers are still used in extremely subjective and inconsistent ways, which means that the substantive stakes are lost in semantics. Sometimes when pundits say that Harris ran too far to the left what they mean is that she was too invested in identity politics — even though Harris’s identity politics are much more strongly aligned with the Clintonian center-left. When other pundits say that she didn’t run far enough to the left, what they mean is that she failed to pursue the ambitious universal programs associated with figures like Bernie Sanders, or that she failed to position herself against the genocide in Israel. Republican aligned pundits, meanwhile, are likely to insist that she ran too far to the extreme left simply by virtue of running against Donald Trump. Obviously, arguments like these among activists who refuse to settle on consistent terms are unlikely to clarify anything.
In any case, against the backdrop of this hopeless terminological conclusion I’d like to look at a second problem: the ideology of potential voters. When centrist pundits make claims about this question, they usually rely on a simple kind of argument: since Democratic candidates are generally to the left of the broader population, and since they can generally take for granted leftward voters, they have the most to gain by competing for votes in the center and on the right. This is particularly true, they insist, since ideologies are distributed among the population in bell curve, with most voters falling somewhere in the middle.
When they’re arguing against these claims, leftists often seem to fall into the trap of insisting that most Americans are actually aligned to the left. Unfortunately, this just isn’t true, at least when it comes to self-identification — but this point is misleading. Here, based on some recent polling by YouGov and some election data1, is how various voting behaviors are ideologically distributed in the US:
