What we should learn from people who called her “Copmala”

We should stop ignoring the online left

I hate arguing with certain types of vitriolic Bernie Sanders-enjoyers online. While my heart is with them, my body fills with unbearable tension when I see their rhetoric. “Copmala” was a clunky, inelegant nickname, but it communicated their feelings well enough. Vice-President Harris was a prosecutor; she enforced the law and put people in prison. On the surface, subtitling the 2024 election, “the prosecutor versus the felon,” made sense. In reality, there is no sheen left in being a prosecutor.

The vibes on the left are that criminal justice is excessively hard on poor communities, police are too brutal, and prosecutors place their stamp on these evils; if you skim the comments section of Nextdoor, you’ll find the right imagines that honest cops bring good cases to mean prosecutors who throw them out so they can focus on picking on beleaguered business owners and Donald Trump. The enlightened center, splitting the difference, does not think about prosecutors at all.

In our electoral Rashomon, Kamala Harris was too hard and too soft on crime, depending on your ideological predispositions. Kamala was a villain for both far left and right. She was insufficiently loyal to Israel and also responsible for the death of everyone in Gaza. Not firm enough with Putin but leading the United States into World War III with Russia. Too “woke” yet failed to engage with the concerns of minority communities—a communist Barry Goldwater.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

While we should not be surprised by Republicans tearing down civil servants, I think a lot of Democrats were surprised to see Harris disparaged and mocked by voters who also ostensibly desired a Trump loss. It’s unrealistic to expect Democrats to like their candidates—Lord knows I thought John Kerry was a bore, and I still wonder about that Skull and Bones fraternity he and George W. Bush joined—but I wish we could have all agreed to train our fire on Republicans, at least until the election was over.

We cannot bemoan the difficulty of engaging enthusiastic support from Democratic voters if we refuse to hear them. Nobody was unaware of the “Copmala” nickname. Nobody was unaware that the Democratic coalition had become so pissed at seeing rogue police murder men on video for petty crimes that the phrase “defund the police” went viral and got hung on all our necks whenever someone so much as nicked a candy bar from Walgreens. We know damn well that our voters, and most of us, do not like that Sherrif Joe Arpaio hard-on-crime authoritarian shit. “The most lethal fighting force in the world” is not the type of rhetoric people who watch the DNC live tune in to hear.

So why did we pretend we liked wearing jackboots in order to impress Republicans? The only people convinced that Democrats are the real militarists are voters who do not like militarists.

Instead of alienating ourselves from our voters, we ought to have explained to the country why we should value the law, why we should want a prosecutor in command. We were opposing a real felon, who was convicted of real felonies, and is still facing real charges for more real crimes. We should have told the voters what laws he broke, why those laws were made, and what harms he had done. We should have put witnesses to those crimes on television and made them confess every night at Prime Time. We should have detailed the ways Trump and his gang planned to abuse and break the law in the future. Instead of saying that Kamala was such a tough prosecutor that she would shoot a burglar herself—strange rhetoric from someone who’s had a security detail for years—we should have let her lay down the law on Donald Trump, show the world what exactly it is that our prosecutors are trained to do.

We used language we knew made the base uneasy, then crossed our fingers and wished they would not complain, even though we knew they had already been complaining. They gave Kamala that nickname back in 2019. Chris Christie knew better than to shoot his campaign ads on bridges, Jim Jordan does not Tweet selfies inside gymnasiums, Lauren Boebert does not take interviews in bowling alleys or musical theaters. So why did we insist on leaning into the aspects of our candidate that we also knew dampened our own enthusiasm?

I understand the dream: by trading away our manic pixie fringes, we might find favor with some old grocer in the suburbs. But old grocers would rather be young and enthusiastic, too, and becoming stolid like the old Republicans diminishes our appeal. It is inevitable that we will run candidates who go against the overall ethos of the activist base. It is expected. We cannot wordlessly expect them to shrug it off. When we know the base has this kind of deep antipathy, we have to talk to them about it and emphasize the elements of the candidate they will like—we will like—instead of downplaying their resistance so we can disingenuously cosplay as Reaganites.

There are no moderate Republicans anymore, and extremists of conscience like Liz Cheney are rarer still. There’s only us, and we can only win as ourselves. One thing I think might have helped Kamala demonstrate real authenticity with our antiwar, activist base specifically and the online left generally would be if she and Tim Walz campaigned while wearing a Trump is a Bitch shirt, available now on Spreadshop.