Kamala Harris is back…with a vengeance. The first excerpt of her forthcoming memoir, 107 Days, about her history-making presidential campaign after President Joe Biden dropped out, published on Wednesday morning in The Atlantic. And it is unexpectedly juicy for Harris, who is typically known to equivocate—and who, until now, staunchly defended Biden’s decision to run for a second term. In the excerpt, Harris repeatedly takes Biden and unnamed members of his “inner circle” to task, for what she alleges was their distrust of her ambitions; their failure to support her, and acknowledge her successes, as vice president; and their resistance to her growing popularity as Biden’s declined. “Their thinking was zero-sum,” she writes of Biden’s closest confidantes. “If she’s shining, he’s dimmed.” (The Biden camp does not yet appear to have commented.) Below are some of the juiciest topics she tackles. Biden’s decision to run for president again For the first time, Harris publicly admits that she should have considered telling Biden not to run for a second term: > During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider > not running? Perhaps. But the American people had chosen him before in the > same matchup. Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again. Later, she characterizes administration officials as being “hypnotized” and reckless for failing to push Biden to drop out earlier, even as outside pressure was mounting: > “It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.” We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d > all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I > think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a > choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s > ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision. Biden’s age Harris rejects the “narrative of some big conspiracy at the White House to hide Joe Biden’s infirmity,” but concedes that he had gotten “tired”: > Here is the truth as I lived it. Joe Biden was a smart guy with long > experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president. On > his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising > judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, > Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles. Relationship with the White House A vast portion of the excerpt features Harris’s complaints about deep-seated distrust she alleges Biden’s staff harbored towards her: > Because I’d gone after him over busing in the 2019 primary debate, I came into > the White House with what we lawyers call a “rebuttable presumption.” I had to > prove my loyalty, time and time again. > > > > When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to > whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a “DEI hire,” the White House > rarely pushed back with my actual résumé: two terms elected D.A., top cop in > the second-largest department of justice in the United States, senator > representing one in eight Americans. Later, she describes her frustrations with the White House communications team and their failure to adequately fight back against her bad press: > They had a huge comms team; they had Karine Jean-Pierre briefing in the > pressroom every day. But getting anything positive said about my work or any > defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible. > > […] > > Worse, I often learned that the president’s staff was adding fuel to negative > narratives that sprang up around me. One narrative that took a stubborn hold > was that I had a “chaotic” office and unusually high staff turnover during my > first year…the first year in any White House sees staff churn. Working for the > first woman vice president, my staff had the additional challenge of > confronting gendered stereotypes, a constant battle that could prove > exhausting. > > […] > > And when the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle > seemed fine with it. Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked > down a little bit more. One example she references: The criticisms over her work tackling the root causes of migration from the Northern Triangle of Central America: > When Republicans mischaracterized my role as “border czar,” no one in the > White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I > had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had > achieved. > > […] > > Instead, I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had > proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Even > the breathtaking cruelty of Trump’s family-separation policy hadn’t deterred > the desperate. It was an issue that absolutely demanded bipartisan cooperation > at an impossibly partisan, most uncooperative time. > > > No one around the president advocated, Give her something she can win with. Harris also writes that Biden’s inner circle resented her growing popularity: > When polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him > didn’t like the contrast that was emerging. As one example, she refers to a speech she gave on “the humanitarian crisis in Gaza” in Selma, Alabama in March 2024: > It was a speech that had been vetted and approved by the White House and the > National Security Council. It went viral, and the West Wing was displeased. I > was castigated for, apparently, delivering it too well. > > Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them > grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his > age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a > testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something > happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him. His > team didn’t get it. That’s the last line of the excerpt. It ends abruptly—almost as abruptly as democracy as we know it seems to have ended the day Trump was sworn into his second term. But it’s almost certain that we can expect more tea spillage when the book publishes, on Sept. 23.

Few have felt the whiplash of President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs with China more than American farmers. The US is the world’s largest exporter of agricultural products, from corn to soybeans, wheat, and cotton. And the largest importer of America’s farm products? China. The two countries have engaged in a back-and-forth series of escalating levies since Trump imposed tariffs on the country in April. Those tariffs were then deemed illegal the following month by a US trade court, and the administration is currently appealing that decision. One of the many farmers caught in limbo is Bryant Kagay, who raises cattle and grows soybeans, corn, and wheat. Kagay says he voted for Trump last year even though Trump promised that as president, he would place tariffs on the very products Kagay sells to China. But now, Kagay questions whether the president has a long-term trade strategy and is increasingly concerned about what the market will look like come harvest time this fall. “I like to think that my corn is really good, but as far as the markets are concerned, my corn doesn’t really look any different than anybody else’s,” Kagay says. When a farmer from a country with low or no tariffs can sell corn cheaper than Kagay’s on the global market, he adds, that farmer will win out. As the US and China continue negotiating, Kagay talks with host Al Letson about how tariffs from Trump’s first term affected his farm, why he voted for Trump in 2024 knowing tariffs could jeopardize his business, and why farmers are often hesitant to take government subsidies—yet often accept them anyway. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This interview was edited for length and clarity. Al Letson: So tell me about your farm. From what I understand, you weren’t living in this area, you weren’t living in Missouri for a while, and then you and your family came back. Bryant Kagay: Yeah, well, I’m the fourth generation on our family farm. I guess my great-grandfather, he started a very small operation and then my grandfather has grown it, really, mostly in the 60s and 70s and 80s. But yeah, following college, I had a corporate job, lived in several different states, but in 2018 my wife and I decided to come back and work into the farm, more in a management-type role, management trainee, if you will, type role. And I’ve continued to take more responsibility since coming back. How many employees do you have on the farm? Yeah, so it’s myself, my dad, my 87-year-old grandfather is still involved as much as he can be. And then we have two full-time employees and currently one part-time employee. So we’re a fairly small operation as far as manpower goes. What do you produce? So our main products, corn, soybeans, wheat, and then we also have a cattle operation. Many will refer to it as a cow-calf, so we have cows, produce calves from them, but then we also have, often referred to as a beef feedlot or a finishing operation that we feed cattle to get them right up to the point of them going to the meat processor for them to become the finished product. So you’re running a family business that depends on international trade. We’ve been following President Trump’s trade war with China. What would really steep tariffs mean for your farm? I think that what they mean for our farm is, it’s not that different from what they would mean to everybody. We live in a very global economy, a global market. So many of the products that we purchase, both on the farm and within our households and within any business you run, often come from overseas. Those trade networks and industries have been set up, many of them have been in place for decades. Chinese manufacturing, we’ve been making things in China for years and years, and they’ve gotten pretty good at it. They’ve got pretty good systems to get them shipped here. I think steep tariffs will, at least for the foreseeable future, will mostly raise the prices that everyday Americans and farmers spend on the things that they buy. So I think that’s how it affects all Americans. Now, how does it affect me differently? Well, many of the products I sell that get shipped into overseas markets or international markets, now they are looking to buy that commodity from somewhere else. And what I’m selling is a commodity. I like to think that my corn is really good, but as far as the markets are concerned, my corn doesn’t really look any different than anybody else’s. So if mine is now 20% higher or 120% higher, whatever these tariffs are, I’ll buy it somewhere else, because it’s the same stuff. Are you scared that if these tariffs continue that it will basically put you out of business? If China can buy soybeans from Central America at a much cheaper price than what they would buy them from you, how is that going to affect your farm in the long term, especially if these tariffs stay up? For our farm, personally, we try to manage things very financially conservative. So do I feel that a trade war would put us out of business? No, probably not, because if a trade war puts us out of business, it’s going to put a whole lot of other people out of business first, and there are business owners that have probably taken on more risk. And at the end of the day though, if there are, let’s just put it in simple terms, a hundred units of soybeans produced globally and China uses 50 of them, whether they get 50 from the United States or 50 from everywhere else, all the soybeans are probably going to go somewhere and get used. It’s that friction that gets added in the system for tariffs that, well, now instead of sending multiple large container ships to China with soybeans, I’ve got to send a hundred smaller container ships to multiple other countries to make that same sale. So you lose that economic efficiency the more hurdles you put in this trade deal. So what do you think of Trump’s reasons for imposing these tariffs? Well, it depends what day you get. So someday, one day, it may be, “I’m going to impose these tariffs because I want to bring American manufacturing back.” And you think, “Well, I could get behind parts of that in some industries.” But for that to happen, we’ve got to have consistent tariffs for a long time because I’m not going to come build a factory tomorrow, it’s going to take years. There’s whole supply chains that have to be built up around it, and if I’m an investor or a business owner, I don’t want to build a factory when tomorrow he may say, “Well, tariffs are off. We worked out a deal.” On one side, this long-term play that, “I want to get manufacturing and jobs back to the United States.” Which yeah, I think, I don’t know too many of us that would argue with that, but there’s a lot of hurdles to doing that and that’s a long-term play. And then the other side is, “Well, I’m just using it as a bargaining chip. I’m going to get him to the table and get better deals.” And he’s maybe done some of that. I don’t know. I’m not a hundred percent confident that he has a really clear vision for exactly how this plays out. I think, I don’t know, it’s been so uncertain whether, are these short-term, we’re going to try to get short-term deals, or is this a long-term strategic, we’re going to rebuild American manufacturing? And I don’t know where it is because it changes every week. And when we talk about, is it a long-term goal, I’ve done a lot of reporting on manufacturing in the past, and the thing that keeps coming to me is that it may be a long-term goal that is really unrealistic in the sense that I can’t imagine Americans going to work in manufacturing plants where the pay is not going to be the type of pay that… The reason why all the manufacturing is in different parts of the world is because their economies are different and people will go in there and work for a couple dollars an hour, whereas, here in America, people would need government aid to survive off of working in a factory if we were paying the same amount to workers that they do in China. So it doesn’t feel like a realistic goal to me, it feels like manufacturing at that scale is in our past and not really in our future. Yeah, I completely agree. I just think, yeah, if you want to talk automobile manufacturing or some of those higher level, more advanced type manufacturing. Yeah, and maybe there’s a national defense reason we need more computer chip manufacturing in the country, but if you think we’re going to have a Nike sneaker factory in the country, come on. These other countries have been doing this for decades. They’re good at it. They’ve got systems set up, they’ve got the people to work there. I don’t know any of my neighbors who want to go sit at a sewing machine and make t-shirts all day. That’s not what this country’s going to do. It’s probably not realistic. Yeah. So all that being said, in 2024 you voted for Trump knowing that this may be what he would do. How did you come to the decision to vote for him? That is a very good question, and it was something that I struggled with, to be a hundred percent honest, I was not thrilled with either candidate. I’m a little bit embarrassed that on the global stage, these are the best two candidates that we could come up with out of this great country. I was very uncomfortable with the Harris campaign on some social issues, some other things. I was very uncomfortable with the Trump campaign on a lot of, I guess, his personal character issues that I am very uncomfortable with. I don’t think it represents our country very well, what we stand for very well. Ultimately, because you look at what a president can do, I felt like his policies long-term were probably more in line with what I wanted, but this was not something that I was really sold on either way. So I did know that these trade wars were possibly coming. I also felt that his business experience, I guess I felt, much like he says, some of the time that he would use these type of things as a bargaining token, but at the end of the day, I do feel he’s got a decent business acumen and would recognize that, yeah, we’re not going to bring a bunch of manufacturing back to this country. Maybe we should use our power on the global stage to get some better trade deals. I was hopeful that amidst all the rhetoric and all the talk that he would use them maybe more wisely than I feel he has to this point. Let me run down some numbers for you here to… Because I want to focus up that you said that he’s got a good business acumen. In 1991, his casino, the Taj Mahal, bankrupt. In 1992, Trump Plaza Hotel, bankrupt. Castle Hotel Casino, ’92, bankrupt. Trump Hotels, Casino and Resorts in 2004, bankrupt. Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2009, bankrupt. I could go on, there’s more. I would say that the way we have talked about Trump, both in the media… Because I believe that the reality show that he was on where he’s got that great saying, “You’re fired.” It’s myth building. It makes this idea that he is a really great business man, but the truth of the matter is that when you look into his business deals, I mean he had a college that the government had to sanction and shut down because it was ultimately deemed, and I may be putting it in colloquial terms, but it was ultimately deemed a scam. So I mean, how do you feel about that when you think about it, looking at it from this vantage point? Yeah, maybe I should have rephrased my previous statement as he has given us this idea that he has a lot of business acumen. I’ve always questioned whether he really does or not, because I see those things that you’ve mentioned. Apparently he’s been pretty good at running failed businesses and enriching himself, which that is what pointed to a lot of the character issue that I had voting for him to begin with. I mean, that’s one of the character issues. I still think it’s no secret. I live in a very red area and the people I talk to, I think there’s still some that they still are very confident that he has this really good plan that this is all going to work out for the better. And I guess I don’t necessarily… I don’t have that much confidence. I think he’s doing a lot of running his mouth without much of a plan, and maybe it’ll end up okay in the end if he throws his power around enough. But I’m a little more skeptical. So Bryant, your farm has been in your family for a very long time. How have you seen farming change over the years? There have been a lot of changes in agriculture over the long term. When I think about my great-grandfather, he would’ve started with some horse-drawn equipment, likely moved into tractors pretty quickly thereafter, but nothing on the scale of what we use today. There’s a lot of technology that we use to try to make sure every product we use gets put in the right place at the right time, and we are just better at conserving land and water resources as well. I’ve done a lot of reporting with farmers in the past, and the one thing that I think our listeners may not understand or know, is really like the economics of farming. So I’m just curious if you can break down for my listeners, what’s your income like and how do you get that income? Do you get a big check from delivering cows to market? How does all that work? I think from the outside people see, we deliver a lot of high value products, whether it’s right now cattle are at record highs. The checks we receive from selling cattle are very high. The checks we receive from selling grain can be very big. To the average American, that’s a lot of money. The issue is that we have so many expenses tied to producing that crop that really very little of it is profit. As far as the money, when I had a corporate job, I had a paycheck every two weeks. I had so much money that went into my bank account and that was very reliable and consistent. With this, it’s a lot more inconsistent and you find the business can pay for a lot of our living expenses. So my out-of-pocket expenses are less, but I don’t take just regular paychecks. Mostly what we do is we take our profits and invest those back into the business through land and equipment that it’s like this business has it’s built in 401(K) that you’re investing in assets all the time and eventually you hope to get a pretty big asset base, but you don’t do it through collecting a lot of cash in your bank account. It goes elsewhere. When it comes to competition, it seems to me that you are dealing with different factors than your dad had, than your grandfather, than your grandfather had. And I’m thinking of specifically with the rise of big agriculture and these big company farms that I would imagine make it hard to compete because of the resources that they have. Yeah, I think what’s often referred to as corporate farms probably get a lot of bad press. I think there can be some confusion in just because you’re a really large farming operation doesn’t mean it’s not still family owned and operated, but it may not still have that same family feel that I feel our operation does. As you get bigger, you do have to put some corporate structure, mid-level managers, a lot more process and procedure in place. We have seen over the past 10 years, especially some of the very biggest producers have continued to grow, and I think the economics have worked out for them to do that. And they’ve really built systems and as equipment gets bigger, they’re just able to cover a lot more acres. I think for our operation, we decided that our way to improve and build for the future was not necessarily to try to achieve scale at all costs, but to try to focus more on a more diverse operation and also just to produce, let’s say, higher quality over quantity, let’s put it that way. Yeah. So take me back to 2018 when President Trump imposed tariffs on China. This is right around the time when you are starting to come back to the farm. How’d that affect you and your family? Yeah, so that was an interesting year. We had a pretty severe drought that first summer I came back and then trade war with China on top of that. So it was a pretty rough year that first year, but I guess I was still getting my feet under me. So maybe I didn’t fully grasp, I just thought that was normal, but that first trade war, it did severely affect the price of soybeans, primarily because China is such a huge buyer of US soybeans. We produce a lot of soybeans, and when your largest customer, the harder you make that to do trade with them, that directly affects our bottom line. And then on top of that, they come through with these direct payments from the government that I think are a touchy subject amongst farmers. I’m not going to tell you we turned ours away. You feel like it’s a competitive market. You can’t reject it on principle, but at the same time, I don’t think any of us feel like that’s how we want markets to operate. We try to be self-sufficient and run our business in a way that can be profitable and let me do that. I don’t need the government to come in and write me a check to make sure I stay in business. Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask you is why do you think it’s a touchy subject? Well, I think if you ask many people, in the parts of the country I live, about welfare programs, SNAP, they might look at those with a negative light. This idea that, “Hey, I work really hard to support myself. I don’t need the federal government coming in and doing that for me.” And then all of a sudden I’m a farmer and I’m taking this check from the government because government-induced tariffs reduce the value of my product. At the same time, I don’t know any farmer who turned theirs away who said, “Well, I don’t believe in it, so I’m not going to accept it.” We all took it, but I ultimately think it’s really those programs aren’t administered very well on who actually needs them the worst. And also if you give all a certain number of farmers in the same area, a whole bunch of money, it’s no different than the COVID payments that drove a lot of inflation. You can’t just hand out a bunch of money and not have other effects in the economy. And I think we saw that as well through that. So there’s a lot of debate about whether those payments actually helped or hurt, and I’ll let economists argue over that. The thing that stands out for me when I think about those payments is that when Trump did it, the left complained. And when Biden did it, the right complained. To me, what it tells me is that America has turned politics into sports. Maybe neither party is functioning or serving Americans particularly well, but because of team loyalty, people just go with it and sometimes they vote not for their interests, but for the team that they represent, their home team, the thing that they feel strongly about. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of reasons that our political system has drifted this way. I live in a congressional, like a house district that there’s virtually zero chance that it would ever flip to blue. So I think our incumbent, as long as he continues to say and do right-leaning things, he’s never going to be challenged. And he’s never going to be held to account for how much he actually accomplishes because, “Hey, he’s on my team, so I’m not going to go against something that my team wants.” But it’s something that American politics really has to figure out. I think we continue to go through these cycles where really nothing really happens. And I just think with this many smart people, we have to be able to come together and come up with solutions that maybe the edges of both sides are not thrilled with, but ultimately move our country forward. And I don’t know what it’s going to take to get there, but I too am very frustrated with this polarized, “I pick my team. The other team can do nothing right and my team can do nothing wrong.” Because we just know that’s just not how it works, and it’s just not true. I’m not confident enough in my own abilities, knowledge, biases, to think that I have all the solutions to make all this better. I know we need both sides to be able to come together, but our political system, our primaries, there’s so many reasons why that doesn’t happen. And I don’t know what it’s going to take to break, but you just see these presidential elections that are so evenly split, so much urban rules, so much class-based voting, and it’s not good for our country, and we do need some leaders who can really bridge that and try to bring people together for a greater good. You just gave a great campaign speech. I’m just saying. You are looking for an answer and I think you might be it. I’m just saying. Bryant Kagay, thank you so much for talking to me, and thank you for being open, man. You just have a good conversation. I am going to be thinking about this conversation for days to come. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I enjoy it. I try to be open and honest and I appreciate those kind words. I try to be a reasonable voice amidst all the polarization, so thank you.

