Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists Ross Douthat, David French, Michelle Goldberg and Lydia Polgreen to discuss where Democrats go from here — whether the party should coalesce unreservedly around Kamala Harris as its presidential nominee, what her strengths and weaknesses are, how she should run against Donald Trump, what it will take to beat him and who the Democratic V.P. nominee should be this year. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Patrick Healy: Michelle, Lydia, Ross and David, I’ll cut to the chase: Is the Democratic Party making a mistake by quickly going all in on Kamala Harris as its likely presidential nominee?
Michelle Goldberg: This is a hard question, because for the party to do otherwise would mean trying to restrain the passions, enthusiasms and calculations of its members. The instant flood of endorsements for Harris demonstrated that there is both a great deal of support for her among Democrats and, maybe more important, an enormous hunger to finally come together and go after Donald Trump.
Healy: Did that flood of support seem organic to you, Michelle, or orchestrated by Harris’s campaign?
Goldberg: It felt organic, for sure. No doubt Harris and her allies had a strong whip operation — which speaks well of their abilities — but there was also a spontaneous bandwagon effect that no decision maker could have held back. And the fact that Harris was the object of that outpouring of exhilaration and relief suggests no other candidate could compete or unify all the party’s factions as quickly.
Ross Douthat: It’s a mistake to go all in on Harris, obviously, because she’s still the exceptionally weak candidate whose weaknesses made President Biden so loath to quit the field for her. Potential rivals like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan are throwing away an unusual opportunity because they imagine some future opening for themselves — in 2028 and beyond — that may never materialize. And the party clearly has an interest in having a better-situated nominee: A swing-state governor who isn’t tied directly to an unpopular administration would be a much, much better choice for a high-stakes but still winnable race than a liberal Californian machine politician with zero track record of winning over moderate to conservative voters.
Healy: A few governors come to mind here. Go on.
Douthat: Right now it feels as though the party put so much effort into convincing Biden that Harris could be a strong replacement nominee that now it’s going to be stuck with the fruit of that argument: Harris for president.
Lydia Polgreen: I think Democrats falling in line behind Harris isn’t just closing ranks; it is genuine relief and enthusiasm. For weeks now, we have had a kind of mini-tryout for the top of the ticket, with Harris getting the best opportunity to show what she’s made of. There were recent chances for Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania to have a star turn — his response to the Trump assassination attempt — and for Whitmer as well — her book promotion tour. I think Harris has threaded the needle very well.
David French: It’s way too early to say if it’s a mistake. On the one hand, Democrats are not wrong to remember her disastrous 2019 primary campaign. On the other hand, there would be a real cost to a mini-primary, and any candidate not named Kamala Harris would have to be introduced to the American people in less than 100 days.
Healy: That small window presents a real gamble for any Democrat other than the sitting vice president.
French: It’s a gamble either way. Do you gamble that Harris is a better candidate than she was before and that, on balance, it’s better to unify now and go with the person who’s poised to take over? Or do you gamble that you can initiate a divisive and potentially chaotic selection process, unify immediately afterward and then make the new candidate a household name in three short months?
Healy: Right now, the nomination looks like Harris’s to lose, but she also says she wants to earn it. What can she do to secure the nomination and become the strongest possible opponent for Trump?
Goldberg: I can’t imagine a scenario in which she’s not the nominee. The convention is open in that I believe the delegates can legally vote for whomever they want. But so far, many are coalescing behind Harris. The only way to change would be for someone strong to run against her, and no one is stepping up.
Douthat: She needs to take the extremely boring, predictable, simplistic step of picking a set of issues and figuring out how to pivot to the center, ideally criticizing her current boss a little bit along the way. And make it specific: If Trump can stand up and denounce Project 2025 on the hustings, Harris should do the same for some unpopular liberal cause. There is no substitute for centrism.
Goldberg: She can lean into the thing that killed her in the 2020 primaries: Harris is a cop.
Polgreen: Her views on the issues that matter most are in line with a majority of Americans, already a strong contrast to Trump. She needs to remind people that she is a moderate, mainstream Democrat, as almost all Black Democrats of her generation are. She was attacked in the 2020 primary contest, quite effectively, from the left. It was sort of a fluke that she ran for president in the one cycle when her biggest selling point became a liability. Now it is not.
Healy: What do you think Harris should do, Lydia?
Polgreen: She needs to lean into her strength — sensible law and order — and pick a strong, complementary running mate. Stick to the fundamentals that have worked for her so far: abortion and defending democratic governance against right-wing extremists. I suspect she will telegraph a more dexterous handling of Israel and Gaza, even if the policy doesn’t change much. That will help, too, not so much with people on the left, who seem to have already fallen out of the coconut tree, but with voters across the Democratic spectrum who have been rightfully horrified by the seeming callousness of the Biden team toward Palestinian life.
French: Part of the reason she ran so poorly in 2019 was the strange ideological environment. The party — especially white Democrats — lurched way to the left, especially on criminal justice issues, and that’s a poor fit for a person whose biography revolves around a career in law enforcement. As Michelle notes, she lost the benefit of her best selling point: Harris is a cop. Now she can run as the cop versus the felon.
Healy: Would the Democratic left really accept that cop messaging, though?
French: There is much less pressure to tack to the left now. If anything, the environment is ripe for her to emphasize her past as a prosecutor. Ross is exactly right. Her best move is to offer a kind of solid centrism to contrast with Trump’s berserker personality. Even if Trump throws the Heritage Foundation and the pro-life movement under the bus, he still has his furious temperament, and he just can’t let go of his grievances. She has an opportunity to present herself as the adult in the room.
Healy: The Democratic convention starts four weeks from Monday. Is the Democratic Party best off — meaning, best positioned to beat Trump — if it closes ranks quickly around Harris or if it goes another route: a mini-primary, a contested convention now that Biden has released his delegates or something else?
French: I honestly don’t know. We haven’t seen a situation like this in our lifetimes. Lyndon Johnson dropped out after one primary in 1968. Biden stayed in throughout the entire primary season, and so any kind of mini-primary would have to be essentially made up on the fly.
I know that lots of folks were paying tribute to Biden on Sunday. I posted kind words about him as well. But he is not exactly the hero of the ages in this story. He stayed in too long, and I don’t think there is any real question that his team misled America about his condition.
One reason we’re praising Biden so much is that we’ve gotten in the habit of assuming the worst from our politicians, and Biden at least showed us that selfless acts are still possible. But his stubbornness cost the Democrats time, and time is one of their most precious commodities.
Douthat: I second David’s point. All of the liberal encomiums to Biden are politically necessary to ease him into obsolescence, but he and his aides and advisers practiced deception and placed their party in an impossible position while depriving its voters of the chance to make a fully informed choice.
In terms of process, the best one now is the one most likely to deliver an electable nominee. Maybe that’s a mini-primary if we think that getting voters involved would tend to moderate the impulses of convention delegates, or maybe it’s a contested convention if we think that power brokers like Barack Obama could exert some effective control.
Goldberg: Ross, I might agree with you in the abstract, but to me, a process that ignores the realities of the Democratic Party is not going to be a good one. There is still a large minority of Democrats angry about seeing Biden pushed aside, and they want Harris. The left, by and large, both wants Harris and is willing to see her make the ideological compromises necessary to win. Black leaders want Harris. If we’d had an open primary contest, people might have made different choices, but in the primary we did have, she essentially received millions of votes to take over from Biden if he became incapacitated, and so she has a kind of democratic legitimacy.
Polgreen: It is puzzling to see Ross increasingly appeal to moderation, because Harris is a moderate. This was one of the reasons her primary campaign failed. I’d love to know what she has to do to prove to anti-Trump conservatives that she is a moderate and why someone like Whitmer or Shapiro is assumed to be more moderate. A great example of this is Harris’s incredibly convoluted student loan forgiveness program in the primary campaign — just classic moderate, technocratic, means-tested stuff. Much more moderate than where Biden ultimately landed. I am guessing that she sensed that this issue was a political loser.
