This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘Kamala Harris could win — and win big’
Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s edition is inevitably about the US presidential election. President Biden’s decision not to run for re-election has upturned the race. I was in Washington, DC, when Biden made his announcement, and the day afterwards, I sat down with a political analyst Jacob Heilbrunn. So what happens now in the US election?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Joe Biden voice clip
I know yesterday’s news was surprising, and it was hard for you to hear, but it was the right thing to do. I know it’s hard because you poured your heart and soul into me to help us win this thing. But I think we made the right decision.
Gideon Rachman
In the letter announcing that he would step down, Biden endorsed his vice-president, Kamala Harris, to be the new Democratic candidate. And then there’s Donald Trump. Lest you forget, he was almost shot and killed last week. But he recovered in time to accept the Republican party nomination at their convention in Milwaukee last week. Jacob Heilbrunn is the editor of the National Interest magazine and author of a recent book, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. His offices are just a few hundred yards from the White House. When I sat down with him the day after Biden’s announcement, we began with the Kamala Harris question. How strong a candidate would she be?
Jacob Heilbrunn
I think Harris will be an extremely formidable candidate who is well positioned to slice and dice Donald Trump on a variety of issues, ranging from abortion to gun control to women’s rights. And I don’t think he has any idea of what awaits him. She is a former prosecutor, and in her most recent appearance on CNN immediately after Biden’s disastrous debate appearance, she deftly turned the subject from Biden back to Trump’s deficiencies. And that, for me, was the first sign that Harris really has matured as vice-president.
Gideon Rachman
And that’s very interesting that you should say that, because the conventional wisdom, which I must admit I kind of share, is that she’s quite a weak candidate. People point to the fact that, you know, in 2020 she didn’t even really get off the runway. Many people thought she’d get the nomination but she dropped out very quickly. She hasn’t established much of a profile as a vice-president. So why are you so confident?
Jacob Heilbrunn
I’m confident because I think Harris has changed in the job and she’s extremely rhetorically adept. She has watched Biden perform as president. She’s a former senator. She is not the first vice-president to struggle in the position. Richard Nixon, after he served for two terms under Dwight D Eisenhower, failed in his 1960 race. And then he went on to run for governor of California, which became a debacle. Remember his famous press conference, he said, you won’t have me to kick around any more. Everyone thought that Nixon was as dead as the dodo bird politically. He came roaring back in 1968. The climate is perfect for Harris because she does represent the generational change that the country has been thirsting for. If the Republicans stick with Trump, who is almost 80 years old, they now have the candidate who is elderly and clearly the loopy, if not mentally challenged.
Gideon Rachman
Again, interesting point, because I was at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, and obviously one now applies discount to Trump, because we’re so used to his kind of bizarre way of speaking. But given that, I think the Republicans left that convention, albeit before Biden dropped out, but pretty confident. They felt that Trump is a much stronger candidate for having survived the assassination attempt. And that JD Vance as vice-president pick is a strong one. What did you think is next? But on American conservatism, watching that convention, did you think it went well for the Republicans?
Jacob Heilbrunn
The convention went well until Trump gave his acceptance speech, which turned into its own debacle. After Trump read the remarks that were prepared for him, he went completely off the rails. The mood at the convention, if you watched, he was not getting that many raucous cheers. People were falling asleep.
Gideon Rachman
I fell asleep.
Jacob Heilbrunn
I guarantee you that if Kamala Harris receives the nomination and speaks in Chicago in her acceptance speech, she will be greeted with frenzied applause. It will dwarf anything that we saw in Milwaukee.
Gideon Rachman
And presumably, Biden will be able to now make an appearance at the convention and be greeted as a hero, as somebody who did his duty, did a good term, who’s now ready to retire as an elder statesman. So that completely changes the mood of the Democratic convention.
Jacob Heilbrunn
In general, I think we’re gonna see now that Biden is no longer competing for a second term like he is in all but name an ex-president. Ex-Presidents’s popularity tends to rise. There will be a wave of nostalgia for Joe Biden, and to the extent that he can deliver speeches which clearly he does not have the capacity to run a campaign, he will prove a valuable weapon for Harris, I think, because he will be able to speak at targeted events, particularly in Pennsylvania, which he regards as his home state because he grew up in Scranton. He will be sent out to address the white working class voters.
Gideon Rachman
Now, you know, a lot of people say, you mentioned Pennsylvania, that the whole election could turn on that state because this is, by all accounts, gonna be another very, very close election down to a few swing states. Do you think that it is basically Pennsylvania that’s gonna decide it?
Jacob Heilbrunn
I mean, she has to win Pennsylvania, which is going to be a strong reason to pick governor Josh Shapiro in who’s a very popular governor in the state. But we shouldn’t assume that it’s going to be a close election. Harris could win big.
