The Rainbow Coalition Re-visited: Why Kamala Harris Will Be the Democratic Presidential Nominee

Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris addresses the Presidential Forum at the NAACP's 110th National Convention at Cobo Center in Detroit, Michigan on July 24, 2019. Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images

Commentary

It’s over. The Democratic presidential primary was decided months, maybe even years ago.

President Donald Trump should refocus his energies away from Joe Biden and relegate Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to the sidelines. The Democratic nominee will be California’s junior senator, Kamala Harris—and she will be very hard to beat. Not because of her personal qualities, formidable though they are, but because of the machine backing her and the philosophy guiding her.

Harris is set to harvest the seeds sown by former President Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson before him. Like Jackson’s presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988, which paved the way for Obama in 2008 and 2012, the 2020 Democratic campaign will be all about race.

When Jackson ran in 1988, he united enough white leftists and progressive “people of color” under his Rainbow Coalition banner to earn 7 million votes in the Democratic primary. Obama used the same formula 20 years later to win the presidency and then repeated the trick four years later.

In Jackson’s day, about 12 percent of voters belonged to “minorities.” Today, the figure is closer to 40 percent. Harris—a female, of black, Irish, and Asian Indian extraction, far-left but not publicly so—is the ideal modern Rainbow Coalition candidate.

The original Rainbow Coalition was led largely by pro-China communists—from Line of March, Communist Workers Party, and especially the 3,000-strong League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS).

One LRS supporter, Stanford University law student Steve Phillips, was Jackson’s West Coast student organizer in both the 1984 and 1988 campaigns.

According to a 2012 post on Phillips’ blog “Political Intelligence”:

“I’ve studied Marx, Mao, and Lenin. In college, I organized solidarity efforts for freedom struggles in South Africa and Nicaragua, and I palled around with folks who considered themselves communists and revolutionaries ..., and I did my research paper on the Black Panther Party. ... My political baptism was the Jesse Jackson 1984 Presidential campaign ...”

When Jackson abandoned the Rainbow Coalition after his 1988 loss, many LRS cadres stayed with the Democratic Party. In 1990, the LRS dissolved with the majority faction to form a Unity Organizing Committee (UOC), which was specifically created to further infiltrate the Democrats.

Phillips was a UOC leader and became a prominent Democrat in the Bay Area. In the early 1990s, he was elected to the San Francisco School Board. Phillips also married his Stanford University sweetheart Susan Sandler—the daughter of Golden West savings and loan billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler.

The Sandlers put almost half of their $2.4 billion profit from the sale of Golden West to Wachovia Bank into the left. They fund the Center for American Progress, ProPublica, and many candidates and ballot measures around the nation.

According to journalist Matt Bai, Progressive Insurance billionaire Peter Lewis, along with Democratic donors George Soros and the Sandlers, established America Votes “to coordinate various get-out-the-vote drives during the 2004 election.” To consolidate this process, the Sandlers also sent their son-in-law Phillips as their representative in October 2005 to help found the “Democracy Alliance” at the Chateau Elan near Atlanta.

The Democracy Alliance has now grown to more than 150 members—all leftist billionaires and multimillionaires fixated on moving the United States permanently to the left.

Rainbow Coalition Rerun

In 2007 and 2008, Phillips organized an 18-state initiative, in mainly in the South and Southwest, called Vote Hope “that increased communities of color participation in state primaries and the federal general election in 2008.”

This rerun of the Rainbow Coalition strategy was of great benefit to Phillips’s friend and idol Barack Obama in his battle with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2008. Susan Sandler was Obama’s earliest big donor.

In 2013, Phillips served on a panel at San Francisco’s Chinese Historical Society in commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington—with former LRS comrades Francis Wong and Jon Jang.

Wrote Jang in a comment to Phillips’s Facebook post about the event: “Steve, you and I were one of the few I know that share how the Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition had an impact on the election of President Obama.”

In his New York Times best-seller “Brown is the New White” (endorsed by Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi), Phillips argues that Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition strategy set the stage for Obama and is the road to permanent Democratic Party control of the United States:

“Before Obama went to law school ... a forty-two-year-old Black civil rights leader shook up the political system by running for president of the United States of America. To get from Martin in 1968 to Barack in 2008, we needed Jesse in 1984 and 1988.

“It was during the presidential elections of the 1980s that the seeds planted in the 1960s began to sprout and become visible in national politics. Jackson was fond of saying, ‘When the old minorities come together, they form a new majority.’ The potential of this prophecy came into sharp focus in the 1988 campaign as Jackson won the presidential primaries in eleven states, led the race for the Democratic nomination near the halfway point, and finished as the Democratic runner-up with the most votes in history up to that time.

“The key to Jackson’s success—and Obama’s electoral victories twenty years later—was the power of connecting the energy of people of color and progressive Whites seeking justice, equality, and social change to a political campaign for elected office.”

A New American Majority

According to Phillips, the left already has a majority in this country. By his calculations, 23 percent of potential voters are what he terms “progressives of color” and 28 percent are white “progressives”—reliable locked-in Democratic voters. So, 23 percent plus 28 percent is 51 percent: the “New American Majority.”

Phillips’s message to the Democrats is clear. Stop wasting billions on “swing voters.” Put that money into massive voter registration drives and Get Out the Vote efforts in Southern and Southwestern states. These states all have large minority populations that lean Democratic but vote in very low numbers. Get them registered and to the polls. Inspire them with “progressive candidates of color.” Do this and you will destroy the Republican’s Southern stronghold.  Do that, and you rule the United States forever.

Through his organizations PowerPAC-plus, Democracy in Color, and the Sandler Phillips Foundation, Phillips and his Democracy Alliance comrades support a Southern network of voter registration organizations that have already seriously challenged Republican dominance in several states.

