"We're not going back!": Kamala Harris's anti-populism

The spectacle of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in August 2024 was rich with female representation. The New York Times dubbed the 2024 DNC as "the Convention of the Woman," with Kamala Harris as the Democrat Party's presidential candidate and the crowd going wild in response to speeches by Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Democrat Party rising star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The Convention launched Harris's campaign motto, "We're not going back." The slogan references averting a second Trump presidency. It is also a powerful reminder that equality projects are at stake due to a deeply conservative right-wing surge in several state legislative bodies, and on the United States Supreme Court. These range from threats to African Americans' voting rights, women's reproductive rights, and LGBTQ+ rights.  

In the current populist moment, where Donald Trump's self-presentation rests on crass masculinity representing his populist anti-elitism, Kamala Harris's campaign has chosen a surprising path of mostly avoiding populist politics. Populism uses a simple formula. Its core elements entail presenting oneself as being of the people, and of being against elites. 

Harris's biography could just as well be cast as a populist story. As the daughter of highly educated Indian and Jamaican immigrants to the United States, she does not come from vast wealth, nor from an established and connected family, and did not attend elite Ivy League universities. Her life story blends well into faith in American meritocracy, where talent and ambition can open a path from being a multiracial child of immigrants, to the Vice Presidency, and even the Presidency. Her political rise took place in liberal San Francisco, and supported by the patronage of vastly wealthy families who recognised that she was worth betting on. Against this backdrop and considering that even a rich Manhattan real estate developer can present himself as a ‘man of the people’, Harris could have easily opted for a populist narrative.

How populist displays of hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity influence voter behaviour

In previous research of mine, I have studied the growing popularity of Marine Le Pen as leader of the populist radical right in France. Women on the radical right have fared well as populists. In the United States, the 2008 presidential election stands out, when vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin burst onto the national stage, energising the Tea Party and paving the way for the rise of Donald Trump. Palin displays many of the same qualities as Marine Le Pen. She leveraged her femininity, her physicality, and a discourse of protective maternity – think of her self-description as a "mama grizzly" – to present herself as being "of the people," in contrast to the liberal and "out of touch" elites of Washington, D.C. 

Gender relations at large, regardless of politics, shape deep-seated feelings of desire, attraction, love, but also disgust. In my ethnography of the French populist radical right, I found that populist performances of hyper-masculinity or hyper-femininity, like the "mama grizzly", or the "protective father", can be effective because they trigger deep-seated feelings of desire, attraction, love, or repugnance in voters and followers. My research on populist rightwing female politicians also found that they are able to perform masculinity in ways that elicit admiration among followers. While women running for elected office were punished electorally until the near past if they appeared either too feminine, or too masculine, populist radical right women today benefit from both hyper-femininity and hyper-masculinity.

Harris aims to win over voters by emphasising her professional success

Kamala Harris, by contrast, has been avoiding the populist temptation. She is instead running a campaign emphasising experience, and her long career in public service. As she stated in her speech at the DNC, "My whole life, I've only had one client: the people." Invoking "the people" alludes somewhat to a populist discourse, but falls short of full-blown populism. Harris is capitalising instead on her spectacular career, one marked by many firsts. 

In 2003, she was the first female District Attorney of the City of San Francisco, representing the government in criminal cases. In 2010, she was elected the first female and first African American Attorney General in California, the state's top legal officer. In 2016, she was then elected to the United States Senate, representing California. In 2020, she became many firsts at once: first female Vice President, first Indian-American Vice President and first African American Vice-President of the United States.

With no biological children of her own, Harris does not mobilise populist repertoires of motherhood, like mama grizzly protection, or needing to make ends meet as a working mother, as do figures like Italy's Giorgia Meloni. The closest Harris has come to sounding like Sarah Palin was a recent surprise admission that she is a proud gun owner, aiming to appeal to swing voters. But this is hardly the self-representation of pro-Trump women in the Republican party today, like Republican Governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, whom I observed speaking at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February 2024. Noem has undergone an extraordinary transformation and now looks like a female member of the Trump family. She also frequently publishes media photos of herself hunting with a shotgun, and emphasised her tough military credentials at CPAC by showcasing herself with her state's National Guard troops at the US-Mexico border.

While Harris's campaign motto is, "We're not going back," the campaign's avoidance of the populist impulse harkens back to politics before the age of Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. It is a risky strategy. It signals going forward with fighting for racial, sexual and gender equality, while nonetheless trying to return to a bygone era of American politics.