Deus Vult

Many pundits have compared Kamala Harris’s losing effort in 2024 to the 1988 Michael Dukakis campaign. In some respects, this is unfair: Michael Dukakis, who turned 91 on November 3, is a self-made man in public life, an Army veteran who served his country at the bleak post of 1950s Korea. As a three-term governor of Massachusetts, the longest serving in the history of the Commonwealth, Dukakis was a creative and thorough executor of public policy according to his own ideological lights. Up to his late 80s, as one can learn from various recorded lectures and talks, he was a more intelligent and eloquent communicator than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris have been at any age. As Richard Ben Cramer explained in his classic work of campaign reportage, What it Takes: The Way to the White House, Democrats in 1988 sensibly passed over then-Senator Biden, with his well-earned reputation for corruption, plagiarism, and general political hackery, and gave their nomination to Governor Dukakis.

In issue terms, Dukakis lost the 1988 general election to George H. W. Bush because his views on the punishment of criminals were badly out of step with the American mainstream. Dukakis and George McGovern (who carried only DC and Dukakis’s Massachusetts in his 1972 shellacking) remain to this date the only major party candidates unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for all crimes and in all circumstances. Unlike Dukakis, in running for president, Harris downplayed her previous opposition to the death penalty. Nothing in Harris’s prosecutorial career is as embarrassing as Dukakis’s granting of prison furlough to the convicted first-degree murderer and life prisoner Willie Horton, who took advantage of his temporary freedom to flee to Maryland and commit rape and assault.

But there is one important respect in which Kamala Harris’s public persona resembles that of Michael Dukakis. Dukakis, as Garry Wills argued in his 1990 book Under God: Religion and American Politics, was “the first truly modernist candidate in our politics, as trustful of secular values as of technology,” and his apparent lack of religious interest or feeling made him “a man isolated from his fellow citizens.”

Every successfully elected president from FDR (the last Christian nationalist president) to Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden has gone to some length to profess their faith in God and their understanding of the place of religion in American life. President Biden has had his weekly attendance at communion regularly televised, while Obama had made such heavy going of his turn to Christianity under the guidance of his neighborhood pastor Jeremiah Wright that he had to devote an entire major campaign speech to distancing himself from Reverend Wright’s racial pessimism.

While Kamala Harris is a confessed Baptist, she did more to display her cooking skills than the ostentatious piety Americans seem to expect of their Presidents. America is a much less churched country than it was in 1988, and Harris’s campaign advisors, even more secular than Democratic voters at large, probably did not notice her isolation.

But only a total lack of personal feeling for religion and an unawareness of its importance to most Americans made it possible for Harris to say during an October 17 rally in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in response to shouts that “Jesus is Lord,” that “Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally. No, you meant to go to the small one down the street.” Harris’s rare, coherent improvisation earned her shouts and cheers from the crowd. But, in so many words, she sent professed Christians to the camp of her political enemy. Trump received America’s alienated believers, as he receives all potential supporters from any quarter, with open arms and loud professions of sympathy.

Even in the less godly America of 2024, we don’t need elaborate theories to explain why a nominee who sets out to alienate Christian believers would lose a presidential election. What requires careful and detailed investigation is how she ever managed to get elected to any office at all.