Why Everyone Should Vote For Kamala Harris

Well, ok, not everyone -- but many cross-pressured undecideds should. This post is for them.

Like most scribblers on politics, I’m completely sick of writing about the election. But I also feel like there’s nothing else anyone is paying attention to; if I don’t write about the election, I’m writing into the void. On yet a third hand, though, what is left to say? Turnout in this election is almost certainly going to be lower than in 2020, and the percentage of undecided voters is at a low level as well. Like 2012, the race looks close, but it also looks relatively stable. People have largely made up their minds. What more is there to talk about?

Well, while there aren’t that many of them who are still undecided, but there are lots of cross-pressured voters out there. Most of them have decided what their priorities are. We’re all familiar with Never Trump Republicans who are supporting Kamala Harris because, even though they are opposed to core parts of the Democrats’ economic and social agenda, they cannot vote for someone who tried to overturn an election. I’m sure there are cross-pressured folks who have clearly decided to vote for Donald Trump for one reason or another.

But there are surely cross-pressured voters who remain undecided who they should vote for—or if they want to vote at all. There are principled opponents of abortion who also consider themselves feminists and supporters of a family-friendly welfare state. There are libertarians who want to dramatically shrink the regulatory state, cut taxes, liberalize immigration and robustly support the rights to free speech and to bear arms. There are immigration restrictionists who also believe in strong unions. There are supporters of the Palestinian cause with a variety of views on other topics who are appalled by both parties’ support for Israel. I’m going to use this post to make the case why these people should vote for Harris.

Let’s take them one at a time.

Anti-Abortion Feminists. I bet a lot of abortion-rights supporters don’t believe such people exist—but they absolutely do. The more intellectually-inclined among them hang out at Leah Libresco’s Substack, Other Feminisms, or should. For a generation, people with this orientation have increasingly made a home in the Republican Party as the Democratic Party has grown increasingly dogmatic on the subject of abortion rights, and have labored to open space within the GOP for genuinely family-friendly economic and social policy. Why should someone like this switch teams now, when Harris is running firmly against any abortion restrictions any time, anywhere?

My answer, in a nutshell, is that thanks to Trump, the anti-abortion movement won its most important national battle: the end of Roe v. Wade. States are now free to enact any restrictions on abortion that they wish—and many have done so. The prospect of major restrictions on abortion being passed at a national level is limited given the distinct unpopularity of such restrictions; meanwhile, the fallout from state-level restrictions has driven up popular support for abortion rights nationally. The core challenge for the anti-abortion movement is to demonstrate that state-level bans work, and are not putting women at risk in pregnancy, and on the back of that to build further support for restrictions in additional states. The core challenge for abortion opponents who also favor a strong welfare state, meanwhile, is to defend the welfare state and reform and expand it in a family-friendly direction.

A Trump presidency is going to be actively unhelpful with both goals. He puts the most masculinist possible face on the anti-abortion cause, which repels most women; his supporters are focused on using the national government to further restrict abortion access (for example, by limiting the availability of mifepristone), which will galvanize opposition in purple states; and, most important, his fiscal policies will prove devastating to the welfare state that these cross-pressured voters support.

A Harris presidency will also be unhelpful toward the first goal; she’s surely going to try to undermine states’ ability to enforce their bans on abortion, and will try to pass national legislation supporting abortion rights. But the prospect of national abortion rights legislation will be hampered by a likely Republican Senate. Meanwhile, Harris’s core domestic policy goal is expanding the “care economy.” A Republican Senate could prevent her from achieving that goal—but it could also partner with her to do so in a more family-friendly and fiscally-sustainable way. Anti-abortion feminists who vote for Harris and for a Republican Senate could be crucial to brokering such a deal.

If you oppose abortion and also favor cuts to the welfare state, then Trump is the obvious choice for you on policy. But if you are cross-pressured in this way, I think there’s a strong case for supporting Harris.

Libertarians. A lot of liberal friends of mine are baffled by the idea of a libertarian supporting Donald Trump—but I definitely know self-identified libertarians who are, because they prioritize gun rights, or the prospect of an assault on the regulatory state. I also know self-identified libertarians who are supporting Harris, because they support abortion rights or more liberal immigration or because they see Trump as a fundamental threat to democracy. But a great many libertarians (see, for example, this Reason Magazine roundup) look at these two candidates and say: a plague on both your houses.

I understand the impulse; the “libertarian moment” was decidedly short-lived if it ever happened, and it’s hard to vote for the lesser of two evils when, from your perspective, both choices keep getting more evil. But I don’t think it’s a serious way to approach politics to say: political trends are against me and therefore I will opt out entirely. Here’s my case for why libertarians who hate both parties should support Harris.