Since Donald Trump won reelection, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have both done what the now-president-elect and his fellow Republicans refused to do in 2020: publicly accept loss and advocate for a peaceful transition of power. In a Thursday morning speech outside the White House, Biden told Americans, “We accept the choice the country made.” “I’ve said many times,” he continued, “you can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.” He added, “Something I hope we can do, no matter who you voted for, is to see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans. Bring down the temperature.” The remarks, both unifying and a call for calm, sharply contrasted with the Trump campaign’s rhetoric in the final stretch of the election, which included Trump just this weekend saying he would be “ok” with journalists being shot at. Biden’s speech was also radically different from the near-constant conspiracy theories Trump and his allies promoted after Trump lost the 2020 election. > President Biden: "Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable … > The American experiment endures. We're going to be okay, but we need to stay > engaged. We need to keep going." https://t.co/627FiKv7Sz > pic.twitter.com/hZoGsFc7yl > > — NBC News (@NBCNews) November 7, 2024 Seemingly alluding to Trump’s attacks on the voting system, Biden on Thursday also added that he hoped “we can lay to rest a question about the integrity of the American electoral system. It is honest, it is fair, and it is transparent, and it can be trusted, win or lose,” he said. Of course, now that Trump has won, the GOP suddenly appears to agree with this, despite the fact that they and their candidate spent years sowing doubt in the electoral system—including up until election night. The president also told Americans who voted for Harris they had to keep the faith and keep peacefully fighting for what they believe in. “Setbacks are unavoidable,” Biden said. “Giving up is unforgivable.” “The American experiment endures, we’re going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged,” the president added. “We need to keep going, and above all, need to keep the faith.” Harris struck a similar tone during her concession speech at Howard University on Wednesday. “The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for,” Harris told the crowd. “But hear me when I say, hear me when I say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.” Harris also acknowledged that “folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now,” but urged her supporters to still accept the election results. “A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” she continued. “That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.” The duel speeches came at a moment of widespread concerns that American democracy and so many civil liberties hang in the balance with Trump’s return to power. But with a future so unknown—and even frightening—to many, both Harris and Biden post-election remarks reminded Americans what leadership looks like: Recognition of, and respect for, the will of the people, and a reminder that the future of American democracy remains worth peacefully fighting for. Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the coming days, you will hear every imaginable take on why Americans voted to put Donald Trump back in office. Pundits will say toxic masculinity was to blame—and men feeling usurped by women. They’ll say it was the Christian nationalism movement. A surprising shift in Latino voting patterns. Sexism. Racism. Transphobia. Elon Musk. Crypto bros. “Theo bros.” Housing prices. Gaza! Propaganda from Fox News and Newsmax. Misinformation on X. Perhaps it was the cowardice of powerful men like Jeff Bezos and Jamie Dimon. The anti-immigrant frenzy—Trump’s incessant false claims about vicious murderers and rapists and mental patients swarming across the border like locusts. Property crime. Inflation. Interest rates. Lingering malaise from the pandemic. The Democrats’ failure to sell their economic wins. Kamala Harris’ inability to distance herself from an unpopular president. Or maybe a combination of all these things. Gender and Gaza clearly made a difference. Inflation is a notorious regime killer—it was high inflation that underpinned the rise of fascism in Europe in the last century—and rising wages haven’t kept pace. When the Dems say, “Look, inflation is back to normal,” well, the price of groceries sure ain’t. But I’m talking here about something even more basic, something that undergirds so much of America’s discontent. The best explanation, after all, is often the simplest: Wealth inequality. There is little that leaves people as pissed off and frustrated as the feeling that no matter how hard they work, they can’t ever seem to get ahead. And this feeling has been slowly festering since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and his cadre of supply side economists launched the first salvos in what would become the great fucking-over of the American middle and working classes. > Half of the families in the richest nation on the planet have no wealth at > all. Is it any wonder some of them are willing to see the system burn? The frustration was evident in something two very different women in two very different states told me on the very same day in 2022 for a story on how America spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year subsidizing retirement plans mostly for rich people: “I’m going to have to work until I die.” The great fucking-over commenced with President Ronald Reagan’s gutting of unions and the wealth-friendly tax cuts he signed into law in 1981 and 1986. The trend continued with George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, and culminated with the Trump tax cuts of 2017—which, like all of those other Republican initiatives, failed to generate the degreee of growth and prosperity the supply-siders promised. They did, however, make the rich richer as wages stagnated and the middle class shriveled. We talk a lot about income inequality, but wealth and income are different beasts. Income is what pays your bills. Wealth is your security—and in that regard, most American families are just not feeling sufficiently secure. In January 1981, when Reagan took office, the households of the Middle 40—that’s the 50th to 90th wealth percentiles—held a collective 31.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. Fast forward to January 2022: Their share of the pie had dwindled to 25.7 percent, even as the combined wealth of the richest 0.01 percent of households soared from less than 3 percent of the total to 11 percent. Put another way, 18,300 US households—a tiny fraction—now control more than a tenth of the nation’s wealth. And what of the bottom 50 percent? How have they fared over the past four decades or so? When Reagan came in, their average household wealth was a paltry $944. (All figures are in 2023 dollars.) Today they have even less—just $659 on average, according to projections from Real Time Inequality, a site based on data from the Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. All told, those 92.2 million households now hold less than 0.05 percent of the nation’s wealth—which rounds down to zero. In short, half of the people living in the richest nation on the planet have no wealth at all. They’re not doing so hot, income-wise, either. In September, the Congressional Budget Office reported that average income of the highest-earning 1 percent of taxpayers in 2021 was more than $3.1 million, or 42 times the average income of households in the bottom 90 percent, according to the nonprofit Americans for Tax Fairness. That’s the most skewed income distribution since CBO began reporting this data in 1979, the group noted. Back then, the disparity was only 12 to 1. And the billionaires? I’m glad you asked. Based on Forbes data, from January 1, 2018, when the Trump cuts took effect, to April 1 of this year, the nation’s 806 billionaires saw a 57 percent gain in their collective wealth—after adjusting for the inflation that has plagued working families. > Team Biden has actually done a good bit for the middle class, and tried to do > more, but nuance is a hard sell when you’re pitching to families worried about > whether they can make it to the end of the month. “It’s a class and inequality story for sure,” Richard Reeves, the author of 2017’s Dream Hoarders, concurred when I ran my premise by him. “But it’s also a gendered class story.” (His latest book, Of Boys and Men, examines how “the social and economic world of men has been turned upside down.”) And he’s right. But are you starting to see why the broader electorate, race and gender notwithstanding, might be just a little fed up? I suppose, having also written a book about wealth in America, that I know enough to assert that wealth insecurity is fundamental. But why, you might ask, would someone living on the edge vote for Republicans, whose wage-suppressing, union-busting, benefit-denying policies have only tended to make the poor and the middle class more miserable? And why in the name of Heaven would they vote for Trump, a billionaire born with a silver spoon in his mouth who has lied and cheated his way through life? A man whose latest tax-cut plans—though some, like eliminating taxes on tips and Social Security income, can sound progressive—will be deeply regressive, giving ever more to the rich and rationalizing cuts that will hurt the poor and middle class and accelerate global climate chaos. The reason, my friends, may well be that those on the losing end of our thriving economy don’t see it as thriving. Every election cycle, when reporters fan out to ask low-income voters in swing states what they are thinking, the message is roughly the same: Presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans, come around here every four years and talk their talk, and then they leave and forget about us when it comes to policy. Now that’s not entirely fair, because the Biden administration actually has done a good bit for working people and families of color, and has proposed all sorts of measures to make the tax code fairer and reduce the wealth gap (both the racial one and the general one)—including increasing taxes