DA - Elections - Kamala Supplement - CNDI 2024

Elections DA – Kamala Edition*
Notes
Delete the old Biden wins now cards – IRRELEVANT – Mamala Harris is a woman on a mission to win the presidency, BUT IP reform risks turning her dreams into nightmares. The rest of the DA is fine (links, Trump bad impacts, etc.), BUT the Trump wins NOW cards that are NOT in this file, but the original one, are all useless because they presume he is up against Biden. This file has the new uniqueness (Kamala wins now) cards that you need to read this DA and it has new non-uniqueness evidence (Trump wins now) that all presume a new contender. Welcome to the field of battle Kamala Harris and welcome back to tournament viability Elections DA.
1NC’s
1NC – Election DA
Election DA
a. Uniqueness: The race is close, BUT unity behind Harris ensures a dem victory.
Butts 7-22 [Dylan Butts, reporter at CNBC. “Trump faces a tighter race with Kamala Harris set to replace Biden, experts say,” Jul 22, 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/22/trump-faces-a-tighter-race-with-kamala-harris-set-to-replace-biden.html]
President Joe Biden’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president has set the stage for a much tighter and uncertain race in November, according to some experts.
Biden stepped down from the race Sunday as top Democrats pressured him to drop out following a disastrous debate performance and as Republican nominee Donald Trump was leading in the polls.
The Democrats had been headed for a “landslide defeat” in November, but now, they stand a chance, said Ian Bremmer, founder and president of Eurasia Group.
“They’ve turned [this race] around, and President Biden has given the Democrats a fighting chance,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday.
Harris now finds herself on a glide path to the Democratic nomination, though she will still need to win a majority of delegates ahead of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.
Harris’ business and economic policies are likely to mirror President Biden’s, says DCLA’s Sethi
While some other contenders might throw their hat into the race, “it is very clear that Kamala Harris is the prohibitive favorite to become the nominee,” Bremmer said.
If Harris wins the nomination, she would offer the Democrats a “total reset,” Steven Okun, senior advisor at McLarty Associates, said on CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia.”
“If the Democrats can be unified, come out of this convention, speaking with one voice, energized, excited, then they have a good chance to win in November,” he said.
Allan Lichtman, a presidential historian who has correctly predicted the winner of every presidential election since 1984, told CNBC’s “Capital Connection” that Harris would be in a “strong position to win the upcoming election” in a matchup with Trump.
He will wait until the Democratic convention to make his official prediction.
Harris said in a post on social media platform X that she was looking to work to “earn and win” the nomination while uniting Democrats.
How Harris helps Democrats
According to experts who spoke to CNBC, Harris comes with a number of advantages in comparison to her former running mate.
While Republicans have been gaining ground on the economy, inflation and immigration fronts, abortion is a salient issue where she will have an edge, Okun said. Harris has been outspoken on reproductive issues as the first woman vice president.
“The fact is that Biden and Trump are too old to be running and serving for another four years, and this is now the top vulnerability for Trump,” said Eurasia’s Bremmer.
A recent poll showed that some 85% of the population believed Biden was too old to serve another four years. The same poll found that 60% of Americans thought Trump was too old.
“You see a lot of enthusiasm for Harris, a younger, more vibrant, more energetic former prosecutor that could certainly perform extremely well on the debate stage,” Bremmer added.
Bremmer pointed out that Harris also has some weaknesses. She “isn’t super likable as a retail politician. ... That’s been a vulnerability for her.” There are also some risks associated with running as a woman — a daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father — in today’s America, he added.
On the other hand, she may be better positioned than Biden to drive out certain key demographics, including “women, young people and black voters, Charles Myers, founder and CEO of Signum Global, said on “Squawk Box Asia.”
“It’s a whole new race. There’s a new candidate with an enormous amount of unity and enthusiasm behind her,” he said.
b. Links
1. Kamala must stay pro-worker and economically populists
(not the techno corporate elitism of IP)
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.
2. Strong copyright and patent regimes are the opposite of economic populism – the aff would be perceived as a favor to corporations, driving up costs and ensuring monopolies.