Douthat: I will concede that Harris is relatively moderate by the standards of the 2020 Democratic primaries, in which the various candidates competed to take the most gonzo left-wing stances possible. By the standards of broader American political alignments, she is a doctrinaire liberal, several ticks to the left of her boss, boasting exactly zero experience in appealing to a non-Californian electorate. And also currently trailing Trump, I would add, in most available polling. I think the case for her staking out some heterodox positions in those circumstances is obvious.
Polgreen: I think Harris will be fine. We are all overestimating Trump’s strength. Our colleague Jamelle Bouie has been saying for a while that the vibe feels very 2016, with the soothing sense of inevitability on the G.O.P. rather than the Democratic side. I agree. I think there is a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for anyone but Biden or Trump, and it might matter a lot less than we think who the person who stands in is.
Harris’s strengths and weaknesses
Healy: What kind of candidate does Harris want to be — and that, ideally, is authentic to who she is?
Polgreen: I think Harris’s biggest weakness is her ability to advocate for herself with a vision of what she wants for the country. I have a lot of confidence that she can take the fight to Trump and win, focusing on the dangers of a second Trump term and making a much stronger case for the economic accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration. But I honestly do not know if she would be a good president — only that Trump would be an absolutely disastrous one. She will need to find a story to tell about her vision for America. That isn’t easy, but it is somewhat less important with the task immediately at hand than it was when she was vying for the nomination in 2020. I think the message could be very simple: Let’s come together as Americans, turn the page and put all of this behind us.
Goldberg: I hope she finds language to call on people to move beyond the last eight nightmarish years and connect with the hopes and optimism so many of us felt in 2008, when we thought there was an arc of history that bends toward justice. More concretely, in addition to abortion and democracy, she needs to zero in on labor and economic issues. Biden has already given her a good start. She should take his recent promises to wipe medical debt off credit reports and to cap rent increases in corporate-owned buildings at 5 percent and run with them.
Trump has also given her an opportunity by dropping his attacks on corporate America and Big Tech. Harris should use some of the money pouring into her campaign to get a commercial up on the air with video of Trump promising tax cuts to his “rich as hell” donors. People forget how much of Obama’s campaigns against both John McCain and Mitt Romney were about painting them as out-of-touch plutocrats.
French: I’m a bit puzzled by the newfound optimism around Harris.
Healy: How so?
French: I think she’s clearly a better candidate than Biden, who is bordering on being unfit to finish his term, but her primary campaign was genuinely terrible. It’s possible she’s a much better candidate now, but I have to see it to believe it. If the hour weren’t so late, I’d think a mini-primary would be the obvious best course, but the hour is late, and now there is no process that is guaranteed to yield a better result. Even a theoretically better candidate could be crippled by infighting before his or her campaign even starts.
Goldberg: David, I think the optimism is a result of the enormous relief in the party and the desperate desire to feel good about politics again. The anti-Trump coalition has been mired in low-level despair for months, turning to outright terror after the debate. Now that’s lifted, and people are projecting their newfound effervescence onto Harris. Who knows if it will last? But there’s power in being able to absorb these projections. Let’s remember that Bernie Sanders was seen as a lonely gruff eccentric for many years before a nascent social movement turned him into an icon.
French: Michelle, I agree that there is a vast difference between hope and no hope. But hope shouldn’t veer into irrational exuberance.
Goldberg: You’re right that we shouldn’t kid ourselves about the challenge, but exuberance can be a powerful thing: Harris raised almost $70 million through the donor platform ActBlue on Sunday.
Douthat: Harris is clearly not a conviction politician in the style of, say, Sanders. She’s a conventional liberal who’s moved — mostly leftward — with her party throughout her career. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Plenty of Democratic positions remain popular, and the good thing about not having strong convictions as your brand is that it can make it easier to pivot.