and IRS enforcement for the super-rich. But one can only get so far with a split Senate, Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema on your team, and a rival party that would just as soon throw you into a lake of fire as support your initiatives. But nuance is a hard sell when you’re pitching yourself to families worried about whether they can make it to the end of the month. Roughly half of the population barely gets by, has no stocks, no wealth, no retirement savings, and can’t imagine how they’ll ever afford a house—certainly not at current interest rates. Meanwhile, the billionaire techno-dicks are strutting around, publicly flexing their wealth and power with Democrats and Republicans alike. In courting Americans who, fairly or not, feel like the system has never done them a bit of good, Team Trump has the rhetorical advantage, because he says he’ll destroy that system—even if that really just means he’ll subvert it to further enrich his buddies. “Populist Revolt Against Elite’s Vision of the U.S.” was one of the New York Times’ headlines after the race was called on Wednesday morning. And that’s absolutely right. Because when the Republicans say, “The economy is a nightmare under Biden and Harris, and illegal immigrants are committing heinous crimes and taking your jobs and we’re gonna cut your taxes,” and the Dems counter, “Hey, none of that is really true and we actually did a lot and we feel your pain and the economy is going gangbusters and Trump’s tariffs will destroy it,” well, whom do you think a person struggling from paycheck to paycheck might be more inclined to believe? Sure, the economy is doing great—if you own stock. If you have a well-paying job and a retirement plan. If you are in the top fifth of the wealth and income spectrums. If not, even if you rightly suspect that the Republicans won’t do a damn thing to improve your lot, you might just be tempted to say, “Fuck it.” And watch the system burn.

Kamala Harris conceded the presidential election to Donald Trump Wednesday afternoon in a speech at Howard University. Addressing a crowd of sometimes tearful supporters, Harris emphasized the need to accept Trump’s victory but continue “the fight for our country.” “While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign,” she said. > In her concession speech, Vice President Kamala Harris urged her supporters to > accept her election loss against President-elect Donald Trump. > pic.twitter.com/cwr3XjJzwH > > — The Associated Press (@AP) November 6, 2024 Harris told the crowd she had spoken to Trump earlier in the day and pledged to “engage in a peaceful transfer of power” and help the next president’s team with the transition. In the speech, Harris urged her supporters to accept the outcome of the election. “A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election we accept the results,” Harris said. “That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.” She also added, “We owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the constitution of the United States.” Harris struck an energizing note, pointing to the need to continue pushing to protect abortion rights and the right to freedom from gun violence. “I will never give up the fight for a future where Americans can pursue their dreams, ambitions, and aspirations, where the women of America have the freedom to make decisions about their own body,” she said. The vice president encouraged her supporters “to organize, to mobilize, and to stay engaged.” “On the campaign, I would often say, ‘when we fight, we win,'” she said. “But here’s the thing. Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win.” “Do not despair,” Harris concluded. “This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves.”

Inside a museum in Oakland, not far from where Kamala Harris launched her first bid for the presidency back in 2019, Lateefah Simon, a Democrat whom Harris mentored, declared victory in her congressional race on Tuesday night. Early ballot returns showed her with 63 percent of the vote, though results were still coming in Wednesday morning. Simon is regarded as “a rising star within Bay Area politics and the Democratic Party,” and Oaklanders tried to celebrate her win as a bright spot while television screens around the room showed Donald Trump claiming more and more electoral votes. “We have no idea what our reality will be tomorrow: the threat of mass deportation…of women not having control over their bodies. Let’s keep organizing,” Simon told a crowd of supporters. “Our fight has always been an enduring fight,” she added. “We have been in this place before of uncertainty.” Simon’s political career owes much to two mentors: US Rep. Barbara Lee, whose seat Simon now plans to take in the House, and Vice President Kamala Harris. Simon met Harris more than 20 years ago. At the time, Simon was a young mother who’d been running a San Francisco nonprofit helping girls in the criminal justice system and organizing sex workers. Harris was a lawyer at the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, and they both served on a task force that aimed to stop criminalizing young people who’d been sex trafficked. When Harris became DA in 2004, she asked Simon, who’d started running the nonprofit at age 19, to come over to the prosecutor’s office and try to make the system better. Simon demurred—she’d spent time in the juvenile justice system herself and “never wanted to work for The Man,” she told my colleague Jamilah King in 2018—but Harris was persistent: “She was like…Do you forever want to be on the stairs yelling and begging for people to support you, your cause? Why can’t you fix it from the inside?” Simon recalled. > “Vitriol is poisonous to our democratic process, but I’ve never shied away > from any fight, and I’m gonna lead us forward.” Together, Harris and Simon created a program called Back on Track that helped nonviolent offenders earn a diploma and get job training instead of going to prison. Today, Simon describes Harris as a mentor and “auntie”—Harris gifted Simon her first suit and urged her to go to college, even inspecting her report cards. “She saw me before I saw myself, in a lot of ways,” Simon told King. It was at Mills College where Simon met Lee, who held her House seat for more than a quarter century before running an unsuccessful campaign to replace Dianne Feinstein in the Senate after Feinstein’s death last fall. Over the weekend, Lee and Simon went together to cast their ballots at the former Mills campus. “Congratulations again, my sister!” Lee said from a video at the election night party, calling in from DC, as the polls showed Simon leading handily over her opponent, Jennifer Tran, a political newcomer who campaigned in part on getting tougher on crime. The party continued, but no one could ignore the presidential results trickling in from outside this progressive enclave. Some people in Oakland had been hopeful that Harris, who was born in the city, would make history. But as the night went on, it was hard for the partygoers to mask their concern. “Shit, he improved his performance from 2020,” a woman said as she waited outside for a ride, looking anxiously at Trump’s results on her phone. A Trump presidency would be “devastating for disabled people, for women, for people of color,” Simon told me earlier in the evening, shortly after California polls closed. Progressives in Oakland also appeared to be marching toward losses in other important races, including the recall of the Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and District Attorney Pamela Price, both progressive women of color. Inside, I ran into Pastor B.K. Woodson, who’d opposed the recalls. “I’m very concerned,” for the nation, he told me, “because we have a large part of America that’s okay with retribution, violence, and intolerance.” “We’re going to push forward, we’re going to organize,” Simon told me, bringing the conversation back to her constituents: “There are literally thousands of people tonight that are sleeping on the streets of Alameda County; they deserve leaders that are going to focus on shifting their material conditions.” During her campaign, Simon pledged to invest more in affordable housing, addiction treatment, and mental health care; close loopholes in federal gun laws; and push for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Though Harris’ outcome in this election was not as rosy, Simon’s win is a sign of Harris’ impact, and the impact of other Black leaders before her. On the video at the event, Rep. Lee spoke of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run as a major party presidential candidate, who “opened that door for you and for me.” Months ago, before the primary, Simon told me that Simon’s oldest daughter, who as a kid spent time playing in Harris’ office, recently became a prosecutor in DC. “She saw Kamala do it, and she was like, I can be a Black woman and a prosecutor” who helps people. Simon, herself, has left a legacy to uphold: After working with Harris, she led an organization focused on racial justice Oakland and was later elected to the Bay Area Rapid Transit Board of Directors. (Simon was born legally blind and depended on BART trains to get to work and take her daughter to school.) She also co-chaired Gov. Gavin Newsom’s task force on police reform in 2020. And the nonprofit she ran in her youth, now called the Young Women’s Freedom Center, remains important to her. Several of the center’s staffers were there at the museum on Tuesday to support her, including Julia Arroyo, its executive director. “It means a lot for a lot of our young people to see her in this position of leadership,” Arroyo said. “Lateefah was born in the revolution,” Simon’s uncle, Timothy Simon, told the crowd. “She was born of parents who believed in a Black economic agenda. She was born of grandparents who were part of the great migration here to California, seeking opportunity and fleeing those red states that Lateefah is about to take on in the House of Representatives.” It’s a mandate that Simon seems eager to embrace. “I’m ready to go,” she told me. “Vitriol is poisonous to our democratic process,” she said, referring to Trump’s message, “but I’ve never shied away from any fight, and I’m gonna lead us forward.”

