Kamala Harris has designed her general-election campaign around a “Belmont+” coalition. In his 2012 book Coming Apart, the social scientist Charles Murray used the wealthy Massachusetts suburb of Belmont as a shorthand for Americans with high social capital and college degrees. While the credentialed elite has been drifting in a Democratic direction for decades, the age of populism has accelerated this trend. Highly educated suburbanites delivered for Democrats in the 2018 and 2022 midterms and proved decisive in the 2020 presidential election. Joe Biden positioned himself to some extent as a link to the hard-hat Democrats of the past; he had strong connections with organized labor and at times resisted the race to the left that characterized Democrats during the Trump years.

With her background in San Francisco machine politics, Harris has instead bet the farm on appealing to Belmont.