The Rise of Vince Lombardi Democrats

Policies? We don’t need no stinkin’ policies!

As legendary football coach Vince Lombardi famously said: “Winning isn’t everything—it’s the only thing.” That might well serve as the slogan of today’s Democrats as they enthusiastically line up behind the newly-minted presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris. Doubts about Harris’s political history and positions, what she really stands for, what she might actually do if she is elected—all have been completely submerged to the sacred goal of beating Donald Trump.

This is understandable. They thought they were toast. Now the race has been reset and winning looks within their grasp. They subbed out their aging leader for a much younger model who can hit her marks in scripted settings and excites Democratic voters. But she is much less good in unscripted settings, has not had to put her personal views before voters for five years, and has an extensive history of commitments to policy goals that would be crippling liabilities in the upcoming election. Solution: keep her in scripted settings, make her policy commitments vague and deny, without explanation, that she now holds the unpopular positions she formerly did. Democrats, including progressive Democrats, who at other times might have been ostentatiously displeased with some or all of this have cheerfully—joyfully?—accepted this approach as a cheap price to pay for defeating Trump.

Will it work? There are two big problems with Vince Lombardi Democrats as the new, improved version of the Democratic Party. The first is that, even in the limited, short-term sense of beating Trump this November, it might fall short. Consider that, while Harris has dramatically improved the Democrats’ position compared to Biden and now leads in all national polling averages and in some key swing states (how many depends on which poll average you look at), her position is still not all that great. Even after weeks of extremely favorable press coverage, rapturously-received rallies, and near-flawless execution of her campaign’s roll-out strategy, followed by a national convention that was judged a great success, she still lags far behind where Biden was at this point in 2020 cycle and, indeed, lags behind Biden’s final popular vote margin in 2020. Nate Silver’s influential election forecasting model now has Trump a slight favorite, at 58 percent to a 42 percent win likelihood for Harris.

As has been widely noted, Harris has recovered a considerable proportion of Biden’s 2024 underperformance among key demographics. But it is also the case that she is still considerably below Biden’s 2020 performance among many of these demographics. Aaron Zitner and Stephanie Stamm have an illuminating article in the Wall Street Journal making these comparisons. According to their analysis, comparing Harris’s current margins vs. Biden’s in 2020 shows the following:

• Harris’s margin among black voters is 15 points below Biden’s in 2020;

• Harris’s margin among Hispanics lags Biden’s by 9 points;

• Harris’s margin among young (18-29 year old) voters is 20 points below Biden 2020; and

• Harris lags Biden’s 2020 margin among men by 6 points and, surprisingly, among women by 2 points.

In addition, their analysis shows Harris doing slightly better than Biden among white college voters but slightly worse among white working-class voters. While available data are sparse, they tend to indicate that Harris is also running behind Biden 2020 among nonwhite working-class voters, a likely culprit for much of her underperformance among blacks and Hispanics.

It’s a bit ironic, no? As Zitner/Stamm remark:

If Harris can’t match her party’s 2020 showing among these groups, where might she make up the votes? Many analysts say she can look to white voters, especially among women responding to her promises to work to restore access to abortion. If they are right, the first Black female president could have a winning coalition that relies more on white voters, and less on those from minority groups, than did the white man elected just before her.

Put another way, as I noted in a recent piece on how the emerging Harris coalition differs from the Obama coalition overly-enthusiastic Democrats believe she is replicating:

[E]ven if successful, Harris’s coalition will [not] represent the second coming of the Obama coalition. Instead it is likely to be a more class-polarized version of the post-Obama Democratic coalition [such as in 2020] with even more reliance on the college-educated vote, particularly the white college-educated vote.

This is nicely illustrated by new CNN data from Pennsylvania. By general assent, Pennsylvania is the most important state in this election, with by far the highest chance of being the tipping point state in this election. If Trump wins it, and only carries Georgia in addition to the states he carried in 2020, he will be the next president. Looking at the CNN crosstabs and comparing these findings to States of Change data from 2020, we have the following:

• The CNN poll has Harris carrying Pennsylvania college-educated voters by 23 points; Biden carried them by 18 points in 2020.

• In the poll, Harris loses Pennsylvania working-class voters by 16 points; Biden lost them by just 9 points last election.

• Looking at Pennsylvania’s white college voters, Harris has a thumping 22 point advantage among them compared to Biden’s lead of only 10 points in 2020.

• Finally, the white working class in Pennsylvania prefers Trump over Harris by 32 points, more than his already-large 28 point advantage over Biden in 2020.

This pattern translates into a tie between Harris and Trump in the state (close to the running average of Pennsylvania polls). This is not terrible and she could certainly wind up winning the state. But it does suggest the precarity of her position; the rise of Vince Lombardi Democrats has not fundamentally altered—and probably can’t—the underlying nature of the Democratic coalition.

Which brings us to the second problem with the rise of Vince Lombardi Democrats: it is no solution to Democrats’ longer-term problems with building a coalition sufficiently broad in class and geographic terms to dominate American politics. Therefore, even if successful in the short-term goal of keeping Trump out of the Oval Office, we are likely to see a continuation of what Yuval Levin and I term “Politics Without Winners” in a forthcoming paper:

In the American political system, the purpose of parties is to form a national coalition that endures. Look in on almost any point in our history and you would find a majority party working to sustain a complex coalition and a minority party hoping to recapture the majority. Today, however, American politics is home to two minority parties and neither seems interested in building a national coalition. Close elections and narrow majorities dominate our electoral politics more than at any point in our history.

The rise of Vince Lombardi Democrats seems highly unlikely to change this situation. This seems obvious, but one of the surprising things about this change in Democratic approach is how many formerly critical Democrats seem convinced Democrats have solved their underlying problems through the new approach. They are happy Harris and her campaign have emphasized gauzy themes like “freedom” instead of the imminent end of democracy, backed off her former support for politically toxic positions like decriminalizing border crossings and ending fracking, and drenched the Democratic National Convention in patriotism instead of identity politics-coded rhetoric.

It's the new centrism and the new “big tent” Democrats! But how plausible is it that Vince Lombardi Democrats have, in a few weeks, reinvented the Democratic Party and decisively jettisoned its cultural radicalism, climate maximalism, and other baggage that prevents the party from broadening its coalition? It seems far more plausible that Democrats are “maximizing within constraints”—moving to the center just enough that they might gain some electoral advantage but without really changing the underlying commitments and priorities of the party their liberal, educated base holds dear.

In short, it’s more a purpose-built, curated centrism than a full-bore move to the center. As such, it fits the rise of Vince Lombardi Democrats like a glove but is profoundly inadequate to the task of building a broad and durable political coalition that can do more than squeak through the next election.