First of all, as noted above, Harris is very likely to lead a divided government, and will therefore be seriously constrained in what she can do on the domestic front. As well, she faces a Republican-dominated Supreme Court that has already shown an interest in curbing the administrative state. By contrast, Trump may have a unified Republican government to work with, and while the Supreme Court may be a check on any administration that behaves in a lawless manner, some of what Trump wants to do that threatens liberty likely won’t raise their hackles.

I’m thinking, in particular, of the approach to tariffs and to the regulatory state that Trump has articulated. Trump plans to raise tariffs substantially—something he can do without legislative approval. That’s a direct assault on free trade, but it also means that businesses will be petitioning Trump for waivers for inputs they need. Trump also plans to staff the Federal government’s regulatory agencies with loyalists who are more responsive to political pressure than to a neutral process; that’s a very different objective than either reducing regulations or tilting the process in a more free-market direction. He has also argued in favor of reducing the independence of the Federal Reserve. The overarching thrust of Trump’s articulated approach to government is to further politicize the government’s economic decisions. This not only opens up enormous scope for corruption, but could seriously reduce the degree to which America has a free-market economy governed by the rule of law, as opposed to a crony-capitalist economy governed by a partnership between big business and big government. And the Supreme Court is unlikely to be an obstacle to any of this.

Of course, Harris is not running as a deregulator and is unlikely to govern as one. If she wins the election, it’s possible that the Democratic Party will continue its trend away from the deregulatory neoliberalism of the Clinton era. But it might not; Bill Clinton, after all, is the one who declared the era of big government to be over, and it’s not that hard to imagine the shape-shifting Harris facing a Republican Congress being pushed in a similar direction. It’s much harder to imagine a similar evolution by the Democrats if Trump wins, though, and it’s equally hard to imagine if Trump wins that the GOP will trend back in a libertarian direction. That should be reason enough for cross-pressured libertarians to prefer a Harris presidency.

Pro-Union Immigration Restrictionists. In his first campaign for the presidency, Trump made immigration restriction his signature issue. He also made historic gains among blue-collar workers, and looks likely to make additional gains among that demographic this year whoever wins. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, presided over an unprecedented surge in migrants seeking asylum, and tasked Harris with dealing with the border early in his term. Why would someone who supports immigration restriction and strong unions even be cross-pressured?

Trump may get a lot of support from blue-collar workers, but most of them aren’t members of unions. And while he may get a lot of support from unionized workers as well, that’s largely for reasons unrelated to union business—for example, his stance on immigration. Republicans, including Trump, reliably appoint people to the relevant agencies like the NLRB who rule in a pro-management, anti-union direction. Biden, meanwhile, has been the most pro-union Democrat in my lifetime. If people who support strong unions and immigration restriction aren’t cross-pressured, they must not be paying attention.

Now, of course, there are other issues that unions themselves care about besides how easy or hard it is to organize. They care about their members’ healthcare, for example, and whether their pensions are properly funded. These issues, though, also cut strongly in Harris’s direction. Unions have also generally been protectionist in orientation on trade, correctly perceiving big trade deals as ways of sidelining union concerns and giving multinational corporations more power. Biden and Trump have both turned away from free trade, but their approaches have been very different, with Biden being much more focused on building up American business in a strategic way, while Trump has called for massive and un-strategic across-the-board tariffs. Most important, though, when Trump included pro-union provisions in his first term trade agenda (as, for example, the labor provisions added to NAFTA when it became the USMCA), these were pushed by congressional Democrats. Even if you favor an industrial policy with a trade-protectionist aspect to it, I think you have every reason to prefer Harris to Trump both for being more likely to be union-friendly in orientation and less-likely to be economically destructive.

Immigration, though, is legitimately an issue where, if you are a strong restrictionist, you should prefer Trump. Nonetheless, I think the case can be made that Harris and the Democrats have learned their lesson, and will prioritize securing the border and reforming the asylum system as their first immigration priority before moving on to trying to secure a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants who are up to date on their taxes and have not committed other crimes. Meanwhile, I think the case that Trump either fails to deliver on his immigration promises (as he failed in his first term), and generates a powerful thermostatic reaction against any abuses he engages in (which also happened in his first term), is real.

If you’re an immigration restrictionist above all, it makes sense to reward the man who put the issue front and center of the national agenda. If you’re cross-pressured, however, I think there’s an argument for giving Harris a chance to make good on the Democrats’ very belated shift on the issue.

