What If Kamala Wins?

Photo by Kamala Harris, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Earlier this week, I took a look at what might unfold if Donald Trump wins the election and becomes president once again. The outcome of the election remains a coin flip, so today, I’ll address the possibility of a Kamala Harris presidency.

To start with, the betting markets are giving Trump the edge and Republican pundits are practically coronating The Former Guy, but the polling remains extremely close in both national polling and swing states. In fact, as Trump closes in national polling but the Electoral College remains a tossup, it opens up the possibility of a Trump win in the popular vote with a Harris win in the Electoral College. That would be deeply ironic but not good for the country at all.

However it happens, a Harris presidency would start with a crisis as Donald Trump challenges the outcome of the election and whips MAGA into a violent frenzy. I think there is a chance of violence if Trump wins, but the chances are much greater if Trump loses.

For the first few months of the crisis, Kamala won’t be president, but she will undoubtedly have some influence over the Biden Administration’s response. How Harris and Biden respond to this crisis will set the tone for her presidency. As Garry Trudeau pointed out in Sunday’s “Doonesbury” comic, it would be an official act with absolute immunity if the Biden Administration simply locked up Donald Trump to keep him from causing trouble. However fun this is to think about, I don’t think it would be a good course.

Once Kamala takes office, things get immediately murky. Where Trump has a disturbing track record, Harris doesn’t have much of one at all. In fact, there seem to be two Kamalas. One was the hardcore progressive that ran for president in 2020 and the other is the more moderate candidate from this year. Which is the real Kamala?

I have not performed an exhaustive investigation of Harris’s policy positions over time, but speaking to Jamie Weinstein on The Dispatch Podcast, David Frum made the case that she is a typical liberal rather than a staunch progressive. Frum pointed out that she veered left in 2020 based on faulty polling and that it didn’t work. He speculates that she learned from the experience and may be less inclined to chase public opinion in the future. If so, that would be a good thing in a President Harris.

I think there is hope that Kamala will maintain her moderate positions from the campaign, especially after seeing how the backlash to progressive policies from the Biden Administration almost put Donald Trump back in the White House. Harris may realize that her best hope for a second term is to govern from the middle rather than veering back to the left. As I’ve said before, whichever party realizes that they can be sane and win the middle repeatedly will seize on a long-term majority… as long as they can keep their crazies in check.

And even if Harris tries to veer left, she probably won’t be able to. The odds are very good that Republicans will control at least the Senate and possibly the entire Congress. This would make Harris’s agenda DOA from the outset.

Republican control of the Senate would also eliminate any possibility of Harris pushing to remove the filibuster. There would be no point in taking the public opinion hit on nuking the filibuster if the opposition party had a congressional majority.

Harris has advocated ending the filibuster for abortion legislation, but even if Democrats hold a majority in the Senate, it won’t be her call. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said only that the Democratic caucus would “discuss” the proposal. Schumer may well remember the price that Democrats paid after Harry Reid nuked the judicial filibuster. They are still paying it with a trio of Trump appointees that could not be blocked and a long list of increasingly partisan judges.

When it comes to abortion, without the end of the filibuster, there will no codification of Roe and no national abortion ban. With the filibuster in place, there is a stalemate between the evenly divided parties. Without the filibuster, we might find that the situation gets worse as the pendulum swings between very permissive abortion laws and outright bans with successive Administrations and Congresses.

There might be more hope for immigration reform, however. Republicans and Democrats came very close to agreement earlier this year on a bill largely authored by immigration hawks. Donald Trump scuttled that bill from his campaign, but if Trump loses, there is a real chance that Democrats, who got hammered on the border this election, will be able to find enough common ground with Republicans to reform the system. As I’ve said before, anything a president can do unilaterally is nothing more than patchwork on a badly broken, antiquated, and often contradictory system.

Foreign policy is one of Harris’s strongest areas. While Harris is not a free trader, she is better than Trump on international trade and tariff policy. She is a strong supporter of Israel (the Biden Administration actually deployed US troops to Israel to help defend against Iranian missiles) and in one of the most important differences with Donald Trump, she is also a strong supporter of Ukraine. Helping Ukraine to defend itself is vital to prevent Russia from starting an even larger war as well as to keep China from getting aggressive ideas about Taiwan.

Culture war issues are where Harris would be weakest. She would likely continue unpopular Biden policies on transgender education and sports. This bureaucratic rulemaking is being reined in by the Supreme Court, however. A ruling last summer overturned the Chevron deference and severely limits the ability of federal agencies to make new administrative law. The decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, and Relentless v. Department of Commerce puts the legislative ball back in Congress’s court where it belongs and limits the authority of presidents to do Congress’s job.

Harris’s ability to act on other culture war issues will be similarly limited by the courts and Congress. Even Democrats should applaud this because it will help to save the party from itself. In a perfect world, the new dynamic will force Congress to focus on crafting laws rather than soundbites.

If Kamala Harris turns out to be the mediocre president that Republicans predict, the Democratic Party will pay a price at the polls. Midterm elections could extend Republican majorities if they can find candidates who aren’t crazy. Statistics and logic would also favor a Republican victory in the presidential election in 2028, again assuming Republicans can pick a candidate who isn’t crazy.

Kamala Harris is a bit of an enigma. That may be a negative, but the fact that Trump is not an enigma is a definite negative for him. A different Republican would probably be running 10 points ahead of Harris, but Trump is stuck in a dead heat and created more trouble for himself with a racist comedian at a Madison Square Garden rally.

The set by Tony Hinchcliffe singled out Puerto Rico as a “garbage island” in the most quoted joke, but Hinchcliffe also attacked blacks, Jews, and Palestinians. The Bulwark reported that the set had initially included a joke calling Harris a “c-nt.” That joke was axed by the Trump campaign but not the racist ones. Trump has not personally renounced the performance, which may be a bigger problem than the comedian himself. In most years, October surprises come from the other campaign, but again Trump has to be different.

The good thing for Harris skeptics is that she would almost certainly be constrained by congressional Republicans. The same is not true of Donald Trump who, for at least two years, might have control of both houses of Congress and a party that is unwilling to tell him no about anything.

An election that gave us Kamala and gridlock is not the worst outcome we could hope for.