Jonathan Chait, then a columnist at New York Magazine, speaks onstage at the American Magazine Media Conference on Feb. 2, 2016, in New York City. Photo: Larry Busacca/Getty Images for Time Inc

It was almost exactly a year ago that Jonathan Chait claimed that Kamala Harris’s moderate turn was a winning strategy.

“The centrism is working,” Chait wrote at New York Magazine. Her success in the polls compared to President Joe Biden, he added, should be “attributed to the cleverness and unsentimental courtship of the center her campaign has followed.”

Fast forward a year.

For Chait, the problem with the Democratic Party in the last ten years is that it’s been run by the far left.

Chait now says that it was progressives who controlled Harris’s campaign — and lost the election. The leftward tilt doomed her.

For Chait, the problem with the Democratic Party in the last 10 years is that it’s been run by the far left, and now, finally, that the centrist moderates he’s a part of are reclaiming power. Mystifyingly, he seems to think they’re finally winning.

“After almost a decade of nearly unchallenged supremacy, the progressive movement’s hold on the party is no longer certain,” Chait wrote this week at The Atlantic.

Is the progressive dominance of the Democratic Party in the room with us right now?

The last 10 years have been a near nonstop assault on the Democratic Party’s left from an establishment that wants to crush it at all costs. One of the prime attackers has been one Jonathan Chait.

His assertion today, however, is striking in its detachment from reality. And it relies on making an appeal to the Democratic Party that’s rooted not in a return to centrist politics, but in an embrace of Trump’s demagogic narrative.

Centrists Weren’t Winning?

Over the past decade, Democrats have submitted three nominees to voters for the White House. Two of them, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, explicitly ran against the insurgent left-wing campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

Harris focused more on finding opportunities to appear onstage with Liz Cheney than on appealing to progressives.

Since then they’ve stayed the moderate course. Clinton continues to advocate for a continuation of the center-right politics that worked for her husband over 30 years ago. Chait’s ally in aggressive centrism Matt Yglesias was one of the most read pundits among the Biden transition team.

The third Democratic presidential candidate in the last decade, Harris, was picked as Biden’s vice president and ran an abbreviated general election campaign after the incumbent dropped out. On the trail, she focused more on finding opportunities to appear onstage with Liz Cheney than on appealing to progressives.

Perhaps she should have pivoted to the left instead of embracing the centrism that Chait once celebrated. In 2020, Biden won after an explosion in liberal activism, from Black Lives Matter protests to advocating for civil rights — often referred to with the derogatory catchall “woke” by Chait and others in the centrism cohort, though they seldom if ever acknowledge the usefulness of motivating the base to come out for elections.

Four years later, registered Democrats sat out the 2024 election at a 2:1 margin over Republicans, researchers found in April.

The case in point here is the Gaza war. The Democratic National Committee refused to even allow a Palestinian-American Democratic state lawmaker to speak at the convention — a sign that the presidential hopeful wouldn’t break from the continuing, morally repugnant Biden policy on the war in Gaza.

The stance on Gaza was one of the things that alienated Harris’s base and drove away enthusiastic young Democrats that had served as the foundations for successful Democratic ground games, young Democrats who were against unconditional support for Israel’s war.

A Convenient Excuse

In an election as close as the 2024 race, it’s hard to pinpoint just one cause for the outcome.

The pivotal moment, to Chait, was an ad cut by the Trump campaign using an answer Harris gave in 2020 to a question from the American Civil Liberties Union on the rights of trans incarcerated people, an example of what the pundit called an “edgy, leftist policy commitment in a campaign that consisted of little else.”

By citing the answer on trans prisoners, Chait is not talking about a tack to the center; he is instead making an appeal for the party to move right — the far right.

The idea that Harris’s position on trans rights was even a left-wing stance is a Trump campaign talking point, one hammered home by Fox News pundits day in and day out. It ignored that Harris was simply repeating established legal practice for the rights of those prisoners, policy that was in place at the time under the Trump administration. Chait bought it all hook, line, and sinker: making a case not for centrism, but for anti-trans demagoguery.

Choosing the position that Harris took on trans rights in prisons in 2020 as the defining issue of the campaign conveniently lets the party off the hook for having nothing of substance to offer an angry electorate. As evidence, Chait refers to an unconvincing data point from an analysis by Future Forward, the Harris team’s polling firm, as evidence it shifted voter preference by 2.7 percentage points in Trump’s favor.

In reality, as in Gaza, Harris didn’t take any positions on trans rights for incarcerated people that hadn’t been in place for successive presidents. Her stand that all prisoners are entitled to care deemed to be medically necessary — including care for transition — was the policy of the Biden administration and, before that, the Trump administration too.

In 2024, Harris continued to affirm this policy but, instead of jumping headlong into a fight over an era-defining, life-and-death civil rights issue, she softened her rhetoric. In other words, she tacked to the center.

What Could She Have Done?

Though soft-pedaling trans rights at a time when trans teens are attemping suicide at increasing rates was moral cowardice, it may be true that it wasn’t a winning electoral strategy.

So what could Harris have done? Almost nothing that Chait would have approved of.

Americans were unusually united in their dour view of the economy, but rather than turn away from consolidating wealth that had left the working class scrambling to keep up, Harris catered to billionaires. She ran a campaign that seemed not like it was for the left of the party, but for its well-heeled donor classes. She had long since eschewed the economic populism of the Sanders-style Democrat.

And this is exactly where Chait is too: The only mentions of an economic message are swipes at Sanders and progressives for championing economic justice. Inflation goes unmentioned.

For Chait, though, Palestine might as well not exist at all.

And what would Chait have thought about a pivot away from Biden on Gaza to excite her base? Under a quarter of Democrats expressed support for Israel’s war in October 2024, but Harris refused to break with the president.

For Chait, though, Palestine might as well not exist at all.

What Chait is doing now is a typical strategy for moderates interested in avoiding blame for their ideology in another losing effort on the national stage. Rather than look inward, they fixate on an easy target to punch down at and place blame on a marginalized community to scapegoat the loss.

The DNC’s 2024 autopsy is expected to be more of the same, focusing on groups aligned with the party rather than any decisions made by the Biden or Harris campaigns or the Biden White House.

Centrists can try to rewrite history, but they’ve been winning the battle over the Democratic Party for years. If that’s translating into losses at the ballot box, maybe it’s time to actually try something new.

The post Jon Chait Thinks Kamala Harris Went Too Far Left. He’s Just Falling for Trump’s Demagoguery. appeared first on The Intercept.

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