26 United States The EconomistOctober 17th 2020
J
aime harrisonsays his earliest political memories are of dis-
cussing the evening news with his grandfather in the rented
condo in impoverished Orangeburg County, South Carolina,
where his grandparents raised him. “That’s where it started, I
would pepper him with questions about the president and I be-
came very interested in politics,” recalled the amiable Democratic
Senate candidate this week, after a long day on the virtual trail.
One thing led to another. Mr Harrison, who was born to a 16-
year-old single mother, won a full scholarship to Yale. He then pro-
ceeded to law school and a job on the Hill with an early mentor, Jim
Clyburn, South Carolina’s first black congressman since the Re-
construction era. Yet his gritty approach to politics, including a
willingness to compromise informed by his knowledge of the ob-
stacles in the way of progress, still recalls Orangeburg’s red-dirt
roads and the grim stories—of cowering from Klan rallies and long
walks to school—his grandparents told him. “I think I got my prag-
matism from them,” he said. “I know I’m not going to get every-
thing I want. But anything gained is positive movement.”
This hard-nosed view is antithetical to the activist left that was
until recently said to have captured Mr Harrison’s party. Indeed he
opposes what many of its members consider essential: including
Medicare-for-All, packing the Supreme Court and scrapping the
Senate filibuster. Yet he, not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is currently
the Democrats’ posterchild. The 44-year-old first-time candidate
raised a record-smashing $57m in the past three months and has
turned his improbable tilt at Lindsey Graham, a Republican in-
cumbent running for a fourth term, into a nail-biter. Recent polls
point to a tied race. If Mr Harrison wins—an outcome this newspa-
per’s forecasters consider unlikely but highly possible—it would
be the second-most-momentous result of the night.
There is an interesting symmetry to this. When black South
Carolinians resuscitated Joe Biden’s candidacy eight months ago
(following Mr Clyburn’s dramatic endorsement of the former vice-
president on the eve of the state’s primary) they not only gave him a
badly needed win. They also framed the argument for his unexcit-
ing but unobjectionable candidacy. Black voters—everywhere, but
in the South especially—tend to vote for the sympathetic candi-
date they consider likeliest to win sufficiently broad support fromwhitestogetelected.AndwithPresident Donald Trump on the
ticket, and South Carolina’s electability specialists as their guide,
this thinking suddenly made a lot of sense to Democrats outside
the pampered coteries of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Mr Biden proceeded to win almost half the votes in the remain-
ing primaries. Where Mr Obama was the first black president, his
deputy might therefore be considered the first presidential nomi-
nee to have been expressly selected by black voters. Mr Harrison, a
fresher face than Mr Biden but with much the same politics, is an-
other sign of the pre-eminence of their approach.
Like Mr Biden, he emphasises unity over partisanship, practical
solutions over big ideas and an old-fashioned regard for institu-
tions as a fount of both of the above. Having been a shoo-in for the
Democratic ticket—as a well-connected former chairman of the
state party—Mr Harrison has been running campaign advertise-
ments for a year, most of which focus on his inspiring personal
story. “There’s a general fatigue with chaos and division,” he says.
His policy proposals are similarly soothing. He speaks of ex-
panding rural broadband and making Medicaid available to more
poor people, which most South Carolinians support. He also cites
the importance of such unglamorous policies to explain his at-
tachment to the filibuster. “Politics swings like a pendulum,” he
says. “But certain government programmes are necessary for the
most vulnerable. How would we protect those programmes from
those who would gut or eliminate them without the filibuster?”
Mr Biden’s pragmatic pitch is based on a calculation, so far am-
ply justified, that he can build a bigger coalition by rallying the
country in opposition to Mr Trump than by revving up the left. Mr
Harrison had no alternative to such moderation. No Democrat has
been elected to the Senate from South Carolina for over two de-
cades, because the state does not have nearly enough African-
Americans and white moderates to make a majority. His electoral
hopes therefore hinge on his ability to recruit a slither of Trump-
voting conservatives who have had enough of Mr Graham.
This looks possible because the veteran senator is less popular
in South Carolina than the president. A sometime moderate, who
warned that there were not enough “angry white guys” in America
to sustain an unreformed Republican Party, Mr Graham has latter-
ly tried to fix that problem by adding himself to their ranks. Where
once he pushed immigration reform, he now indulges in racist
dog-whistling, while fulminating against Democrats and toadying
to a president he formerly dismissed as a “race-baiting xenophobic
bigot”. It has been a humiliating performance by a once widely ad-
mired politician. Opinion polls suggest most South Carolinians
consider him dishonest.(South) Carolina in my mind
Conventional wisdom suggests the Democrats’ current unity
would not last much beyond a Biden victory. Yet the promise of Mr
Harrison and other moderate Democrats—running strongly in Ar-
izona, Montana and elsewhere—suggests that might underrate the
dynamism of the moment. A big Democratic win would swell Con-
gress with such figures; the centre-left would be the decisive vote
on most new legislation. It is also just about possible to imagine
Democrats learning the right lessons from their predicted success.
Even against opponents of Mr Trump’s and Mr Graham’s cali-
bre, the quirks of the electoral system make it hard to win power
from the left unless with Mr Biden’s and Mr Harrison’s expansive,
pragmatic message. Instead of betting on their chances of chang-
ing the system, Democrats should stick with that message. 7Lexington The audacity of Jaime Harrison
The Democrats’ latest crush is a former lobbyist scrapping for conservative votes in South Carolina