Gideon Rachman
Really? I haven’t heard anyone else who said that. So why should we believe you? I think you’ve claimed a good record of prognostication.
Jacob Heilbrunn
I do, because I predicted that Biden would get the Democratic nomination to win the presidency when everyone counted him out, and that was before South Carolina. But obviously, I’m not infallible. But I think we do tend to get caught up in conventional wisdom. This could be an epochal election. If Harris manages to pull together a coherent and successful campaign, she can mobilise minority voters and youth voters.
Trump’s entire campaign was predicated on running against an enfeebled and doddering Joe Biden. But he succeeded too well. He knocked Biden out of the race during the debate when he said, I don’t understand a word you said, and I don’t think you do either. That was the end. That was . . . he finished off Joe Biden. And his campaign, he does have some very skilled advisers, but his campaign also does not have a real ground game from what we see. He has not focused on voter turnout on the ground. Instead, he has poured a lot of money into policing so-called voter fraud. This could be a cataclysmic mistake on his part.
Obviously, I don’t know that Kamala Harris is going to win big, but I do think it’s possible and that if the Republican party were defeated in this election, it will be confronted with its own existential survival questions.
Gideon Rachman
Now, conventionally, people say vice-presidential picks, although they’re kind of fascinating, doesn’t accent matter that much. I sort of feel that’s different in this election because both the leaders of the tickets, you know, have their own question marks and it’s important signalling device. So let’s go through the choices. I mean, first of all, Trump and Vance. Do you think that Trump may have made a mistake by choosing Vance?
Jacob Heilbrunn
I do, because he should have picked Nikki Haley or Elise Stefanik as his running mate. He was very confident. The choice of Vance meant that he was doubling down on the Make America Great Again movement. And that appeals, obviously, to the party faithful, the people who show up at the rallies. But this election will be decided by swing voters and undecided voters. JD Vance is not going to appeal to them. If anything, he’s Trumpier than Trump, and he is steeped in these esoteric intellectual debates about the future of conservatism, whether it’s on tariff policy or wiping out what they call the administrative state. In this regard, it’s interesting that the first thing that Kamala Harris tweeted out when she accepted Biden’s exiting the race and announced that she was gonna run, right in that message was, and we must stop Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan for eviscerating the federal government and getting rid of IVF, abortion and so on. She is going to hang Project 2025, which Trump is trying to distance himself from around his neck. It would be interesting if, by putting all of this into print, that the Heritage Foundation has done a huge disservice to Trump.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah, I mean, it’s very interesting that they are running scared of Project 2025. I mean, my colleague Edward Luce, when he was leaving Milwaukee, photographed somebody with a big Project 2025 rucksack on the plane, and Chris LaCivita, who is kind of running Trump’s campaign, said, you know, I’d throw that out the window. But presumably if they say we’ve got nothing to do with Project 2025, which most voters, you know, probably fairly baffled by, isn’t that enough?
Jacob Heilbrunn
Well, I should say I was somewhat disappointed that Ed did not procure that bag for me, as walking around with it in Washington at this point would be a form of radical chic. But, no. Hardly. They’re gonna pound Trump on this because I think dozens of his former advisers from his first administration most, if not all of whom would serve in a new Trump administration, drafted this hideous document. And he is not going to be able to detach himself from it. In fact, I find it interesting how this term Project 2025 is almost like out of a Hollywood thriller or something. It’s been draped around Trump’s neck and it is an albatross.
Gideon Rachman
And to me, even though, you know, I do have my own deep reservations, to put it mildly, about Trump, the Republican party convention, like all these conventions, was just a kind of bizarre show. It was quite entertaining. But there was a moment where I was a bit chilled, and that was when they were talking about illegal immigration, and you had these banners on the floor saying mass deportation now and led to talking about rounding up essentially 11, 12mn people and just dumping them over the border into Mexico. I mean, again, people used to say, Trump, take him seriously, but not literally. Do you take that seriously?
Jacob Heilbrunn
Yes, because this is an idée fixe of his. And it’s being promoted by Stephen Miller, who’s a close adviser of Trump. Now it leads to another speculation that I have: were Trump to be elected, would this in fact be a smoothly functioning administration, or would it in fact be complete chaos? Because if you’re going to try and apprehend and deport 12mn people, he’s talking about using the National Guard in Virginia and sending it into Maryland to apprehend people, sending it into Pennsylvania to root out illegal immigrants in cities like Philadelphia. You’re gonna have protests across the United States. How are you going to construct these concentration camps on the border? And if you do have these camps, you know for a certainty that these people are going to be abused. There’s going to be rapes, murders. This whole thing strikes me as a dystopian nightmare. Why should we believe that the federal government under Trump would suddenly be extremely efficacious and able to carry out this program? It’s a nightmare scenario.