For several years, the Phillips-aligned New Virginia Majority has almost turned a once reliably Republican state blue through mass minority-voter registration. The organization is led by Jon Liss—a cadre with the pro-China Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO)—and uses sophisticated precinct maps generated out of the Geography Department of Wuhan University China to micro-target new Democratic voters.

In 2017, Phillips and Sandler put several million dollars into voter registration in Alabama to help Democrat Doug Jones beat scandal-damaged Republican Roy Moore in that year’s U.S. Senate race.

In Florida in 2018, Phillips, Soros, and Tom Steyer of the Democracy Alliance put several million dollars behind Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum’s race for the state governorship. Gillum, a longtime Phillips protege and former PowerPAC-plus board member, was also aided by the FRSO-led New Florida Majority, which helped him raise the Democratic vote by 40 percent—almost all new minority voters. Gillum lost by a tiny margin.

In Georgia, another Phillips protégé, Stacey Abrams, came within a whisker of winning the Georgia governorship with at least $10 million of Sandler and Democracy Alliance money and mass minority-voter registration drives.

In Texas, Beto O’Rourke came within 3 percentage points of beating Ted Cruz in the 2018 U.S. Senate race. Two Phillips-aligned and Democracy Alliance funded groups, Battleground Texas and Texas Organizing Project (formerly Texas ACORN), signed up hundreds of thousands of new minority Democrats from the poorer neighborhoods of Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin.

A Winning Coalition

Phillips and at least some factions of the Democracy Alliance and Democratic Party want to run the 2020 election along Rainbow Coalition lines. They want to ignore the “center” and focus entirely on building a winning coalition of “progressive” whites and “people of color.”

Is Bernie Sanders the ideal candidate to motivate and mobilize millions of new mainly young “progressives of color”? How about Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, or Pete Buttigieg?

Phillips doesn’t seem to think so. He’s had two horses in this race for some time.

At Stanford University, Phillips was very close to a young black football player—a radical, but not the most extreme on campus. Phillips nurtured this man’s career. In 2013, PowerPac-plus committed between $1 million and $2 million to make Cory Booker the U.S. senator from New Jersey.

Phillips had high hopes for Booker in 2020, but so far things have not panned out. Perhaps, Attorney General Booker under the next Democratic president?

Maya Harris was a young student radical at Stanford in the early 1990s. The daughter of openly Marxist Stanford professor Donald Harris, she was close to many activists in Phillips’s circle.

Maya Harris would go on to become a senior fellow at the Sandler-funded Center for American Progress. Phillips also helped Maya Harris’s husband, Tony West (another Stanford alumni), get hired at the Obama Justice Department.

According to PowerPAC-plus: “We set up a D.C. office and worked closely with the administration’s personnel staff to build a Diversity Talent Bank that the White House used to identify and hire more than 60 people, including Associate Attorney General Tony West.”

Just before the 2016 election, Phillips said that Maya Harris would be a “social justice ally” in the Hillary Clinton White House.

After a stint in the leadership of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Maya Harris is now at the helm of her sister Kamala Harris’s presidential effort.

Kamala Harris and the Phillips-Sandler family go way back.

From a PowerPAC-plus post on Political Intelligence:

“Once named the ‘female Barack Obama,’ Kamala ran for Attorney General of California in 2010 on a progressive platform. ...

“PowerPAC.org and PowerPAC+ have been Kamala supporters since 2010. In our efforts to support Kamala, PowerPAC.org produced a political ad outlining Kamala’s promise to protect the most vulnerable working-class neighborhoods by holding California polluters accountable to their environmental crimes.” This short bio of Susan Sandler from the Sandler Phillips Center ties together several threads:

“Susan Sandler is a philanthropist and political donor. She was the first and largest donor behind the independent efforts to support Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. She was also the lead investor in the independent activities supporting Kamala Harris’ 2010 campaign for California Attorney General and Cory Booker’s 2013 election to the United States Senate. She has served as a board member of several progressive non-profit organizations including the Democracy Alliance.”

When Kamala Harris announced her 2016 U.S. Senate bid, Aimee Allison, another former Stanford radical and Phillips’s deputy at PowerPAC-plus and Democracy in Color, wrote:

“This Tuesday, California Attorney General Kamala Harris announced her U.S. Senate bid to replace Senator Barbara Boxer, who is retiring next year. We are thrilled at the opportunity to support a progressive that represents California and the nation.

“The PowerPAC+ family has supported Kamala Harris since before she ran for statewide office in 2010, and her record in leadership has been stellar. She took on banks responsible for the mortgage crisis, she stood up for marriage equality and she supported criminal justice reform. She is the right leader for the multiracial majority.” That’s the key sentence. Kamala Harris is the “right leader for the multiracial majority.”

The Phillips, Sandler, and Democracy Alliance helped to give us President Obama, Sen. Cory Booker, and Sen. Kamala Harris.

They’ve helped move several Southern and Southwestern states from deep red to purple or leaning blue.

Expect to see Kamala Harris steadily rise to the top of the Democratic Party rankings. Look to see much of Bernie Sanders’s support base eventually fold into the Harris machine. Watch as the Hillary Clinton machine and money also gets behind Harris.

I predict that the Democrats will fight the 2020 election on an identity politics Rainbow Coalition platform—they will try to forge a “multi-racial majority” or a “New American Majority” that can never be beaten.

If they win, the United States as we now know it will likely be over.

I’ve wagered many steak dinners that Kamala Harris will be the new “Rainbow Coalition” candidate.

I hope I’m wrong, but I’m looking forward to trying the high protein diet that everybody’s talking about.

Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.