There we go: Harris/Walz 24

Candidate swap complete. Okay, I’m convinced. Let’s go win this thing.

The party conventions are always a sales event—they’re the political versions of those big keynotes Apple does—but this one was remarkably well put-together, probably the best of my lifetime, which is especially insane considering they had to swap candidates only four weeks ago. I’m acting like Belle’s father from Beauty and the Beast, just staring at it asking “how is this accomplished?” I’m really looking forward to next summer’s deluge of tell-all behind-the-scenes books, explaining how in the heck they pulled any of this off.

This bit from Josh Marshall’s piece on the final night stuck with me:

What I took from this is a sense of focus and discipline from the people running Harris’ convention and campaign — not getting lost in glitz or stagecraft but defining a specific list of critical deliverables and then methodically checking them off the list. This was going on in the midst of what was unquestionably a high-powered and high-energy event. There was a mix of discipline and ability there that could not fail to have an impact but was also, in the intensity of the final day of a convention, easy to miss.

The other nights had some of this too. But it came through to me most clearly tonight.

I continue to think there’s more going on in this campaign than much of the political and commenting class has yet understood or reckoned with.

There’s a thing going on here that’s not just a “honeymoon phase” after a surprise switch-up. Personally, I think a big part is the Dem’s long overdue embrace of being the “regular people” party, but critically, without a self-destructive “pivot to the center.” In the US “The Center”, like “libertarian” is just a code word for a republican who smokes weed and doesn’t openly hate the gays. For ages now the Dems have surrendered so much American iconography—camo, flags, guns, the entire midwest—and it’s incredibly refreshing to see the Dems openly embrace all that “Real America” stuff, leaving the Repubs with nothing but looking like the creepy weirdo loosers they are.

I tend to think of the Democrats as, effectively, a British-style coalition, just without the framework the parliamentary system provides of actually having each member party having a public number of seats. Instead the factions are fluid and more obscure. Which makes intra-party negotiations hard even in better times, and even more so when the “other side” isn’t a coalition and is full of wannabe petty dictators. From the outside, and probably from the inside, it’s hard to tell how the various factions are doing versus each other.

There are, bluntly, a lot of issues that just aren’t on the ballot this year, which for whatever reason have fallen outside of the contextual Overton window of the ’24 election. The lack of formal coalition dynamics makes those so frustrating; there’s no way to know how close they were to being on the ballot. And, of course, the reason I keep calling this a “harm reduction” election is that for those about six things I’m subtweeting, the other side would be an absolute catastrophe. And that’s before we remember that the baseline of the opponents here really is “…or fascism.”

That said, it’s such a relief to see that the party seems to have finally shook off the Clinton/Blair era “Third Way” hangover and landed in a much more progressive place than I’d have ever hoped a few years ago. This feels like a group that would have held the banks accountable, for starters?

The first Bill Clinton campaign is the one this keeps making me think of, that explicit sense of “the old ways failed, here comes the new generation.” (Speaking of, can you imagine how hard Harris would kill on the old Arsenio show? For that matter, how hard Walz would?)

But more than any of that, this is a campaign and a candiate that’s here to play None of this gingerly hoping “we can finally talk about policy,” this a group that’s solidly on the offensive and staying there. The Dem’s traditional move has been to blow what should have been easy wins (looking at you 2000 and 2016) mostly by wrecking out the campaign to chase votes they were never going to get, or because actually trying to win power was beneath them somehow. Not this time. Non-MAGA America is deeply, profoundly sick of those assholes, and Harris has really captured the desire to move on as a country.

Finally!

In any case, we’re really though the looking glass now. No one has any idea what’s going to happen. Yeah, I saw that poll, and yes that one, and that one. We’re so far outside the lines I don’t think any of those mean anything we can interpret with the data we have. At this point, anybody who says what they think is going to happen without ending the sentence with a question mark is lying.

To quote Doctor Who: “Oh, knowing's easy. Everyone does that ad nauseam. I just sort of hope."