That’s why I think that Trump’s presidency, writ large in the early months, probably would be quite chaotic, you know, signalling that Article 5 of the Nato treaty, which specifies that one for all and all for one, he would dump overboard Ukraine and Taiwan. He would institute tariffs. Now he’s talking about 60 per cent. They’re talking about decoupling from the Chinese economy. You do all these things at the same time, you’re gonna trigger a recession, if not a depression.
Gideon Rachman
OK, so that’s Trump. But the story of the week is, of course, Biden and Harris. So let’s get back to that and we’ll talk about the Vance pick. I mean, you’ve already mentioned Josh Shapiro’s name as the governor of Pennsylvania, and that would make certain sense. He’s popular. Pennsylvania, as we say, is a key state. Do you think she’ll pick him?
Jacob Heilbrunn
I don’t know. She’s looking at a variety of candidates, including Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona. She could pick Gretchen Whitmer because she needs to win Michigan as well.
Gideon Rachman
And Whitmer’s the governor of Michigan.
Jacob Heilbrunn
Right.
Gideon Rachman
Possible to have two women on the ticket?
Jacob Heilbrunn
To me, it seems audacious but maybe the gamble would pay off. She needs to pull the suburban female vote out. And I don’t think the men are quite as high-propensity voters. Right. So it would be a real gamble. My guess is that she will go with Shapiro.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And I’ve heard, I’ve been surprised by how openly people discuss this stuff. But they would say, I’ve heard them on television, people saying, yeah, but Shapiro’s do it. That’s a potential problem.
Jacob Heilbrunn
Well, you know, it does pose a new conundrum. I mean, the Democratic ticket would be a highly unusual one with Harris and Shapiro. And what Trump has exposed is that the existence of racism and, as well, antisemitism in the United States is much stronger than many people had presumed.
Gideon Rachman
And I think the Republicans, well, I’ll be interested in your view, how explicitly will the Republicans use the fact that Harris is a black woman, actually an African American father, Jamaican father, and an Indian mother against her? I mean, there are trial in this argument that she’s a diversity pick, you know, that she hadn’t got there on merit. And I think a lot of Americans are uneasy about DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion. So do you think they’re going to lean into that argument?
Jacob Heilbrunn
Definitely. I think it’s dangerous territory to go into. And I think they will also go into her sexual history because she used to date Willie Brown. He was the mayor of San Francisco, and that’d become a flashpoint among Republicans. Because they claim, you know, he was older, markedly older than she was, and they claim that she was exploiting him to advance her career, in other words, that she was sleeping her way to the top. It reaches a level of calling her a prostitute or worse. Again, I think it’s . . .
Gideon Rachman
Trump is really in a position to campaign on sex and morals?
Jacob Heilbrunn
I think actually, you know, in his rallies, if you watch him, no subject is taboo. He can talk about whatever he wants. So he does it in the form of musing about things. So he’ll talk about Harris. He might even say it in an admiring way, you know, to insert the knife.
Gideon Rachman
I admire the way that . . .
Jacob Heilbrunn
Yes. Yeah, anything is possible with him. And he is bemused by it, because basically what Trump wants everyone to be is as loathsome as he is. Or to have his, as Joe Biden said, the morals of an alley cat. But Trump thinks it’s hypocrisy if someone claims to be better than he is, that all people are driven by the same impulses that he has or should share them. He didn’t want Biden to be better than him, he just wanted him to be as much of a criminal as he is. So you say, well, there’s no difference between these two guys so I might as well vote for Trump. I mean, remember the whole argument, the Biden crime family, that Biden was making millions off China and Ukraine and so forth. So I think that’s Trump’s modus operandi.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah. So you’re basically expecting a very dirty campaign.
Jacob Heilbrunn
It should be the most brutal, ugly, nastiest, most racist campaign that we have. I don’t relish it, but I anticipate it.
Gideon Rachman
Right. Getting back to the high ground, or, of course, the FT’s most comfortable. Harris, I mean, do you think she will run as continuity Biden, or do you think she will want to or will attempt to create some distance or some differences between Biden and herself?
Jacob Heilbrunn
I think she probably will. I mean, the assumption in DC right now is that she will simply be continuity in domestic and foreign policy. But she has to have her own ideas, and she is to the left of Joe Biden. And she’s not a creature of the cold war to the extent that he was. So would she support Ukraine but move more aggressively for a peace deal? Would she, in fact, hammer on Nato more than Biden has to pony up financially? The other areas domestically I wouldn’t be surprised to see her pushing more ardently for gun control, for expanding the Supreme Court and imposing term limits on it. And that would be in the service, of course, of resurrecting rights to abortion. That’s going to be a key plank for her as she campaigns. Biden never liked to use the word abortion. She will use it constantly.