What we haven’t seen from her, though, is suppleness and creativity: She was lifted by the Democratic tide in California, and her primary campaign in 2019 was a total flop. Could she come up with a broadly appealing message that highlights Trump’s weaknesses and casts the Biden record in the best possible light while distancing herself from her boss’s unpopularity? Theoretically, sure. But doing so will require talents that we have no definite reason to think that she possesses.
Healy: A lot of Democrats have endorsed Harris. But a few key ones, most notably Obama, have not, which some of my Democratic sources say could be about wanting to see Harris earn the nomination, and there is still some worry on Capitol Hill about whether she’s the strongest candidate to lead the ticket of Senate and House members against the Republican ticket. Any of the big-name Dems who haven’t endorsed yet — do you think it’s telling?
French: We should, of course, pay close attention to Obama. He is still one of the most popular Democrats in the party, but so far, his reticence is the exception, not the rule.
Douthat: The absence of an immediate Obama endorsement suggests that there is at least some appetite for a contest among Democratic power brokers. But you would need an actual rival candidate to make one happen, and instead we’re already reduced to Joe Manchin floating a trial balloon and then puncturing it himself, going on TV and wringing his hands about how it would be nice if someone would go up against Harris but insisting that it won’t be him.
Polgreen: I have to wonder whether there is some element of not wanting this to appear to be a coronation by the most powerful leaders of the party. It makes sense for Biden to endorse Harris as his successor. It would be weird if he didn’t, given that she would automatically become president if he resigned or could no longer serve. But Obama et al. standing down feels like the right thing to do, even if the party is coalescing around Harris. It creates space for competition to emerge, even if it feels extremely unlikely that any serious contenders will try to unseat her.
Is it clear that Harris can beat Trump?
Healy: Is it clear to you that Harris can beat Trump in the Electoral College? Which swing states is she stronger in than Biden or possibly puts in play that he didn’t?
Goldberg: I don’t know if she’s likely to beat Trump, but she definitely can.
French: I agree with Michelle. She can win, and with the right running mate — Shapiro, for example — she can shore up her standing in key swing states. The path to the presidency still runs through Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and she definitely has a fighting chance.
There’s another factor in play — MAGA rhetoric online has gotten far more aggressively racist, especially since Elon Musk bought X. You’re going to read some truly awful posts about Harris, and if the Harris campaign is smart, it will use those posts to highlight MAGA extremism, to undercut MAGA’s inroads with Black voters and to demonstrate that the Trump movement is populated with cranks and bigots.
Douthat: On the other hand, whatever is happening on social media, Trump himself seems to be a less racially polarizing figure — in terms of his appeal to nonwhite voters, at least — than he was in 2016. The conventional wisdom is that Harris will do slightly better with nonwhite and younger voters than Biden and slightly worse with older white voters, which could make Arizona and Nevada slightly more competitive but hurt the Democrats in the Midwest. But I think we need to see how that plays out: If African American and Hispanic men, in particular, have drifted from the Democrats, is Harris actually the right candidate to bring them back? I’m not sure.
Overall, I would say that Harris has a better chance than Biden of beating Trump in the shape that Biden is currently in, but otherwise in almost every respect she is a weaker candidate than Biden was in 2020. If she beats Trump, it will be one of the more impressive and unlikely political feats of my lifetime.
Polgreen: I think Harris is a harder target for Trump than Hillary Clinton was. I also think Trump has gotten even cruder and more meandering in his dotage. I genuinely think that an out-and-out racist remark will repel ordinary Midwestern and Sun Belt voters. I try to imagine what might offend my grandmother, a conservative white Republican who lived in Wisconsin. She could not abide that kind of overt prejudice in public life. It will be interesting to watch Trump try to thread the needle here.
Healy: Lydia, you traveled this month with Harris to report for an upcoming column. What stood out to you the most about her, or what surprised you?