Former President Donald Trump was poised to return to the White House for a second time, ending Tuesday evening on the brink of victory over Vice President Kamala Harris. After running on a dark campaign of retribution, Trump tried to strike a conciliatory tone in a rambling victory speech at the Palm Beach County convention, where thousands of jubliant supporters had assembled for what Trump promised would be “the last rally.” During the speech, which included several of the kind of oddball tangents he is known for, Trump declared his intention to “help the country heal,” and promised his next administration would be “the golden age of America.” He acknowledged his family and thanked his campaign, and after Sen. JD Vance said a few words, Trump quipped, “Turned out to be a good choice!” Among the others he thanked for his victory were podcasters Joe Rogan and Theo Von, in an acknowledgement of the underappreciated role that the medium played in his outreach to the young men who helped return him to office. Trump barely mentioned his opponent and instead focused on his remarkable comeback, which Trump called “a triumph of democracy.” “It’s time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us,” he said. In July, after President Joe Biden stepped down and Harris became the Democratic nominee in July, polls showed the race at a virtual dead heat, with both candidates within the margin of error in all the major swing states. But Trump succeeded in breaching the “blue wall” state of Pennsylvania that Harris could not afford to lose. He also won handily in North Carolina, Georgia, and appeared headed toward victory in Wisconsin. At the end of the evening, it seemed almost certain he would exceed the 270 electoral votes needed to win—he was also ahead in the national popular vote. Harris did well with women voters of all ages and regions, but it wasn’t enough to make up the lost ground she lost among Black men, but especially Latino voters, who, based on exit polling, appeared to break for Trump in surprisingly large numbers. Trump’s campaign had focused on peeling off support from those traditionally Democratic groups, and while they still voted in force for Harris, enough of them switched sides to make a difference. As a 2024 candidate, Trump himself was no more disciplined than he was in 2016 or 2020. But his campaign was far more professional than it had been in his previous races. “Donald Trump is a movement,” former Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) told me in the spring. “That’s how he won this thing originally. But it was kind of rag tag. This time he has everything going for him. He has a huge, disciplined ground operation, a coordinated message operation.” A lot of that, Davis suspected, could be credited to campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita. “He’s the kind of guy that Trump listens to outside of the family and can take control.” In October, though, Trump seemed to revert to form when he brought Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the fold and promised to put him in charge of “making America healthy again.” Kennedy proceeded to make news with kooky promises that the second Trump administration would ban childhood vaccines and get rid of fluoride in drinking water. Trump also briefly brought back Corey Lewandowski, his 2016 campaign manager who in 2021 fell out of Trump’s orbit after the wife of a big donor accused him of making unwanted sexual advances. Despite this series of self-inflicted wounds, campaign co-chairs LaCivita and Susie Wiles ultimately let “Trump be Trump” while keeping the rest of the campaign on track and focused. During the closing days of the campaign, the Daily Beast published a story alleging that LaCivita was “double dipping” and making millions from Trump’s campaign and its ad buys (he denied the claim vociferously). The Atlantic later reported that the story had infuriated Trump, who considered firing LaCivita. In previous campaigns, Trump had hired and fired a handful of campaign managers, including Paul Manafort, who ended up going to prison for money laundering, tax fraud, and illegal foreign lobbying connected to his years working for Ukrainian politicians. (Trump later pardoned him.) But Wiles and LaCivita managed to stay on for the strong finish. Trump also consolidated his support among the nation’s business leaders in a way he had not in his previous two campaigns. Most notably, billionaire Elon Musk took a starring role in Trump’s campaign, spending $150 million of his own money to fund a last minute get-out-the vote effort by paying an army of canvassers to knock on doors for the candidate. (Trump spent a few minutes of his speech praising “Elon” and his “space ship.”) Whether Musk can truly take credit for Trump’s victory is an open question. Especially because some of those workers seemed to be doing a good job of taking Musk’s money and not too much else. News reports noted that as many as a quarter of the voter contacts made by Musk’s canvassers in Arizona and Nevada were bogus, as the workers figured out how to game the canvassing app to look as though they were out beating the bushes for every last vote when in fact they were hanging out at Starbucks. But Trump’s victory will undoubtedly be viewed as a victory for Musk as well, and perhaps serve as encouragement for other oligarchs to take a more direct role in running campaigns, leaving the national party even weaker.   Trump has promised that among his first acts upon taking office will be to close the border, free some of the incarcerated January 6 rioters, fire Special Counsel Jack Smith (who has been investigating Trump for his mishandling of classified documents and his role in fomenting the January 6 riot), and launch his campaign of mass deportations. Some time before the race was called, Cedric Richmond, co-chair of Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign informed her supporters that she would not be speaking tonight, and would address them in the morning. This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Every election is a Judgment Day, but this one more so than any other in the history of the nation. Never before has a major party run a nominee described by retired military leaders who worked with him as a “fascist” and a serious threat to American democracy. Never before has the electorate been provided the choice of a nominee who previously refused to accept vote tallies, falsely declared victory, covertly schemed to overturn an election, and incited a violent assault on the US Capitol to stay in power, as well as one whose mismanagement of a pandemic caused the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of Americans. Never before have Americans been asked to return to office a politician who waged a massive disinformation operation fueled by the most vicious vitriol to exploit hatred, racism, misogyny, and ignorance. Is America a nation that accepts and embraces all that? The vote count on Tuesday night says: maybe. Despite Trump’s multiple offenses (criminal, political, and social), tens of millions voters—roughly half of the electorate—said they want more of him and desire this felonious, misogynistic, racist, and seemingly cognitively challenged wannabe-autocrat once again lead the nation. The contest was not officially decided by the end of Election Day. Vice President Kamala Harris may triumph—but it will be a narrow victory without a resounding rejection of Trumpism. And there was a strong prospect that Trump could end up being the first fascist to win an American presidential election. Facing a highly unconventional candidate whose main strategy was to whip up fear and anxiety, Harris, a latecomer to the race, ran a conventional campaign. She touted the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration, presented a compelling personal story, offered a host of generally realistic policy proposals, and critiqued her opponent—doing all of this mostly accurately. Her last-minute elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket raised the question of whether the United States could elect a Black woman president. Counterpoised was another question: Can a convicted felon awaiting sentencing (found guilty of falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money payment to keep secret his supposed extramarital affair with a porn star) who has been indicted for other alleged crimes, and who has called for the termination of the Constitution (so he could be reinstalled as president), be elected commander in chief and the nation’s top defender of the Constitution? > The visions of America presented by the two candidates were black-and-white > opposites. There has been nothing subtle about the 2024 election. It pit the political extremism Trump has embraced and fomented to drive his red-meat base to the polls against Harris’ effort to expand her pool of voters by forging an alliance of progressives and independents, centrists, and Republicans concerned about the danger Trump poses to democracy. More so than in his previous campaigns, Trump endeavored to demonize his opponents. He peddled the false claim that the United States has descended into a hellscape with an economy in a “depression” and gangs of criminal migrants armed with military-style weapons conquering towns and cities across the land. Looking to stoke grievance, resentment, and bigotry, he asserted that “evil” Democrats, assisted by a subversive media, have purposefully conspired to destroy the country. He essentially QAnonized American politics. He dismissed Harris as “low IQ” and not truly Black. He called her supporters “scum.” Trump debased the national discourse further than he had in the years since he launched his first presidential bid in 2015. That included all violent talk of retribution, which included suggesting deploying the US military against “radical left lunatics,” putting Liz Cheney on trial for treason before a military tribunal and placing her before a line of guns, and executing retired Gen. Mark Milley, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. For years, Trump has forced American politics into a downward spiral of unprecedented indecencies and anti-democratic impulses. And this year, millions of Americans continued to cheer this along. Harris did not only campaign to implement a host of left-leaning policies related to such fundamental matters as health care, women’s freedom, and middle-class economics but to prevent a would-be autocrat from gaining control of the US government. That’s a heavy lift for any one candidate. The visions of America presented by the two candidates were black-and-white opposites. At Trump rallies, the former reality TV celebrity staged his own version of the Two Minutes Hate that George Orwell envisioned