Political candidates aren’t people these days so much as brand logos for the business of politics. Their stock – the ticker tape of their approval – goes up or down, but after any politician has reached a certain level of mass recognition, their name and face hold value. It doesn’t matter, necessarily, if most voters think they’re a joke. Their image can drive media engagement just as their donor files and old campaign data can be profitably mined.
Kamala Harris is a perfect example. She was, all but her most stubborn supporters agree, a disastrous presidential nominee. An unpopular vice president thrust to the top of the Democratic ticket in 2024 because Joe Biden was too doddery, she benefitted from a brief bout of “Kamalamania” before her flaws glared too brightly and she lost to Donald Trump. Various electoral post-mortems have revealed quite how ill-suited she was to nationwide campaigning.
But none of that seems to matter. Kamala Harris still believes in herself. She thinks she inspired an Obama-esque wave of hopeful progressivism. And she remains a leading contender to be the Democratic nominee in 2028, partly because of a lack of decent alternatives. The betting markets have Gavin Newsom, the deeply loathed Governor of California, as the strong favorite for now, with that young congresswoman from the Bronx (via Westchester) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in second place. But Harris has the campaign architecture and a clear edge among black voters, who increasingly decide Democratic contests. On Thursday, in a typically gauche video, she announced the relaunch of the “KamalaHQ” hub, her new-media site, which has a million followers on X and 5 million on TikTok. “Headquarters” is part of a project to gin up Gen Z in good time for the midterms in November, the sassy left-liberal answer to the meme-saturated Trump machine. Social-media users should brace themselves for endless snark masquerading as politics. Yesterday, the Trump War room account (2.5 million followers) greeted the arrival of Headquarters by saying: “Oh, you guys want some more pain?” “This type of pain, or…?,” snapped back Headquarters, with a picture of that big bruise on Donald Trump’s hand. Try not to die laughing.
“Conservatives build permanent organizing infrastructure,” declared Headquarters in its launch press release. “Progressives have historically built machines that dismantle after Election Day. Headquarters is the end of that cycle.” There also bold plans for Headquarters to build a large presence on Substack, YouTube and elsewhere.
The extent to which Harris is behind the move remains unclear. She’s still, officially, on an elongated book tour for her 2024 campaign memoir 107 Days and is named only as Headquarters’s “chair emerita,” an honorary role. Some of her former campaign team will run the organization alongside the hierarchy of the People for the American Way, a fiercely left-liberal non-profit, which was founded in the 1980s primarily as a vehicle to attack the Christian right.
But if the Democrats win convincingly in the midterms in November, (read Charles Lipson’s excellent new Spectator US cover piece on the subject), Trump 2.0’s radical agenda will stall and “Headquarters” will be hailed as a formidable new-media weapon, a message dynamo capable of winning elections. Harris, as its progenitor, will be sure to claim credit. The New York Times and other outlets will publish articles about her indomitability, about how close she actually came to beating Trump, and about how she was willing to take a step back to leap forward. The wheels of her 2028 candidacy will screech into motion. The public will just have to deal with it.
This article originally appeared in Freddy Gray’s Americano newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
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