Election 2024: Security versus identity
This most complex of presidential elections is deceptively simple: security versus identity. Which prevails will determine not only how the campaign is waged, but who will prevail in it.
Despite her momentum since replacing Biden, it is not Kamala Harris who will determine this “how,” but Trump.
It was clear early that Biden trailed on the issues. Nothing Biden’s campaign or administration did could change this. Biden’s strategy therefore had been to make 2024 about Trump, his indictments, and being a “convicted felon.”
However, Biden’s personal failings eclipsed the contrast Democrats sought — rather, they widened Biden’s deficits across the polling spectrum (two-way, five-way and in battleground states).
Biden’s ouster and Harris’s elevation have allowed Democrats to return to their Trump-focused strategy.
Harris is not attempting to resuscitate Biden-Harris policies but rolling out her own — despite their frequent conflict with her past positions. Yet mostly Harris is not talking substantively at all — and certainly not to the media.
The reason is that Democrats still want to avoid a policy campaign; they want an identity campaign. This fits with their ideological identity-group view. A bastardization of socialism’s class struggle, it sees all conflicts occurring between oppressed and oppressor and all society’s meaningful interaction as a form of conflict.
For Democrats, Kamala Harris embodies the oppressed — not as an individual, but as a member of the groups she represents: the left, women, and non-white. As little as Harris was oppressed personally (her “that little girl was me” 2019 attack on Biden notwithstanding), to Democrats she personifies the oppressed.
And as much as Harris embodies the oppressed, Trump epitomizes the oppressor for Democrats: white, male, conservative, older and business-minded.
For Democrats, a Harris versus Trump contest not only revitalizes the identity strategy Biden blunted; it allows them to see the world as they want — and need — to see it.
Everything Democrats are doing complements their identity strategy. Harris functions primarily as a symbol, not as substance — particularly the Biden-Harris administration issues they must avoid. When they must address them (as with fracking in Pennsylvania), they flip-flop, or resort to a pandering liberal pastiche, as in Harris’s economic plan.
But more to the point, Democrats must avoid substance altogether, as Harris has blatantly done with the media. After all, for them this election is not about substance, but symbolism: the symbolism of the identities that Harris represents to them.
Of course, Republicans see the election very differently. They not only don’t see the world through the Democrats’ identity-group lens; they want a policy campaign.
They recognize the Biden-Harris administration has already lost this debate on issues; ultimately that is why Democrats deposed Biden: had Biden been winning on the issues he would still be Democrats’ nominee.
Rather than being about identity — or even policy in general — Republicans should want this campaign to be about security. The Biden-Harris administration’s overarching failure is that it has reduced Americans’ sense of security across the board.
On the economy, Biden-Harris inflation has undercut Americans’ earnings; abroad, Biden-Harris foreign policy has emboldened America’s enemies; domestically, Americans feel less safe from crime and across America’s southern border, illegal immigration has poured. Over and over, Americans’ most pressing concerns come back to security and Americans feeling its absence.
For all this campaign’s unprecedented qualities and complexities, 2024 remains — and will remain — an identity versus a security election.
Democrats want 2024 to hinge on the former, equating any rejection of Kamala Harris as a rejection of the identity groups she represents. So, Harris runs as a symbol and away from substance — especially the Biden-Harris record.
Republicans want 2024 to hinge on substance — especially that of the last four years. Americans have already rejected this administration on these grounds. And they will reject Kamala Harris if the election is waged on this terrain.
For all of Harris’s recent momentum, the choice of where this campaign is waged is not hers; it is Trump’s. Harris has no alternative to running as a symbol.
Accordingly, Harris will continue to avoid the media indefinitely unless Trump presses her on substance and forces her onto his terrain.
The longer Trump runs against Harris as a symbol, the more he plays to Democrats’ strength and strategy. The more he runs on security, something Americans feel threatened throughout their lives, the more he forces Harris to go to the media and explain to Americans why what they feel is wrong.
At its ultimate level, this election can only follow one of two paths. If it follows security, Trump wins. If it follows identity, Harris has a good chance.
J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987 to 2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004 to 2023.
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