Qureshi 18 [Zia Qureshi, Senior Fellow - Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institute. “Intellectual property, not intellectual monopoly,” July 11, 2018. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/intellectual-property-not-intellectual-monopoly/]
“The copyright and patent laws we have today look more like intellectual monopoly than intellectual property,” wrote Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles in their recent book about the U.S. economy. Concerns about overprotection of intellectual property acting as a barrier to innovation and its diffusion are not new. But they have gained greater salience now that knowledge has emerged as a dominant driver of economic activity and competitive advantage.
Digital technologies have enabled the emergence of an “intangible economy,” based on soft assets like algorithms and lines of code, rather than physical assets like buildings and machinery. In this environment, intellectual-property rules can now make or break business models and reshape societies, as they determine how economic gains are shared.
Yet the main features of today’s IP regime were established for a very different economy. Patent rules, for example, reflect the long-held assumption that strong protection provides an essential incentive for businesses to pursue innovation. In fact, recent studies by Petra Moser and Heidi Williams, among others, find little evidence that patents boost innovation. On the contrary, because they lock in incumbents’ advantages and drive up the costs of new technology, such protections are associated with less new or follow-on innovation, weaker diffusion, and increased market concentration. This has contributed to growing monopoly power, slowing productivity growth, and rising inequality in many economies over the past couple of decades.
Patents also invite considerable lobbying and rent-seeking. A majority of patents are used not to produce commercial value, but to create defensive legal thickets that can keep potential competitors at bay. As the system expands, patent trolling and litigation soar. Lawsuits by patent trolls comprise more than three-fifths of all lawsuits for IP infringement in the U.S. and cost the economy an estimated $500 billion in 1990-2010.
Some argue that the patent system should simply be dismantled. But that would be too radical an approach. What is really needed is a top-to-bottom reexamination of the system, with an eye to changing excessively broad or stringent protections, aligning the rules with current realities, and enabling competition to drive innovation and technological diffusion.
c. Impact: Trump re-election causes extinction---great-power-wars, U.S. belligerency, AND trade collapse.
Feaver 24, PhD, Professor of Political Science. (Peter, 2-19-2024, “The Real Challenge of Trump 2.0,” Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/real-challenge-trump-20)
Title: The Real Challenge of Trump 2.0
What has changed is that the members of a new Trump administration will be far less likely to restrain his worst impulses. In Trump’s first term, many of the most important members of his national security team, as well as Republican allies on Capitol Hill, held more traditional Republican views. When Trump expressed a desire to go in a different direction, they had access and clout to explain why that might be a bad idea, and they often persuaded him. This is what played out, for example, in the Afghanistan strategy review of 2017. Just as important, for the many issues on which Trump simply did not engage, his traditional appointees were able to conduct a normal policy below his radar, as was the case with the 2018 National Defense Strategy. Finally, in the few areas where slow-rolling and end-running and other normal bureaucratic gimmicks were used to thwart a determined Trumpian policy flourish, the paucity of true-believing MAGA warriors at every level of the bureaucracy made it difficult for Trump to have his whims fulfilled. It is far from clear that there will be such guardrails this time around.
Trump has already developed plans to intimidate the bureaucracy by reclassifying employees so as to deny them civil service protections and make it possible to fire them en masse. His allies are talking about using the powers of the presidency to root out members of the military who do not show sufficient MAGA leanings. Trump certainly won’t repeat his first-term mistake of appointing senior officials and military brass, such as retired generals Jim Mattis and John Kelly, who were adamant about placing their loyalty to the Constitution ahead of personal loyalty to Trump. And many MAGA loyalists who did serve in the first administration now have a better understanding of the bureaucracies that once frustrated them—and will be better positioned to enact more radical changes if they regain power.
In theory, Congress could still constrain a destructive president. If the Democrats managed to retain control of the Senate, or to regain control of the House, they would be able to use the power of the purse to direct what the executive branch could or could not do. But these legislative tools are weaker than they appear. Congress has, for instance, passed a law making it harder for a president to withdraw formally from NATO. Yet the law is constitutionality dubious. And a president who simply disowns those alliances as a matter of policy—for example, by reducing to zero the number of U.S. troops deployed to NATO or by loudly insisting he will not come to the defense of countries if Russia attacks them—can effectively undermine the alliance even without a formal U.S. withdrawal. There is simply no good way for Congress to Trump-proof U.S. foreign policy, given the considerable powers of the executive branch. Trump would also face a Congress less inclined to impose such constraints, having established ideological mastery of the Republican Party, whose old-line elites can no longer claim that his agenda is aberrant and must be resisted.