in 1984. He decried his rivals—“the enemy within”—for sabotaging America and directed his followers to vent tribalistic fury at these targets, exploiting their rage and, yes, ignorance. At one of his final rallies—held in a half-empty arena in Reading, Pennsylvania, on Monday—when Trump called Harris dumb, he was met by approving and angry shouts from the crowd: “She’s an idiot.” “She’s a moron.” “She’s a puppet.” “Lock her up.” One Trump supporter there told me Harris was too stupid to make a decision about anything, and Barack Obama was calling all the shots. Another Trump devotee wore a sweatshirt that declared “Say No to the Hoe.” (Racism and misogyny in a single slur.) One of the most anticipated moments of Trump’s rambling and repetitive speech occurred when he assailed the press. As soon as he started his now-familiar anti-media screed, many in the audience pivoted to face the journalists and TV crews on the riser toward the rear of the arena, shook their fists at them, and screamed profanities. This seemed to be fun for them. Attendees I spoke with echoed Trump’s talking points, insisting that gangs of thugs from overseas are terrorizing American cities, that the nation is a crime-ridden disaster, that US government funds are being siphoned from a host of programs and handed to immigrants, and that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. One fellow said he was for Trump because his 401(k) retirement fund was strong when Trump was president and now was in the dumps. When I explained that’s virtually impossible, given the Dow Jones average is now more than 44 percent higher than its best mark during the Trump years, he just shrugged and insisted Joe Biden and Harris were to blame. Some were unaware that retired Gens. John Kelly and Milley had called Trump a “fascist.” Those in the know dismissed these remarks as comments uttered by traitorous men envious of Trump or being paid by dark forces to undermine the Republican nominee. Many in the audience were wearing hats and T-shirts proclaiming Jesus backed Trump, and the ones I asked about this said that since Jesus had chosen Trump to be the victor in this race, only cheating could defy God’s will. (Apparently, God and Jesus can’t stop the steal.) Indeed, most of the Trump people I encountered said they would not accept a Harris win as legitimate, and a few remarked that there would be violence if Trump were declared the loser. They were fundamentalists: The nation must be Trump-led or all is lost. It’s not a radical observation that Trump tried to win through hate. Harris, as was much commented upon when she became the presidential nominee, talked up joy. At her rallies, she highlighted the rhetoric and values of community, noting that Americans can work together to address challenges. She repeatedly promised to listen to those who oppose her views and consider Republicans for posts in her administration if she were to prevail. That might have been just nice talk. But it was better than fueling division and, as Trump did, vowing to use the power of the presidency to investigate and prosecute critics and opponents and to root out of the federal government civil servants deemed insufficiently loyal to the president. Certainly, there was anger on the Democratic side: over the Dobbs decision and those politicians enacting or advocating severe restrictions on women, over the lack of action on climate change, over the horrific war in Gaza. But at Harris events, she did not seek to channel that into paranoid and dehumanizing assaults against Americans on the other side. Her stance—at least, rhetorically—was that all Americans count. Trump’s position: Trump uber alles, all others are “vermin” and the “enemy.” American politics has always contained an us-versus-them element, and the battle can be fierce. But Trump has turned this into asymmetrical warfare. More than any other major presidential candidate in modern history, he has lied, he has insulted, he has appealed to the basest reflexes in people. He has waged war on reality, seeking to lead millions into a cosmos of fakery and false narratives that boosts an ultra-Manichean view of the world. He saw his path to power as exacerbating the divisions within American society. He has been an accelerationist for tribalistic discord, explicitly threatening the norms and values of democratic governance. His answer to what ails the United States is strongman government, in which he is the authoritarian savior. Harris ran as a feisty Democrat who wants to work with Congress to tackle assorted problems. These are profoundly different approaches to…well, to life. And in the 2024 election, Americans had to decide which camp they were in. Certainly, there were many issues beyond this monumental clash for voters to focus on: inflation, immigration, housing costs, trade, taxes, Ukraine, education, abortion, and so on. But ultimately, they were forced to pick a side, to render a verdict on Trump’s war on truth, democracy, and decency and Harris’ traditional embrace of pluralism and established norms and values. At this fork in the road—with vote-tallying still under way and the possibility of conflict and challenges in the air—Americans have not reached a clear decision on what sort of country the United States will be. And this inability to resolutely renounce Trump’s politics of hate—let alone empower it—is its own sort of judgement.

As Americans cast their votes in an election dominated by debates over inflation and the cost of living, a ballot measure in Vice President Kamala Harris’ home state is dividing the Democratic Party on the issue of how to address skyrocketing rents. Proposition 33—dubbed the Justice for Renters Act—would repeal the state’s controversial Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which for decades has restricted local governments’ ability to cap rent increases. Currently, Costa-Hawkins blocks counties and cities from imposing rent controls on apartments, condos, and single-family homes built after a certain date—1995 in much of the state, but years earlier in some cities, such as San Francisco. It also prohibits vacancy control, meaning that even landlords who are subject to rent controls can raise rents up to the market rate when a new tenant moves in. Some cities have already enacted new rent control plans in anticipation of Prop. 33 passing. In October, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve legislation that would expand rent control to approximately 16,000 additional units if the initiative passes.  In some ways, Prop. 33 is similar to President Joe Biden’s proposal this past summer to cap annual rent increases at 5 percent over the next two years for large landlords who want to obtain federal tax breaks. Two weeks after it was rolled out, speaking to a crowd in Atlanta, Harris appeared to voice support for the president’s plan, vowing to “take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases.” But since then, according to the Nation, she has largely left promises for direct tenant protections out of her public statements. The outlet observed that instead of renters, Harris seemed to be focusing on homeowners, pushing policies like tax incentives for developers to build for first-time homebuyers.  Harris’ reluctance to embrace rent control may mark a small victory for YIMBYs, the “yes-in-my-backyard” pro-housing movement that first emerged in San Francisco in the 2010s as a more market-based approach to the housing affordability crisis. YIMBYs, many of whom are Democrats, have largely opposed Prop. 33, arguing it would cause new rental construction to grind to a halt. An analysis by California YIMBY, an advocacy group focused on ameliorating the state’s housing shortage, argued that passing the measure “will likely worsen housing affordability by empowering NIMBY jurisdictions to block new housing.”  NIMBY, a largely pejorative label meaning “not in my backyard,” describes locals who oppose construction and redevelopment in their neighborhoods—ranging variously from affordable housing, to homeless shelters, to luxury condos, to public transportation infrastructure. According to Matthew Lewis, the communications director at California YIMBY, NIMBYs include residents from across the political spectrum. While conservative NIMBYs might oppose new buildings to maintain the status quo or inflate property values in their neighborhoods, many left-aligned NIMBYs strongly oppose market-based development out of fears over gentrification or ideological commitments. Between those poles lies a significant group of mainstream liberal NIMBYs, who, as New York Magazine’s Curbed puts it, “believe in affordable housing until it’s in their neighborhood.” In 2022, Barack Obama called them out, specifically arguing that resistance to “affordable, energy-sustainable, mixed-use and mixed-income communities” contributes to the housing crisis.  “When you have very right-wing NIMBYs agreeing with left NIMBYs that we should do all the things necessary to prevent more homebuilding, it kind of makes you go, huh?” Lewis said. For Lewis, the story of a rent-controlled city like San Francisco characterizes the debate. According to the city’s housing plan, about 70 percent of San Francisco renters live in rent-stabilized units, built before June 1979. But this hasn’t helped the affordability crisis, as the percentage of the city’s households who were rent-burdened—that is, who spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent—increased by roughly 15 percent from 1990 to 2015 for residents making 50 to 80 percent of the median San Francisco income. And according to the Public Policy Institute of California and the California Housing Partnership, in 2024, over half of all renters in the state—roughly 3 million residents—are rent-burdened.  “I think our opponents on the left misconstrue that rent control is this mechanism of broad affordability,” Lewis said. “But what it’s supposed to do is provide stability and security of tenure for lower income tenants. In a city like San Francisco, what you end up with is millionaires living in rent-controlled housing.”  To get it right, Lewis suggests that the city first has to “unleash a building boom” by constructing housing and renting it out at market rate so developers can recoup investment costs and continue to build. “Then when those buildings become eligible for rent control—after 15 or 20 years—you have this abundant supply of rent-stabilized units because you’ve never stopped building,” he argues.  