Pro-Palestinian Voters. I fully understand why voters whose core issue is the Palestinian cause feel like they simply cannot support Harris because of the Biden administration’s robust support for Israel and its total failure to moderate Israel’s behavior or open up any space for a political future for the Palestinians. Those who take that view and are also paying attention to Trump’s past actions and present promises know that he will not be better and could easily be worse, from the perspective of such voters, on their core issue. If you want to see what these kinds of voters are wrestling with, check out this debate between Shadi Hamid and Haroon Moghul.

I am not going to use this space to try to argue such voters out of their core commitment and try to convince them to see the issue differently, any more than I have done for the other groups and issues I discussed above. I’ll just note that unlike my other hypothesized groups, this one is not really cross-pressured in the same way. They might agree with Trump on a number of unrelated issues, or with Harris, or they might be cross-pressured between those other issues. But on their core issue, this group’s problem is that both parties appear to them to be terrible, and to have gotten more terrible since the last time they had to make this choice.

I’ve written about such voters before. In that earlier piece, I argued first of all, that if you support Trump or Harris on other issues, but are also outraged by America’s policy toward Israel, you could reasonably decide just to vote on those other issues. That’s hard to do when the issue in question strikes you as being of paramount moral import. There’s a reason that anti-slavery voters in 1844 supported the hopeless candidacy of James G. Birney, whose 2.3% tally was larger than the popular vote margin between James K. Polk and Henry Clay. But if you take that path, or sit out the election entirely on the basis that neither party clears the minimal bar for support on the only issue that matters to you, you must be prepared for that to be your stance for a very long time, and for you to have no direct influence over what happens on your core issue during that period.

I don’t think there’s any case for supporting Trump in the expectation that he will be tougher on Israel or more supportive of the Palestinian cause; that view just flies in the face of all the evidence. But I do think there’s a case for supporting Harris specifically on the issue of foreign policy even if you have no expectation that she would be any better than Biden at advancing the Palestinian cause.

That case, basically, is that any hope for the Palestinian cause depends on one of two things happening. Either America’s position in the world collapses completely, and that collapse brings Israel down with it, or the world eventually finds its way to a more humane order in international relations of the kind the architects of the post-World-War-II era dreamed of founding. If you’re voting in an American election on the basis that America needs to suffer a catastrophic collapse, we’ve really got nothing to discuss. But if you hold out some hope of the other possibility, Harris is the only candidate interested in moving the world in that direction at all. Trump, by contrast, actively wants to tear down what’s left of that order, not to build a new one, but to have America win in a world of unconstrained great power ambition. In that world, Israel could well lose everything—but the Palestinians are all but certain to lose everything first.

I think that hope is quite slim, frankly. But if you discount that hope entirely, and assume we will be in a world of unconstrained great power ambition going forward, there is still the question of which candidate and which party is more likely to see a value in soft power as a tool of that ambition, the deployment of which would require them to pursue those ambitions with less than total ruthlessness.

Attentive readers will note that, in a number of ways, I’m arguing that cross-pressured people with opposed views should nonetheless both support Harris. My libertarian favors more open immigration and freer trade while my union-supporter is an immigration restrictionist who favors protectionism. How could I make the case that they should support the same candidate? The answer isn’t just that there are other issues they both have in play. It’s also that I think one candidate—Trump—will pursue more negative-sum policies in general. Both candidates are too protectionist for a free traders, for example—but all protectionist policies are not created equal.

And that connects to another factor that I think should be especially crucial for cross-pressured voters. Ultimately, I think presidential character matters enormously, frequently more than policy specifics, in determining whether a presidency is successful, and leaves the American republic in better shape than it was before or than it would have been with other leadership. Obviously, you want someone in the Oval Office who wants to lead the country in your preferred direction, but you also want someone with an informed understanding of how to get where they are leading. You want someone with fortitude, wisdom and prudence, someone who knows when to stay the course despite adversity and when to take another road or even reverse direction. And you want someone more interested in winning people over than in just winning.

Obviously, indictments can be made of both candidates’ characters. I don’t have a Pollyanna view of Harris, to say the least. But I don’t think the choice between her and Trump is a close call on this dimension—and you’ll note that I’m not talking about character in the sense of how they conduct themselves in their private lives nor what kind of rhetoric they engage in. If that’s your view as well, and the way you’re cross-pressured is between who you think has the character to be a better president versus who has better positions on the issues, my closing argument is that it’s much easier to change your positions on the issues than your fundamental character, and that part of good character in a political leader is knowing when to change.