The vice president needs to put the Big Dog in a cage—not set him loose.
By Alexander Sammon
Barely three weeks remain until Election Day, which means that the Kamala Harris campaign is pulling out all the stops. She’s doing everything: sitting for TV and podcast interviews and campaigning with endorsees. She’s reaching right to appeal to that all-important Nikki Haley–liking/Trump-hating swing voter by talking about her Glock, hanging with Liz Cheney, and saying she’d put a Republican in her Cabinet. And she’s reaching left to appeal to that disaffected Bernie voter by, uh … well, never mind.
And now the campaign has announced that it’s unleashing “the Big Dog”: former President Bill Clinton. Fresh off a garbled and senescent-sounding speech at the Democratic National Convention, Bill is hitting the trail on Harris’ behalf—not to court Republicans, who don’t particularly like the Democratic ex-president, but to woo rural voters and “younger Black men” in Georgia and North Carolina, according to CNN.
I am ready to believe that this is being done not merely as a favor to old Bill; likely there is some private polling that has convinced the campaign that this will be an asset. But there is plenty of publicly available data that makes this move a head-scratcher, or a hair-tearer-outer, depending.
According to the not-very-scientific metrics of YouGov, Bill Clinton is not terribly popular. In fact, he’s only 1 percentage point more favorable than the loathed current President Joe Biden, and that’s with 25 years of breathing room from the scandals that marred Clinton’s second term in office and led to his impeachment. He’s less popular than Harris, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton, just to name a few. This is where you scratch your head.
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But it’s with these specific demographics in these two states—rural voters and younger Black men in North Carolina and Georgia—that Bill Clinton is a fantastic and particular liability. This is where you tear out your hair.
Let’s start with North Carolina. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, North Carolina lost an astonishing 328,126manufacturing jobs from 1994 to 2018, in the direct aftermath of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, arguably Clinton’s signature piece of legislation in his first term. Of course, it wasn’t all NAFTA—some of those job losses were also attributable to the China–World Trade Organization agreement, which Clinton delivered in his second term. North Carolina was second only to much, much larger California in the number of manufacturing jobs lost: According to one estimate, the Tar Heel State lost nearly half its jobs in that sector.
Rural North Carolina was particularly hard-hit. The textile, clothing, and furniture industries, once pillars of the rural economy in the state (which features a considerable nonwhite rural population), were all gored. This was a long, slow, and painful process that Clinton remains the face of: “Even proponents of free trade say the pact and later trade agreements dealt a powerful blow to rural southeastern North Carolina,” reads a 2014 piece in the Fayetteville Observer about NAFTA.
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Rural voters’ lurch toward the Republican Party is understood in part to be a result of that policy. So lasting was the political damage of those moves that the Biden administration has dedicated considerable policy resources to trying to undo it. The current president broke strongly with the free-trade orthodoxy of Clinton’s Democratic Party and has pursued an aggressive industrial strategy, allocating considerable funds to rebuilding the domestic manufacturing sector. Harris is the vice president in the administration that is currently doing this.
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The idea that Bill Clinton might be especially persuasive to younger Black voters seems similarly ridiculous. Also in his first term, Clinton passed the now-infamous 1994 Crime Bill, his other signature policy. It’s an oversimplification to say that the bill caused modern mass incarceration, a trend that was already well underway in the United States by the mid-’90s, and there’s some disagreement as to how much impact the bill even had on those shifts. But it was a messaging bill as much as a substance bill; Clinton wanted the message to be tough on crime, and he wanted the Democrats, himself especially, to be the messengers.
From the ACLU’s perspective, the Crime Bill “encouraged mass incarceration to grow even further.” It brought mandatory minimums and lengthier sentencing, solidified the racist disparities in drug prosecutions between crack and cocaine, expanded eligibility for the death penalty, introduced mandatory life sentences for three-time offenders, and effected harsher sentences for juveniles. All of those things were experienced inordinately by Black communities.
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Thirty years since the bill’s passage, Harris is deploying Clinton to influence young Southern Black male voters who may have been personally affected by its legacy, one that has made them subject to harsher sentencing and more aggressive policing. Many may have a parent or family member who has served excessive jail time specifically because of Clinton’s policy. It doesn’t matter all that much if the bill’s reputation outweighs its influence; its reputation is bad, and Clinton is embarking on a messaging mission.
All of that is to say nothing of the less policy-oriented and more lurid baggage that Clinton carries, like his affiliation with Jeffrey Epstein. Nor, for that matter, his sexual misconduct allegations, which on their own would render him a dubious surrogate for a campaign that has placed women’s rights, specifically the right to choose, front and center.
Dems have deployed Bill before. In 2022, with Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Sean Patrick Maloney somehow on the ropes in a district that had gone for Biden two years prior by roughly 10 points, Clinton got back on the mic with his signature campaign croak for an event in the not-at-all-working-class New York City suburbs where he lives, on Maloney’s behalf. Maloney lost anyway.
If you’re still not convinced this is a bad idea, I’ll just end by telling you who thinks it’s brilliant: Newt Gingrich.
- Bill Clinton
- Crime
- Democrats
- North Carolina
- Trade
- Georgia
- Kamala Harris
- 2024 Campaign
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