Many housing justice advocates reject that argument. In a 2021 article for Housing is a Human Right, a prominent group now backing Prop. 33, Patrick Range McDonald wrote that such market-based strategies resemble the real estate industry’s failed “trickle-down housing policy” that has led to the ongoing crisis. Comparing it to giving tax cuts to the rich, McDonald wrote that “corporate landlords and major developers will generate billions in revenue by charging sky-high rents for market-rate apartments, making massive profits off the backs of the middle and working class.”  In a May 2024 analysis charging that California YIMBY has sided with corporate landlords to defeat Prop. 33, McDonald wrote that this YIMBY proposal of “filtering” actually “fuels gentrification and displacement in working-class neighborhoods, including communities of color,” since, he says, developers will only build luxury housing to maximize profits.  For his part, Lewis contends that many of Prop. 33’s leftist supporters are acting in direct opposition to affordability by arguing that only government-funded social housing projects can solve the problem. “I think that this is where YIMBYs really part ways with the left,” he said. “The market can just move substantially faster than the government can, if you let it.” While Lewis concedes that the government should play a substantial role in providing subsidized housing for low-income residents, he says that “you can’t have a functioning system where the government is basically shutting down housing production for most of the market.”  Rent control, Lewis says, contributes to the housing shortage. He points to New York City, which has an estimated 26,000 older, rent-stabilized units that are empty, according to findings from the 2023 survey, because limits on rent increases make it difficult for landlords to keep up with maintenance costs and building codes.  The debate is raging among economists, too. A University of Chicago poll found that an overwhelming 81 percent of economists surveyed opposed rent control. But in 2023, 32 prominent economists signed a letter supporting nationwide rent control. The document referred to a 2007 study following rent control policies for 30 years across 76 cities in New Jersey. It found “little to no statistically significant effect of moderate rent controls on new construction.” There is also research connecting housing supply reductions to systemic loopholes, such as exceptions that allow landlords to evict all tenants in a building to convert their rental units into market-rate condos.  Shanti Singh, the legislative and communications director at Tenants Together, a coalition of local tenant organizations in California, argues that rent control and new development can work in concert. “We fight for housing that folks can afford. Millions and millions of people’s wages simply are not anywhere close to meeting market rates,” Singh says. “We’re fighting for people living in crowded conditions, people who are homeless, and people one step away from being homeless.”  It’s not tenant advocates but current laws restricting rent control that are the real problem, Singh claims: “Because of Costa-Hawkins, we are actually bleeding the supply of rent-controlled housing that’s affordable at below market rates. That’s a unit that you’ve lost. That’s the supply loss.” According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there is a shortage of nearly one million affordable rental units in California for “extremely low income renters,” or residents who earn less than 30 percent of the state median income. “There’s a huge issue with folks with disabilities on fixed incomes, including seniors, who need accessible housing,” Singh says. They can’t access rent-controlled housing in places like San Francisco because the units are too old to have the necessary accommodations—they’re all constructed before 1979.  Instead of working on legislation that will solve the affordability crisis, Singh says that many YIMBYs are “leaving a status quo in place that’s untenable” by bringing up “insane hypothetical scenarios.”  Susie Shannon, the policy director at Housing Is A Human Right—which has put over $46 million into its support for Prop. 33—says Tony Strickland is one of these hypotheticals. Strickland, a conservative city council member in wealthy Huntington Beach, is an example of a NIMBY to many pro-development advocates. YIMBYs argue that he would use rent control laws like Prop. 33, if passed, to circumvent California’s affordable housing mandates by setting unreasonably low rent caps designed to stifle new housing development, according to the Orange County Register.  Shannon pointed to an op-ed by Strickland, in which the councilman said his words had been taken out of context and affirmed that he has been “a lifelong opponent of rent control.” He clarified that he does support some language in the ballot measure that stops the state from using the court system to block local rent control decisions. Strickland did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.  Dean Preston, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the number one enemy of several California pro-development groups, says the amount of money backing the campaign against Prop. 33—over $120 million according to the Los Angeles Times—is telling. The two largest opposition donors are the California Apartment Association at nearly $89 million and the California Association of Realtors at $22 million. “What has sucked up a lot of the debate from [Prop 33] opponents is discussing…what impacts rent control has on construction financing,” Preston says. “But what’s really driving the opposition is vacancy control”—the possibility that with the repeal of Costa-Hawkins, local governments would limit the amount a landlord could increase rents between tenants. Preston believes that without vacancy control, cities are essentially powerless to regulate rents. “That’s why it is worth it for the California Association of Realtors, the California Apartment Association, and the landlord lobby to invest,” he says.  While more than 650,000 people in the United States experience homelessness on any given night and living without shelter has increasingly become a crime, everyone I talked to maintains that there is a way to solve the housing crisis.  For Lewis, it’s expanding funding for programs like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which offers developers incentives for making a portion of their construction affordable for low-income residents. He also favors upzoning to increase housing density by allowing more multifamily units in areas previously reserved for single-family homes.  For tenant advocates like Singh and Preston, it’s about the increased dialogue around housing on the national stage, as well as the repeated attempts to create a federal social housing authority. “I think there’s a sense within the tenant movement in California that it is inevitable at some point that Costa-Hawkins will be repealed because most people support rent control,” Preston says. “I hope Prop. 33 passes, but if it doesn’t, I expect it’ll be back on a future ballot and in future legislative efforts.”

The first time I met Kamala Harris, in 2007, I was a reporter profiling her for San Francisco magazine. She was in a basement near City Hall, trying to persuade a roomful of low-level ex–drug dealers to find time in their lives for a little self-care. “I have a job that’s just crazy,” she told the crowd of 100 or so young men and women, sounding more like a motivational speaker than the San Francisco district attorney and possible future president of the United States. “I get calls day and night. That’s a lot of stress.” What helped her stay sane, she explained, was waking up early every morning, jumping on the treadmill, and tuning the TV to something upbeat. “My life is like the news, and I don’t need to watch the news. So I watch MTV and VH1. I know every song!”  Her audience—participants in a program Harris created for young, nonviolent ex-offenders called Back on Track—was there because, if they fulfilled all the program’s requirements and stayed out of trouble, their criminal records would be wiped clean. Harris knew that for these mostly Black and brown young people, the keys to their eventual success included educational opportunities, decent jobs, stable housing, and affordable childcare. Helping them move toward economic security was Back on Track’s—and Harris’s—primary mission.  But taking care of their bodies and their emotional health was also important. Instead of self-medicating with booze and drugs, she wanted to help them develop the mental habits that could help them persevere when they felt worn down by the world—a mindset for believing they did have the power to determine the course of their futures. Going to the gym wasn’t the point, she told them— though she had wrangled free passes to 24-Hour Fitness for anyone who wanted one. “It’s about being happy and healthy and figuring out ways to cope.” Scanning the room, I could see that many of her listeners seemed … baffled. Since when did the city’s top law enforcement official care about how a bunch of former drug dealers felt? > Scanning the room, I could see that many of her listeners seemed … baffled. > Since when did the city’s top law enforcement official care about how a bunch > of former drug dealers felt? Flash forward almost two decades: The Democratic presidential nominee who has spent the past 107 days running an ultramarathon on a tightrope in designer pantsuits and high heels seems light years away from that earnest young DA preaching about the healing power of cardio. Consider Harris’s urgent closing message on the Ellipse a week before the election, flanked by a parade of flags and 75,000 people who were terrified by the prospects of a second Trump presidency. Donald Trump is a “petty tyrant,” the vice president declared—“unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance and out for unchecked power.” America is better than he is, she insisted, “America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised, a nation big enough to encompass all our dreams, strong enough to withstand any fracture or fissure between us, and fearless enough to imagine a future of possibilities.” The 2024 election feels like a second chance, if not the last chance, for the nation, a back-on-track moment. In much the same way that she was encouraging young offenders to seize control of their lives decades ago, Harris spent a good chunk of her speech trying to convince her listeners that they can control the fate of a democracy threatened by bullies, demagogues, and oligarchs. “Each of you has the power,” she told the cheering but jittery crowd, “to turn the page and start writing the next chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.”  