But perhaps the greatest reason Trump 2.0 will be different from Trump 1.0 is the changes in the geopolitical environment abroad. If he returns to the Oval Office, Trump would be acting in a far more disordered world. In 2017, Trump took office as the post–Cold War era was ending. There were tensions with China and hot wars in the broader Middle East against the Taliban and the Islamic State, known as ISIS, but the situation is far more dire today. Now, he is running for a second term amid major hot wars in eastern Europe and the Middle East, a growing risk of conflict across the Taiwan Strait and in the South China Sea, escalating tensions with Iran and North Korea, and other crises. An unruly world demands more of the international engagement and leadership Washington has often provided since 1945—the opposite of what it will likely get if Trump returns.
MORE KABUKI, MORE CHAOS The foreign policy of a second Trump administration will likely be an unusual mix of continuity and change. Some of his policies would, at first, seem to differ from Biden’s only by degree. Trump would surely intensify economic competition with China, albeit with a focus on cutting the bilateral trade deficit and onshoring critical supply chains. He might announce a Reagan-like “peace through strength” agenda that raises U.S. defense spending, a goal that could split hawks from doves within the Democratic Party just as aid to Ukraine now splits internationalists from neoisolationists within the Republican Party. But such policies would come, of course, with a Trumpian spin. A military buildup would likely be accompanied by an aggressive politicization of the military, as Trump would seek to root out senior leaders that he believes showed inadequate loyalty to him in the past. Economic competition with China will likely go hand in hand with a renewed quest for a “historic” trade deal of the sort Trump sought but failed to achieve between 2017 and 2020. And in dealing with many adversaries, Trump will once again fall back on a strategy of kabuki competition—hot rhetoric and rising tensions, but without coherent policy or clear strategic purpose. More important, Trump would likely pursue sharper versions of the policies of his first administration. As his campaign has already made clear, he seems certain to intensify his attacks on U.S. alliances, especially NATO: former National Security Adviser John Bolton has warned that Trump would have withdrawn from the alliance had he won a second term in 2020. Regardless of whether Trump goes that far, he could easily, on his own, attach more conditions to effective U.S. participation in NATO and U.S. partnership with treaty allies in East Asia, demand exorbitant financial tributes from other member states, or simply undermine relations within such multilateral groups by stoking tensions over such issues as climate policy and trade. Trump has already proposed a universal tariff, which would shred the existing international trade regime by unilaterally taxing all imports to the United States. Meanwhile, European states on NATO’s frontlines and Asian governments such as Taiwan and South Korea would have to contend with a more transactional, less committed United States. Trump has already mused about ending the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, and his first-term attempt to hold Ukraine’s security hostage to pursue a vendetta against Biden may indicate a readiness to impose an unfavorable peace deal on Kyiv. Trump would also be less committed to Taiwan’s security. If Beijing attacks the island, he once remarked, “there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it.” Broadly speaking, a Trump administration seems likely to step back further from the greater Middle East. Since Trump has no interest in providing U.S. security for the world, his administration would presumably be less willing to take steps, as the Biden administration has, together with the United Kingdom, to protect vital shipping lanes from Houthi attacks. It is hard to imagine that the Trump administration would be as committed as the Biden administration to achieving a stable peace that addresses both Israeli and Palestinian interests. The desire for a big deal with Saudi Arabia might push Trump to address the Palestinian issue—something that was off the table in the Abraham Accords but cannot be ignored after the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza. There are few plausible scenarios for a favorable outcome in the Middle East and none that would not require a significant U.S. commitment. So it is hard to see how Trump would be able to square his support for Israel with a desire to shed U.S. commitments in the Middle East. A second Trump term would also likely involve further policy incoherence in the Middle East, however, since he might also be willing to pair a retreat from the region with some dramatic military action on the way out the door. Given Trump’s order to assassinate Qasem Soleimani, the he

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