1. Kamala must stay pro-worker and economically populists

Burgis ’24 (Ben is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, “Joe Biden’s Replacement Must Embrace Economic Populism,” https://jacobin.com/2024/07/joe-biden-stepping-down-kamala-harris-economic-populism)

Joe Biden is out of the race, and a second Trump term would be a nightmare. To avoid it, Democrats need more than a candidate who can complete sentences. That candidate must put pro-worker policies at the heart of their campaign. Anyone who would rather not find out should be happy that Biden has dropped out. He almost certainly would have lost. But that doesn’t mean that Vice President Kamala Harris — or whoever else might replace him — will win the election. The ability to complete sentences is a good first step. But the content of those sentences still matters quite a bit. Even before the extent of Biden’s cognitive difficulties became apparent, he may have torched his reelection prospects by backing Netanyahu’s grotesque assault on the population of Gaza. No matter how he’d performed on the debate stage, it would have been very hard to imagine, for example, Biden winning my home state of Michigan — which is both a crucial swing state and home to the largest concentration of Arab American voters in the country. A different nominee who is not as closely associated with that horror might make a difference, especially if he or she made a clear break from Biden’s policy, although it’s also possible that the damage is done at this point. On the domestic front, Biden was desperate enough to start making some tentative steps in a positive direction in the final weeks of his candidacy. He talked about ending medical debt, for example, and finally moving toward desperately needed reforms to the Supreme Court — an issue that had been raised by the “Squad” of left-wing members of Congress. He unveiled a plan to effectively cap rent increases at 5 percent, making major landlords’ tax breaks contingent on their adhering to this limit — although, in a telling moment, he fumbled the delivery of this announcement, telling the NAACP Convention that he was going to limit rent increases to fifty-five dollars. These moves were not only the right thing to do in themselves but evidence that some Democratic Party power brokers correctly understand that a constituency that desperately wants reforms like these could be crucial to winning the election. A candidate less likely than Biden to say “$55” when they mean “5 percent” might be able to blunt the appeal of Trump and running mate J. D. Vance’s cynical reactionary populism. Kamala Harris is now the front-runner for the nomination. As hard as this is to remember, she once claimed to support Medicare for All. Over the course of the 2020 presidential campaign, she moved away from this in fumbling efforts at triangulation, but she could take the idea up again. Trump and Vance are leaning hard into populist rhetoric this year. Vance’s RNC speech covered the pain of communities devastated by deindustrialization, the housing crisis, the opioid crisis, and more. Lines like “jobs were sent overseas, and our children were sent to war,” hit home. When it comes to supporting policies that would do anything about these problems, it’s all hot air. Trump was a ferociously anti-labor president, and Vance’s legislative scorecard from the AFL-CIO sits at 0 percent. But the fake populism taps into very real pain, and that appeal can’t be countered by insisting that everything is basically fine and all we need are competent liberal technocrats to sensibly steer the ship of state. Even if Harris or some other nominee did embrace a substantively populist policy agenda, they might well go down to defeat. Too many voters might dismiss it as empty election-season rhetoric. Harris in particular might not be a believable messenger. And with barely more than a hundred days until Election Day, there just might not be enough time to effectively reframe the election. But fake populism being countered with policies that would actually help ordinary workers could give America — and the world — a chance to avoid whatever’s lurking on the other side of a Trump victory this November.