Polgreen: I watched her primary campaign with great interest, and seeing her fail rather spectacularly stayed with me. And of course, I read all the profiles and stories about the dysfunction in her office. I had been more inclined to Elizabeth Warren, in terms of actual policy and ideas. So perhaps I went in with low expectations, but I was impressed. She is an engaging and charismatic speaker. She is a crisp and dexterous communicator. It was really fun to see her in her element, speaking to tens of thousands of her sorority sisters in Dallas.
But I was especially struck by an event I went to in Michigan, where she had an onstage conversation about abortion with two women who had been Republicans, one of whom served in the Trump administration. One had struggled with infertility and had experienced multiple miscarriages requiring abortion care. Harris was disciplined and on point in her responses, and it felt as though she left plenty of room for the three of them to disagree on many issues but be aligned on the importance of women having access to the medical care they need.
Healy: How did voters react to her?
Polgreen: I noticed that Black voters seem somewhat muted in their response to her. I don’t think we should assume some kind of automatic, identity-based loyalty there. She may struggle with Black men, in particular. There is something ugly happening among young Black men that may be quite similar to what is happening with young white men. There is a virulent strain of misogyny in some parts of Black popular culture that is primarily aimed at Black women, and that certainly worries me. But I think more broadly that Black voters tend to be practical and choose the side that will win. If she can show she is a winner, I think reliable Black voters, older Black men and Black women, will get behind her.
French: I agree with Lydia on her potential struggles with Black men. Harris didn’t generate any meaningful enthusiasm from Black voters in 2019, but the overt racism in parts of MAGA could change the dynamic. Ross is right that Trump has made inroads with Black voters, but quite a few cranks and racists populate his coalition. He won’t be able to keep them in check.
Douthat: I would only note that while Democrats clearly have a big advantage on abortion, that advantage still might be more effectively pressed by someone with a lot of experience presenting the pro-choice side as the moderate side and selling it to conflicted moderates — which is to say, again, not Harris.
Polgreen: I don’t know, Ross. She managed to get two Republican women to have a conversation with her about this, onstage, in a swing state. I am not sure what more one could do to prove that one can lead with the moderate case on abortion. The moderate case is: This is better decided by women and their doctors, and this is exactly the case Harris has been making at every opportunity. You may not like the messenger, but the message is pretty on point.
Who will be the Democratic V.P.?
Healy: A two-part question. First, if Harris is the nominee, who do you think she will pick as her running mate?
Douthat: A white man.
Goldberg: Not just a white man but the whitest man: Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky. And he’s already gone on “Morning Joe” showing that he can out-Appalachia JD Vance, who leans on his “hillbilly” heritage but actually grew up in a city in Ohio. “I want the American people to know what a Kentuckian is and what they look like, because, let me just tell you, JD Vance ain’t from here,” said Beshear.
French: She needs a man to help with the gender gap, a swing state politician to help her rebuild the blue wall and a moderate to blunt charges of extremism. Everything’s coming up Shapiro.
Polgreen: I do really like Beshear. He was able to win in a red state without taking the bait and throwing transgender people under the bus, realizing, rightly, that while a majority of Americans struggle with this issue when it comes to children and athletes, an even bigger majority thinks beating down a tiny marginalized group of people is ugly and gross. It is a dumb thing to do on a very low-salience issue, and I applaud him for recognizing that.
Healy: Second, who do you think she should pick as her running mate?
Goldberg: Part of me would be thrilled if she chose Whitmer. If Whitmer weren’t a woman, she’d be the obvious choice, as the supereffective, charismatic governor of a must-win Midwestern state — and the victim of an attempted kidnapping and assassination plot, which might undercut Trump’s efforts to present himself as a martyr. And the idea of an all-woman ticket standing up to the brutishly misogynist duo of Trump and Vance would thrill the grass roots and signal a new chapter in our politics. But it may be too risky. Going with a Beshear-type figure might be her best bet.