Gideon Rachman
And gun control is an interesting one because one of the many things that struck me as bizarre of the Republican convention was that Trump has just been shot. And yet Vance in his acceptance speech, boasts of the fact that his grandmother had 19 loaded pistols around her house. Do you think gun control is a winning issue for the Democrats or not?
Jacob Heilbrunn
To an extent, yes. I mean, as long as they don’t get carried away, I think it can again appeal to the suburban women. The school shootings have had an impact. So I think it can be a successful issue for the Democrats. It’s obviously treacherous ground, particularly in Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin. So I don’t know the extent to which Harris will highlight it, but I do believe she’ll be more aggressive than Biden.
Gideon Rachman
What about Gaza? Because, you know, before Biden kind of blew up in the debate, that was the major concern of a lot of the Democrats I spoke to. That young people when they need to turn up the vote were very radicalised by Gaza and yet many of them were now labelling Biden as genocide Joe. Do you think that she will tack a bit on that issue and maybe become a bit tougher on Israel?
Jacob Heilbrunn
Definitely, because she . . . for Biden, this has been a real loser, particularly in Michigan. I mean, the Arab Americans simply many have said that they simply will not vote for him. The model here for Harris is Hubert Humphrey in 1968. One of the reasons that Humphrey, after Lyndon Johnson exited the race and Humphrey became the Democratic candidate, a big reason that Humphrey didn’t win is because he looked like a lickspittle. He wouldn’t break from the Vietnam war. And that destroyed his chances because Nixon said he had a secret plan to end the war. And Humphrey . . .
Gideon Rachman
Trump’s saying that he has a plan to end the Ukraine . . .
Jacob Heilbrunn
Humphrey will (inaudible)
Gideon Rachman
Right. And I think also just simply by who she is, the fact that she is a black woman, a lot of people assume that she is more liberal on Israel and Gaza than . . . I don’t know what her private views are, but they think (inaudible).
Jacob Heilbrunn
Well, let’s not forget she is also a California centre-left politician. I mean, she’s ambitious and she’s hard-nosed and to a degree, unscrupulous. Now, all of these things have allowed her to rise to the top.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah. So finally, I mean, this has probably been the most dramatic week I’ve ever seen in American politics. You can’t . . . difficult to beat an assassination attempt on one weekend and then the sitting president standing down. I mean, do you think we’re now gonna be in a more conventional a race or do you see further big surprises in store?
Jacob Heilbrunn
I think there are going to be more twists and turns. I don’t think that the convention in Chicago will be . . . I don’t think we’re gonna see riots. Some people are predicting a rerun of 1968. I don’t think that’s gonna happen. I think by exiting the race, Biden has defused a lot of the hostility, and I don’t think it will be directed towards Harris. But what the surprises are, I’m not sure.
Gideon Rachman
I suppose by definition they’re going to surprise you.
Jacob Heilbrunn
But there could be, for example, what if Biden was pulled into attacking Iran, for example? The situation in the Middle East has become so much more volatile. There could be some kind of October surprise that we don’t anticipate.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And the last question, you know, a lot of people are sitting overseas. America always has this fascinating quality to it. But particularly in Europe, people are uncomfortably aware, particularly with the Ukraine war going on, how incredibly reliant we are on a stable, predictable and strong America. How concerned should America’s allies be by the spectacle of what’s happening here?
Jacob Heilbrunn
They should be terrified. The entire global chessboard could be overturned by Donald Trump. You could see, as I try to show in my book, America Last, a reversion to a 1920s, 1930s America where you have sweeping restrictions on immigration. You have essentially a divorce from Europe and from Asia as well, and add in high tariffs, which led or exacerbated the Great Depression that began in 1929. So you could see a rerun of all these. The more optimistic scenario is that the elections in Poland, France and Great Britain have not gone down the path towards authoritarianism and, frankly, fascist impulses. So I have been optimistic all along, and I remain so. I do not think that the United States is going to embrace the dark, pessimistic, even saturnine vision that Donald Trump pervades.
And by moving to a generational shift, this highlights the contrast between the two parties right now. The sort of Reaganite optimism that Americans have been predisposed to is now embodied more by Harris than it is by Trump. Trump is essentially sounding a dirge, a funeral march, arguing that the United States is going to hell in a handbasket. In fact, the United States has enjoyed a golden age of prosperity since World War II, and it is poised for a new generation of prosperity. But it could all be thrown away. But I don’t think it will.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Gideon Rachman
That was Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of the National Interest magazine, speaking to me in Washington, DC and ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening, and please join me again next week.