For me, the most striking moment in her speech came when Harris talked about her adored mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who died from colon cancer in 2009 at the age of 70. “I took care of my mother when she got sick, cooking foods that she had a taste for, finding clothes that would not irritate her skin,” Harris told her audience, describing intimate acts of love and kindness that public figures, much less politicians, rarely discuss. Harris the candidate was touting her plan to expand Medicare coverage to include home health care for seniors: “Currently, if you need home care and you don’t have some money to hire someone, you and your family need to deplete your savings to qualify for help. That’s just not right.” Harris the daughter was speaking from a personal place that she has often tried to guard. “Caregiving is about dignity,” she said. “It is about dignity.”  It was a profoundly empathetic moment. And I wondered if her capacity to communicate empathy might just end up saving democracy. As Americans reach the finish line of the most stomach-wrenching, soul-sucking, exhausting, consequential presidential campaign in memory, many factors will help determine whether Harris will be able to beat back Trump and pull America from the brink.  If she wins, pundits will point to the innumerable GOP mistakes. Abortion bans transforming health care for women (and families) across the US, infuriating not just the tens of millions of people capable of getting pregnant but also their mothers and grandmothers old enough to remember the coat-hanger-abortion era before Roe v. Wade. Then there is the far-right’s embrace of Project 2025 and other extreme policies that would catapult the country back to the 19th century. The grotesque, proto-fascist spectacle at Madison Square Garden. Trump’s rapidly degenerating mental capacity, his accelerating physical decline, his unapologetic embrace of corrupt dictators, his incessant lies. His vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance’s repulsive views about women, especially unmarried ones with no children. Elon Musk’s full-on transformation into a Marvel supervillain, one who turns out to be clueless about politics even as he spends hundreds of millions of dollars trying to disrupt a democracy that helped make him the richest person on the planet.  > “Considering they had such little time, some say this is a minor miracle. But > it isn’t—it is the result of the right people and the right candidate. It will > be a case study for future political scientists.” Then there’s the Harris campaign, which people who pay close attention to these things are calling one of the best Democrats have ever run. “Considering they had such little time, some say this is a minor miracle,” the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin posted on Twitter. “But it isn’t—it is the result of the right people and the right candidate. It will be a case study for future political scientists.” Harris, who spent four years being dismissed as a DEI lightweight, has been a revelation since President Joe Biden bowed out of the race in July, even to her longtime supporters. “It seems to us that something happened to you,” Oprah Winfrey marveled in September, as if “a veil or something dropped… and you just stepped into your power.” Harris responded by (of course) laughing, then added, “You know, we each have those moments in our lives where it’s time to step up.” In the weeks since that virtual rally, despite a schedule that has sometimes seemed to require her to be in 12 places at once, Harris has seemed to gain in strength and clarity of purpose. Through it all, her sunny stamina has been one of her greatest attributes. But for me, another quality that distinguishes Harris and may even be a determinative superpower in this race is empathy. Obviously, empathy can be a double-edged sword for women politicians, making them seem “soft” and “weak,” their feminine/maternal instincts writ inappropriately large in an arena requiring steely strength. At least that’s what Trump and Vance and Musk and their ilk seem to think—people who at minimum lack any semblance of emotional intelligence and at worst, seem to have learned their social skills on 4chan. It’s not what Democratic strategists have emphasized when they’ve framed her candidacy; she’s the tough-talking prosecutor who recognizes in Trump the type of criminal and predator she spent much of her career trying to put in jail. But scratch the surface of her prosecutorial rigor and consider the policy ideas she’s been talking about on the campaign trail—health care, reproductive care, child care, elder care. > Empathy can be a double-edged sword for women politicians, making them seem > “soft” and “weak,” their feminine/maternal instincts writ inappropriately > large in an arena requiring steely strength. At least that’s what Trump and > Vance and Musk and their ilk seem to think. Of course, those are perennially Democratic issues, embraced with special fervor by female candidates and their voters. It’s hardly surprising that Harris—who was raised by a single mother and focused on victims of violence and crime for much of her career—would espouse a public policy agenda that is fundamentally about treating people with dignity and kindness. But you can support empathic policies and still be a terrible person. What’s notable is how many people have a story about her kindness out of the public eye, going back decades. A young woman named Tanene recently went viral on TikTok, talking about how, when she was a homeless teenager in the early 2000s, Harris—not yet a politician—plucked her from the San Francisco streets, deciding “she was going to love me and guide me and cheer me on for literally my entire life.” Twenty years later, she considers Harris her “big sister Auntie mentor friend.” Lateefah Simon, a MacArthur fellow who ran Harris’s Back on Track program for a few years in the mid-2000s, recalls how, soon after she’d been hired, she showed up to work wearing a hoodie and sweats, like the kids she would be meeting with that day. Harris was not amused. “Why would you ever disrespect your people?” Harris demanded, sending her home to change. “You work for this office. You work for the state, so you represent. Would you go to Pacific Heights”—one of the city’s whitest and wealthiest neighborhoods— “wearing that?” But the next day, Harris presented Simon with a brand-new suit, the very first she ever owned. (Today, Simon is expected to be elected to replace Representative Barbara Lee, representing Berkeley and Oakland in Congress.) Some of these stories can edge into a kind of Frank Capra sentimentality—except they happen to be true. One of them comes from her former boss, one-time San Francisco city attorney Louise Renne. One day Harris—then a young lawyer heading their division on children and families—arrived in Renne’s office with an armful of stuffed toys for kids whose adoptions were being finalized. “She said, Louise, it’s Adoption Day, we’re going to hand out teddy bears to the children so they can remember this day.” Renne recalled. “So off we went, teddy bears in arms, over to the courthouse. Well, that had never been done before. And I just thought, what an insightful thing to do.”  Now, 25 years later, what Renne remains struck by is Harris’s unusual alchemy of toughness and kindness. “Nobody should ever mistake her for not being tough enough,” Renne told me recently. But Harris also cares about people and consequences, Renne says: “What’s going on in the real world? What is the impact here? Who’s it hurting most? How do we solve the problem to get around the hurt?” Imagine JD Vance handing out teddy bears. As Adam Serwer famously wrote about the first Trump presidency, “The cruelty is the point.” Four years later, that cruelty continues to be manifest in hideous, even jaw-dropping ways—were we still able to be shocked—but especially in Trump and Vance’s ugly rhetoric about immigrants and in their callous reactions to stories about women who have died and nearly died because of restrictions on abortion care. Harris, meanwhile, has reached out to Republicans in part by acknowledging their misgivings about voting for a Democrat. The quality of empathy helps explain why she and her vice presidential running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—the football coach who helped launch his high school’s Gay/Straight Alliance club, the governor who supported free meals and tampons for school kids, the proud dad of a special-needs son—seem to genuinely connect. Theirs is not the Bill Clinton-esque “I feel your pain” schtick that often seems performative.  > Empathy has likewise been at the heart of Harris’s messaging on abortion. > Where she really catches fire is when she talks about how abortion bans have > brutalized the lives of women and families. Empathy has likewise been at the heart of Harris’s messaging on abortion. From the moment that the Dobbs decision was announced and Biden gave her the responsibility to lobby for reproductive rights in ways he never did, she has offered a full-throated defense of reproductive freedom the likes of which we have never before heard from a sitting vice president or a presidential candidate. She’s been exceptional in her attacks on Trump and his allies overturning Roe v. Wade, passing extreme abortion bans, threatening access to birth control and IVF, and stripping away the ability of women and girls to make decisions about their own bodies. Admittedly, on the what-she-plans-to-do-about-it side, Harris is more circumspect. During the debate, for example, when asked if there were any limits to abortion care that she would support, she replied that she wanted to “restore Roe.” She knows how limited her powers are likely to be on that front, especially if she lacks majorities in the House and/or Senate.  Harris really catches fire when she talks about how abortion bans have brutalized the lives of women and families, like the young Georgia woman, Amber Thurman, whose 2022 death from delayed abortion care left her six-year-old son without a mother. Or what happens to victims of rape or incest or domestic violence: “The idea that a woman who survives a crime of a violation to her body should not have the authority to make a decision about what happens to her body next—that is immoral,” Harris declared in her speech on the Ellipse. “That is immoral.”  So now it’s Election Day and the polls continue to forecast a tight race, though with some unexpected, late-breaking reasons for optimism for Democrats. If Harris wins, it will be because she has managed to break through the Trump–Musk–Fox News chaos machine and convince millions of people who knew hardly anything about her three months ago to support her and her vision of America’s future. Voters have myriad choices this election, with down-ballot races and ballot measures. But at the top of the ticket, if voters don’t choose empathy, that future will be cruel indeed.