It’s easy to forget the roaring momentum that accompanied former Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascendance to the top of the Democratic ticket last summer. The entire Democratic machine kicked into gear to awesome effect. Hollywood showed out. Brat summer commenced. Time magazine featured a cover captioned “Her Moment,” with a close-up of Harris gazing aspirationally into a sea of placard-waving adorers. The article went on to describe the ways in which “Harris became a political phenomenon.”

But not everyone in the Democratic establishment believed she had the goods to become Obama 2.0 — including Obama himself. In their recent book, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes flesh out what many have long assumed: that Obama doubted Harris’s ability to win and preferred an open primary that would allow a different nominee to emerge. His hoped-for ticket? Rising star governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Wes Moore of Maryland. The combination of a white woman and a black man, he believed, would appease Democratic voters clamoring for a black woman president. 

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Picture the deliberations: Obama, pacing in his Martha’s Vineyard mansion — chainsmoking? — with Pelosi and Schumer on speaker phone, tossing out ideas about how to sidestep Harris. The lucky bastard, they occasionally grumble about Trump.

Hours pass, then days. Finally, it appears Biden will withdraw. And the best idea they’ve got is: white woman + black man = black woman.  

And they say Democrats are out of ideas!

But it was moot. Biden endorsed Harris as he shuffled off stage — perhaps in a one-finger salute to his former boss? — and Harris, who lacked the political talent to execute simple interviews and town halls, torpedoed the ticket and the party. 

But the brief glimpse behind the curtain reveals that Democratic leadership is as hapless as we suspected. More than ineffectual, they understood neither the age nor the electorate. In a nation beset by open borders, runaway inflation, and hot wars raging around the globe, voters didn’t care about the skin color and sex of the candidates. They just wanted order and prosperity restored. 

And what could be a truer sign of progress than that? 

The Democratic Party’s insistence on making key political decisions based on the clumsy math of identity politics has driven the party to the brink of total irrelevance. More than immoral — identity politics is rooted in the fundamentally racist idea that the identity of the thinker is paramount to the quality of the idea — the strategy has led to one crushing electoral defeat after another. 

The only reason Democrats were in this pickle to begin with is because Biden promised to select a black woman as his running mate four years earlier. Neither he nor the legacy media even pretended Harris was the best available choice to be one very frail heartbeat away from the presidency. That consideration didn’t factor into the decision at all. And as a result, Harris was denigrated and delegitimized in the nation’s eyes the moment she accepted the selection on these grounds. 

Plenty of black women have been qualified for the presidency. Harris clearly wasn’t one of them. Democratic voters were themselves the first to disqualify her during the 2020 nominating contest. Her campaign didn’t even last to her home state of California’s primary, where the voters who knew her best were set to serve her a punishing finish. 

Harris should never have been in the vice presidency to begin with. It was a decision based solely on skin color and sex that finally doomed the party in the end. 

Harris’ selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was another identity politics disaster. At a recent Harvard Kennedy School forum, he admitted Harris picked him because he could “code talk to white guys watching football, fixing their truck.” 

Far from bringing Midwestern, white guys into the Democratic fold, Walz chased them away in droves. Cringey videos hunched over the engine of his truck and struggling to load his gun on a hunting trip exposed him as all flannel, no axe, while his jumbled football jargon confused pigskin fans everywhere. Who can forget when he said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) “could run a mean pick six”? 

The problem is that without his identity appeal, there was no reason to have him on the ticket. He was neither a skilled debater nor an effective governor. He was a mess on the stump. No honest observer could credit Walz as being a net-positive for the ticket, and many tried to warn Democrats from making the pick. But their commitment to identitarianism and lack of imagination doomed them to Walz’s mediocrity. 

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Imagine a world in which Harris selected the best possible running mate regardless of identity. That would be the popular governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro. But he was bypassed because he’s Jewish and doesn’t hate Israel. Would this ticket have put up a fight in Pennsylvania?

Trump’s victory proved that the era of identity politics is over. It’s a great thing for the country, and a good thing for Democrats if it forces them to finally think up some new ideas.