Kamala Harris thinks she lost because her campaign didn’t have enough time. She’s wrong. She lost because the American people decided that the Biden economy was terrible, even though it wasn’t, and because she wasn’t a plausible agent of dramatic change. That left her without any arguments except the horrors of a prospective Trump presidency; in the end, that wasn’t enough.
Harris could have done some things better. She could have come up with a more ambitious agenda to distinguish herself from her boss, for example. But would the public have believed it? If she had run as the second coming of Bernie Sanders, would the voters have embraced her program, given the size of the deficit, the inflation numbers, and high interest rates, to say nothing of the lack of votes for such a program in the Senate?
The answer to those questions is no. If the Democrats are to win in 2028, they will need an economic plan that deals realistically with the economic and fiscal constraints of the day. If the plan includes a significant expansion of the welfare state, it will also have to include tax increases, and not just on the wealthy.