Opinion | Kamala Harris Was the Establishment in an Anti-Establishment Election

The strategy of the Kamala Harris campaign sounded great on paper. She would stay clear of the unpopular progressive positions of 2019, unapologetically embrace American patriotism and freedom, and establish a broad coalition by gladly accepting the endorsements of former Republican officials and officeholders like Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The approach seemed strategically reasonable. Modeled on the cross-ideological “popular front” against fascism in the 1930s, it has been tried against right-wing populist parties and candidates in Israel, Hungary and other countries in recent years. Yet the strategy has, at best, a mixed record of success. Add in the sour, inflation-inflected mood among voters around the world that has brought down incumbents over the past year, and Ms. Harris’s struggles can begin to look like the most recent episode of a continuing story.

But the decisive defeat of the Harris campaign strategy has its own dimension — and it is not just the consequence of a fleeting bad vibe in the country or the world. For years and even decades, overwhelming majorities of Americans have been telling pollsters that they are unhappy about the direction of the country and much else besides. By portraying herself as the defender and champion of the country’s governing establishment against Donald Trump’s anti-system impulses and diatribes, she placed herself, fatally, on the wrong side of public opinion.

For more than a decade, between 50 percent and 75 percent of the country has told pollsters they think the country is on the wrong track. That’s the most widely discussed measure of discontent, but there are others that tell an even bleaker story. Asked by Gallup in October if they are satisfied with the way things are going in the country, barely more than a quarter of respondents said yes. Another longstanding Gallup poll tracks the level of public confidence in major U.S. institutions. It’s been falling since the debacle of the Iraq War and the financial crisis of 2008, and currently reveals that a mere 28 percent of Americans have such confidence. Perhaps bleakest of all is a Pew poll about trust in government, which sits at an astonishingly low 22 percent.

The reasons for this lost trust are almost too numerous to mention. Aside from the aforementioned Iraq War and financial crisis, there was a pandemic response by public health officials that many thought was far too draconian, with lockdowns causing widespread suffering and psychological and educational damage to children; a humiliating and demoralizing withdrawal of military forces from Afghanistan; the sharply rising prices of 2022 and spike in interest rates that followed, making many working people feel significantly poorer; skyrocketing public debt; surging rates of homelessness and the spread of tent encampments in American cities; a tense, frustrating and seemingly endless stalemate in Ukraine’s war with Russia; and a flood of undocumented migrants streaming over the southern border, which continued largely unabated for years until the Biden administration was forced by political reality last summer to firmly address the problem.

Maybe you don’t consider all or even many of these to be failures. But many Americans do — and they consider them especially galling because those who have presided over them, from both parties, tend not to concede any fault. Officeholders develop policies and implement them, and when voters disapprove of the outcome, those in charge more often than not simply move on to the next thing, hoping the discontent gets forgotten, or else wave away the criticism as a function of ignorance or disinformation.

Turns out, that isn’t very politically effective. On the contrary, it tends to lead the discontent to fester and develop into a virulent infection plaguing the body politic. Donald Trump is its foremost and most dangerous symptom.

To put the problem in somewhat different terms: Ms. Harris ran for president as a conservative aiming to preserve, protect and defend the country’s bipartisan political establishment against the anti-system furor that’s been rising for many years in the electorate and that is fuel behind the MAGA movement. The problem is that there simply aren’t enough voters in the mood to celebrate that establishment and its works.

That poses a daunting problem for Democrats because, since the time of the New Deal nearly a century ago, the party has aimed to use the power of government to improve the lives of ordinary Americans. Since the 1990s, the impulse to find new ways to accomplish this goal has run up against potent, organized opposition, with the early ambitions of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama met by resounding electoral repudiations in the midterm elections halfway through their first terms. But now skepticism, if not cynicism, about government goes beyond proposals to expand the size and scope of government. It extends to much of what the government already does, beyond automatic transfer payments and some forms of law enforcement.

This doesn’t mean Democrats need to pack it up and go home. Instead of proposing sweeping new programs or even taking a stand, as Ms. Harris did, in defense of the status quo, they could try to redefine themselves as responsible reformers.

The first step in doing so would be to admit some of the mistakes public servants from both parties have made over the past two decades and express humility about them, along with the desire to learn from those errors. In some cases, this could yield promises to change or even halt some government work. Parts of what Ms. Harris proposed — reforms designed to increase the housing supply and lower housing costs; building on the Biden administration’s efforts at permitting reform — were tentative steps in this direction. They paid few political dividends because they were isolated lines in stump speeches rather than integral parts (along with others) of the campaign’s overarching vision of the country’s future.

Many Americans have lost their trust in government. Democrats need to be at the forefront of helping to earn back that trust. The first step toward doing so, like an effort to overcome an addiction, must be admitting there’s a problem. If this week’s painful drubbing at the polls has that effect on the party, it may well prove to have a salutary effect.

Damon Linker, who writes the newsletter “Notes From the Middleground,” is a senior lecturer in the department of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.

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