The thousands of Democrats filing out of the United Center on Thursday night were exuberant. They had seen their new nominee, Kamala Harris, prove that she can deliver a crisp and stirring primetime speech. Joe Biden was history; the future of the party lay before them, along with the growing likelihood that Donald Trump could be beaten again in November.
Celebrations were everywhere at the Democratic National Convention, the first physical gathering in eight years — parties, afterparties, buffet breakfasts, caucus meetings, and all the other giddy rendezvous. The vice president and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, were the toast of Chicago, and most intraparty dissent had been tamped down, although the Uncommitted Movement had demanded a Palestinian speaker at the convention and the DNC had rebuffed them. Beyond the security perimeter, the pro-Palestinian marches were sizable but not as enormous as billed, and disruptions were minimal. It was not 1968 out there.
The question that the convention did not answer is what a Kamala Harris administration will look like if she wins. Because Biden dropped out and anointed her, Harris never had to compete in an open primary. The last time she was subjected to such pressure — and had to regularly interact with the press — was 2020. That campaign went poorly. Now, Harris is offering herself up as both a callback to Barack Obama and a continuity candidate who would honor, theoretically at least, some of Biden’s policy accomplishments. She has not, so far, openly broken with Biden, and she has echoed his rhetoric on both the war in Ukraine and Israel-Hamas, though she spoke more forcefully at the convention about the civilian suffering in Gaza.
What this all means, though, is unclear. There is no Democratic equivalent of the GOP’s Project 2025 — not yet, anyway. And since Biden dropped out of the race, a month ago, Harris has refused to conduct sitdown interviews or speak with journalists for any extended period of time. It’s a risk-averse strategy, and it’s paid off so far, as Trump has flailed. But the race remains quite close and Harris will eventually be forced to sketch out a policy vision for undecided voters in key swing states.
What do we know? Harris endorses the construction of more housing to alleviate a nationwide affordability crisis. She wants to offer a subsidy to first-time homebuyers. And she wants to combat grocery price gouging through some sort of price controls, and protect the Affordable Care Act. But it is difficult to evaluate any of these serious proposals without further details from her team.
Would Harris continue to crack down on the cryptocurrency industry?
One of the most significant — and underappreciated — shifts of the Biden era was his approach to antitrust. Biden was the first president in decades to take trust-busting seriously and to try to halt the ongoing and anti-competitive conglomeration of big business in America. Biden’s Justice Department successfully sued Google over their search monopoly, and his young Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan, has made it her mission to combat monopolization in all walks of life.
Corporate titans revile her. The richest Democratic donors, including media mogul Barry Diller and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, have made it plain that they’d want Harris to dump Khan. Obama was far cozier with business and tech elites than Biden; many of his top aides eventually went to work in Silicon Valley. David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, ended up at Uber and Facebook, and former White House press secretary Jay Carney took lucrative positions at Amazon and Airbnb. Harris’s brother-in-law, Tony West, spoke at the Democratic convention — he is now Uber’s chief legal officer.
There’s the unsettling reality that many business and tech leaders might view Harris as an opportunity. She has not yet shown she has the same affinity for Biden’s left-populism and his administration’s skepticism of corporate power. The Obama administration permitted numerous acquisitions and mergers to take place — Facebook buying Instagram, Google buying Waze, the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger — that Biden might have blocked. In another example that Biden meant business, Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary, scuttled the Spirit Airlines-Frontier merger.
If Harris wins, she would feel emboldened to replace Biden appointees with her own. Bidenworld, after all, mostly shunted her to the side, and it’s only now that she’s becoming a political star. Would Buttigieg survive a Harris presidency? Would Khan? Would Rohit Chopra, the ambitious Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director, who has also, like Khan, challenged corporate power? Would Harris continue to crack down on the cryptocurrency industry? She is still a Democrat, close to Biden, so there would be no full-scale repudiation, no regime-burning, but progressives have cause for worry.
Walz may be the olive branch. Among the top candidates for the ticket, he was the most friendly to progressives, and he had won plaudits in Minnesota for signing into a law a raft of progressive bills, including universal free school lunches and paid and family medical leave. He is not a neoliberal or a triangulator. He exists on the ideological spectrum to the left of Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor who seemed to have the inside track to the Harris ticket, until he didn’t.
Walz, like Harris, has not granted many interviews, and he’s been most visible at rallies and on cable television. His thoughts on corporate power or thorny foreign policy matters are still not fleshed out. That, of course, is the advantage of a primary season — for ideas to be floated and contested in the public.
Instead, we have questions and more questions. The threat of Trump is well understood, as are his designs on the presidency. He wants, at the very minimum, to use the levers of the office to punish his enemies. He may want to further cut taxes on the rich. He will seek to install as many Trump loyalists as possible in the federal bureaucracy, and reward corporate friends with business-friendly policies.
Harris represents normalcy, and that might be enough. What we don’t know is what kind of normalcy. We only have the feeling, the vibe, the sense of what we might be rushing toward. Enough Democrats are content with that for now. They can’t think much past November. ❖
Ross Barkan is a writer from New York City.
