Karen, the nickname given to a grumpy white woman of a certain age, is making a comeback. The graduate of modestly prestigious Oberlin College, who makes a habit of asking to speak to the manager, was once cast as a villain by progressives. This was especially the case for years during the Black Lives Matter riots. Now, however, Karen represents a key demographic of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.
The vice president deliberately shuns a detail-oriented policy agenda of the type embraced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in 2020. Nor is she attempting to define herself with her professional resume or as second-in-command at the White House, as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously did in 2016. Rather, Harris is running away from her record, striking past policy proposals and almost anything that could suggest she has been a Joe Biden-heartbeat away from the presidency for the last four years.
Instead, her campaign and its stenographers in the left-wing legacy press have gone all in on a whiny appeal to pathos. Harris isn’t a girl boss — she is brat, the cool 59-year old. She looks even cooler and younger next to running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), who seems to have been chosen in part because he makes for a schlubby, mediocre, unprepossessing comparison with his new boss.
Harris isn’t an expert. She doesn’t want to talk about the cost of your mortgage and prefers to dilate on her middle-class childhood. She’s cosplaying as a crunchy, traditional wife enthusiastic about cooking collard greens and pretends to be the nation’s “Momala” instead of facing a challenging interview.
All in all, Harris has dramatically departed from the playbook used by past Democratic women vying for the presidency. Despite her record as the most liberal member of the Senate, she is not running as a doctrinaire progressive. Nor (despite her pantsuits) is she trying to be the second coming of Clinton. Instead, Harris is trying to stir up an army of Karens. This force includes college women wearing terrorist-sympathizing keffiyehs or pride flags. Harris wants to be “in” with campus activists who wouldn’t give a white girl a second glance. But she is also making overtures to suburban mothers.
By all the available polling data, Harris has been successful in this strategy, making inroads into the GOP’s historical success with white women in presidential elections. The problem for Harris is that this is costing her party vast swaths of every other demographic.
Harris has mostly led Trump in national polling. The race for the Electoral College a toss-up. Looking closely at specific swing state polls and aggregations of national polls, we can see how Harris’s decision to hold fast on appealing to Karen has coincided with losses among non-white voters, non-college-educated voters, and men in general.
Take the latest New York Times/Siena College poll of Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. Whereas Biden won 66% of Hispanic voters in these Sun Belt states in 2020 and 92% of black voters, Harris leads these demographics by just 52% and 83%, respectively. These declines hold true in national polls.
Whereas Biden won Hispanics by 21 percentage points and black voters by 84 points in 2020, CNN’s aggregation of the latest polling shows Harris winning Hispanics by only a 15-point margin and black voters by a 66-point margin. In contrast, she has improved on Biden’s 2020 performance with white voters by 4 points.
Another post-debate aggregation of high-quality national polling by former Democratic pollster Adam Carlson shows Harris carrying moderates by a 15-point margin and independents by 2 points but trailing Biden’s 2020 performance by 11 points and 7 points, respectively. Where Harris has dramatically improved is among white voters. Carlson found that her 16.5-point margin with college-educated white voters is 4 points ahead of Biden’s 2020 performance (Catalist data indicate it’s actually more than 7 points ahead of Biden’s performance), and even her 26-point deficit with non-college-educated white voters is 3 points ahead of Biden’s 2020 results.
Harris has lost ground with non-white voters, especially those who haven’t graduated from college. Whereas Biden won 74% of college-educated non-white voters and 75% of non-college-educated non-white voters in 2020, the latest national data from the New York Times/Siena College poll found Harris commanding just 66% of the former and 57% of the latter, a staggering 18-point collapse of her support among non-college-educated voters of color.
While the shift is driven disproportionately by non-white men, even black women aren’t lined up as consistently behind Harris as they were for Biden in 2020.
There is no recent broad polling to break down black voters by sex, but the two major polls available show Harris’s losses among black voters cannot be blamed solely on women.
In 2020, Biden won 95% of black women and had a 90-point margin over Trump, as well as 87% of black men with a 75-point margin. Just before the ABC debate, an NAACP poll found that 66% of black women supported Harris, and a survey from The 19th found she had a 59-point margin in that demographic category. The NAACP poll found that 1 in 4 black men younger than 50 support Trump, and the poll from The 19th found Harris had only a 30-point margin over Trump among black men of all ages.
A Howard University poll of black voters in swing states had somewhat better news for Democrats. Harris had a 65-point margin with black women younger than 50 and a 51-point margin with men younger than 50.
But the Karen vote is breaking for Harris. ABC News found that the Democrats’ double-digit deficit with white women had shrunk to a “virtual dead heat” after the Democratic National Convention, and Trump’s lead with white men doubled to a 21-point margin. The 19th News poll found Harris leading by 6 points with white women, and both post-debate polls from NBC and CBS found Harris leading women overall by a 21-point margin. NBC found that the margin among white women with a college degree was a whopping 40 points. The gender divide persists among young voters. According to Harvard’s quarterly survey of likely voters between 18 and 29, Harris’s 47-point lead with young women matches Biden’s 2020 result, but her 17-point lead with young men is 11 points behind Biden’s performance.
It’s not that the Biden of 2024 was performing as well as the Biden of 2020. Harris has shored up margins among black, young, Hispanic, and suburban voters who fled from Biden after his calamitous debate against Trump in June. But despite her best efforts, Harris cannot overcome the headwind of public anger about inflation, foreign policy chaos, and open borders created by the White House where she has been the power behind the throne.
Harris was the president of the Senate who cast two tiebreaking votes that triggered the worst inflation in 40 years. Harris was “the last person in the room” to sign off on Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Harris also backs Biden’s threats of court-packing and federal rent controls.
She has tried to distance herself from her White House work, but she may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in the process. She has dumped “Bidenomics” from her branding, but in the process, she also seems to have lost the goodwill Biden commanded among private sector unions, such as the Teamsters. Harris might have succeeded in quieting voters’ concerns about some of her administration’s failures, but in doing so, she has transformed herself into an empty pantsuit.
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She is flanked by husband Doug Emhoff and Walz. Emhoff, a paragon of toxic masculinity, has adopted the persona of a subservient male feminist to distract from his past sexual affair with a nanny. Walz seems to have falsehood in his DNA. Both debase themselves to elevate the woman who is their boss.
Neither inspires much confidence from the public, according to polls. The only polling category Harris has greatly improved on relative to Biden is white voters, thanks to her appeal to white-college educated voters, white women, and, specifically, white college-educated women. Harris has tripled down on Karen and, by doing so, has lost a historic share of men and voters of color.