Douthat: Beshear has the right profile, but speaking for right-leaning voters everywhere, I think that Shapiro is the most impressive moderate-seeming Democratic politician right now, and he actually governs a swing state, so I would pick him.
Polgreen: If I am going to cosplay as a pundit, I’ll say Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina. They know and seem to like each other as fellow former attorneys general. He is a popular swing state governor in a state with a sizable Black vote.
French: This is one of the rare cases in politics where “should pick” and “will pick” actually merge. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’m going to say Shapiro again.
Goldberg: Until about five minutes ago, everyone worried that the Democratic convention was going to be thrown into chaos over Gaza. A lot of those tensions have died down, in part because voters angry at Biden’s Israel policy are more comfortable with Harris, who is reported to be more sympathetic to the Palestinians. Choosing Shapiro, who is ardently pro-Israel and outspoken in his condemnation of the recent campus protests, would rip those wounds open again.
French: I think those positions would help the Democrats quite a bit in the general election, Michelle.
Goldberg: David, I agree, but I also don’t think Democrats benefit by raising the salience of the issue that divides their coalition more than any other. Especially in Michigan, where Arab American voters could be decisive.
Polgreen: The reality is that a Harris administration would have better language to talk about a substantially unchanged policy toward Israel, but there is nothing to be gained by poking the bear. To me, this means passing on Shapiro, given the plethora of other white moderate men available.
Healy: Lightning round — brief answers, please. On policy, should Harris develop her own platform superfast? Wing it? Follow Biden’s?
Douthat: She should — I am not kidding — do her own Contract With America: Pick the four most popular Democratic ideas, add one big moderate-coded idea that really breaks from her base and put out a five-point document and make that her policy script for the remainder of the campaign.
Polgreen: I like that idea, Ross. Something simple, catchy and, frankly, a little corny. As for a moderate position, maybe she could revive her enthusiasm for jailing the parents of middle school truants? I’m only half kidding.
French: Ross, you’re unifying us. I like that idea.
Healy: What’s the best way for her to reintroduce herself to the country in no time? People need to see and hear her.
Douthat: Be the anti-Biden and accept every interview request she’s offered.
French: She’s a younger woman who would be running against the oldest major party nominee in American history. She needs to plainly and obviously outwork him, a maximum-effort 100-day barnstorming campaign that puts the contrast right in front of the American people, every day.
Goldberg: I agree. She needs to be ubiquitous. Maybe she can benefit from low expectations: A lot of people forget why she excited so many people when she was a senator. I’d also love to see her hold a few huge rallies. I bet people would come out in the tens of thousands.
Healy: What’s a good slogan for her?
Douthat: “What can be, unburdened by what you thought about me up till now.”
French: “I’m not him.”
Polgreen: Her slogan from the 2020 primary was “For the people,” which I had assumed was some kind of lefty solidarity thing, but when I read her book, I realized that is actually a prosecutor thing. As district attorney and attorney general in California, in court filings she was “Kamala Harris for the people.” It’s a clever way to bridge her past with a more activist, left-leaning Democratic base in the present. But maybe it works now, given Trump’s frequent interactions with the criminal justice system.
Goldberg: I think it’s going to be “For the people.”
Healy: Last question: As you sit here, if Harris is the nominee, what will the Harris versus Trump election come down to?
Polgreen: Enthusiasm, discipline and ruthless execution. All things are possible. Trump is absolutely beatable. People close to Harris say she is at her best in a crisis. Let’s hope so, because this is absolutely a crisis.
French: There was no hope when Biden was still in the race. Now there is hope, but she’s not the favorite, at least not yet.
Goldberg: I think we’re about to learn about the role euphoria plays in politics. The pent-up energies of the Democratic base have been unleashed. I think this summer might feel a little like the summer of ’08, when, at least in progressive precincts, every weekend was a combination of fund-raisers and canvassing trips. I have no idea if this will be enough, but in my lifetime, the general election candidates with the most passion behind them have usually won. The role of emotion in elections is hard to quantify, but it shouldn’t be discounted.
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