Today, it is likely that anyone driving through a particularly “liberal” American neighborhood will notice yard signs that beg “Vote Harris! Save Democracy.” With the 2024 presidential election less than sixty days away, Democrats are employing a campaign strategy that paints former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump as an existential threat to American democracy.

With those big scary words tacked to Donald Trump’s reputation, Vice President Kamala Harris has become the pro-democracy candidate, a brave hero who is our only shot at saving our beloved democratic tradition.  

It’s important to recognize the irony here.

Kamala Harris is the first presidential nominee to not receive a single primary vote since Hubert Humphrey in 1968. In fact, her existence as a candidate represents a reversion to an old, less democratic tactic of selecting presidential nominees: the smoke-filled room.

For Americans, this jargon represents an antiquated, undemocratic political picture that now exists solely in our history textbooks. A group of white, male political insiders sitting around a table, smoking tobacco, and secretly pulling the strings of American politics to determine the next President of the United States of America.

If Democrats want Americans to view Kamala Harris as the pro-democracy candidate, they must reckon with the elephant in the room: Harris’ candidacy represents a massive circumvention of the input of the American people.

Is this temporary degradation of American democratic norms worth defeating Donald Trump in November? It may take years to truly know, but let’s discuss it.

Donald Trump is indeed a threat to American democracy. His Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement is built on principles of exclusion and scapegoating. He is guilty of executive aggrandizement, which is an expansion of executive powers and the weakening of constraints against this power from other areas of government. He has threatened violence against political opponents, and he is intent on purging the bureaucracy of disloyal civil servants.

Donald Trump is also a populist.

In his book What is Populism?, Jan-Werner Müller constructs a general outline of characteristics and behaviors exhibited by populists. Trump checks most of the boxes. He is anti-elitist; continually framing political issues as a single, morally pure American people against a corrupt set of Washington elites and “others”. Trump is also anti-pluralist, his MAGA movement dismisses its opponents as illegitimate, sometimes going as far as to say that the opposition is treasonous or criminal. Finally, Trump blames his policy failures and electoral losses on the corruption of democratic institutions.

How do populist leaders like Trump rise to power?

The answer is embedded in Müller’s claim that “populism is the shadow of representative democracy.”

Without a direct democracy, individuals rely on representatives to act on behalf of their interests. In other words, they accept a degree of separation between themselves and decision-making. However, there are periods or issues where decision-making in a representative democracy is perceived as inappropriately distant from the people.  

Consequently, people can feel ignored or neglected by policymakers. Populists prey on this loss of faith in representative democracy, and once in office, they begin to erode democratic norms based on the desires of the “one, true, and moral people” of their nation.

The good news is that there are remedies for these feelings of distance or frustration. The bad news is that this year Democrats have decided to violate one of these remedies.

History can provide us with an example.

In their book How Democracies Die, Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky discuss the 1968 Democratic National Convention as a turning point in how presidential elections operate in the United States. 1968 was a devastating year for Americans. Both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. The war continued to rage in Vietnam, and more and more young men’s names were added to the death toll every day. Americans were angry, grief-ridden, and confused. These emotions rose to a fever pitch at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.  

President Lyndon B. Johnson had dropped out of the presidential race in March and Democrats were divided. Some supported President Lyndon B. Johnson’s foreign policy and others mourned the anti-war position of Robert Kennedy. With the party’s base fragmented, party insiders decided to anoint Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Without running in a single primary, Humphrey became the Democratic presidential nominee.  

Upon the announcement of Humphrey’s nomination, anti-Vietnam war protestors in Chicago erupted and clashed with Chicago police, leading to the devastating scenes we now know as the 1968 Chicago Riots.

Following the events of 1968, American politicians recognized that faith in the legitimacy of US democracy was declining. In response, Americans witnessed the birth of binding presidential primaries. Now, delegates had to reflect the will of their state’s primary voters, and the presidential nomination process was perceived as much more democratic.

The binding primary is an example of an important democratic norm that allows the American people to feel more directly involved in their representative democracy, a mechanism that political scientist Sheri Berman supports as a preventative measure against populist movements.  

What does this have to do with the 2024 presidential election?

On July 21, 2024, after facing intense pressure from Democratic party insiders, President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, dropped out of the presidential race. That same day, he endorsed his Vice President, Kamala Harris, to be the Democratic nominee in the 2024 presidential election. Several notable Democratic party politicians and supporters rushed to endorse her.

Without a single primary vote, Harris was anointed by Democratic insiders, and she may become the next President of the United States of America.

Despite the legitimacy of the threat posed by Donald Trump, Harris’ nomination is a problem. Even if she is the Democrat’s best chance at a victory in November her run for the presidency represents the very political tropes that fuel populist movements in the first place -the behind-the-scenes decision-making of a political elite. Furthermore, she bypassed a proven preventative measure of constituent susceptibility to populist ideas.

As the remainder of this election unfolds, it is important to be somewhat skeptical of Kamala Harris’ pro-democracy rhetoric. In the coming years, time will reveal if this temporary departure from democratic norms in hopes of protecting our democracy will result in a restoration or degradation of American democracy in the long term.

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