The transcript of this audio essay has been edited.
Last week, the Republican Party held its quadrennial convention in Milwaukee. My colleague Elias Isquith described it as a megachurch service held in a Vegas casino under the ever-watchful gaze of its living god. All that week, I heard: America First, America First, America First. But it was clear who came first: Donald J. Trump. This was a party that had persuaded itself that one man’s ambition, his insatiable, unquenchable lust for power, was self-sacrifice. That Trump cared not for himself, that he only cared for you.
Throughout that convention, Trump was spoken of in religious terms. He was a man persecuted on behalf of all who put their faith in him. A leader on a divine mission, chosen and protected by an almighty God. If you did not believe in him, you did not believe in America.
On the final night, shortly before Trump spoke, Hulk Hogan took the stage wearing a shirt emblazoned with the American flag. He sent the crowd into a frenzy as he ripped that shirt, tearing the flag on it in half, to reveal a Donald Trump campaign shirt beneath. It was all so unbearably literal.
In 2020 and early 2021, Donald Trump tried to overturn an election he lost. He used the power of the presidency to pressure state election officials. He whipped up a mob that stormed the Capitol and endangered the lives of the men and women he served with, including his own vice president. People died on that day. How did the Republican Party react to that? Ultimately, by submitting to Trump’s fantasies and resentments. Where was Mike Pence, the vice president from Donald Trump’s first term? He was in exile, replaced by JD Vance. Pence certified the 2020 election. Vance has said he would have backed Trump’s challenge.
There was no price Trump would not have paid to cling to power, and the message of the 2024 Republican convention was that there was no price the Republican Party would not pay to give Trump that power. The message of the 2024 Republican convention was simple: Donald Trump first.
What President Biden did on Sunday — that is what it looks like to put country first. What the Democratic Party did over the past few weeks — that is what it looks like to put country first. The catastrophe of the debate, for Biden, was that he couldn’t draw the true contrast between him and Trump: Instead of highlighting Trump’s narcissism and illiberalism, Biden highlighted Trump’s relative energy and vigor. On Sunday, though, Biden upended that. In one decision, he drew a very different contrast between him and Trump: Trump would not peaceably step aside even after losing an election. Biden stepped aside before the election because he understood that the party and the country are bigger than he is. Putting your own ambitions second — that’s what it looks like to actually put America first.
After the debate, I asked whether the Democratic Party was still a true political party, an organization dedicated to values and ideas that transcended any one leader, or whether it had, like the Republican Party before it, been corrupted into a vehicle for one man’s ambitions and resentments. Now we have our answer. The Republican Party is a personality cult run by the dear leader’s daughter-in-law. The Democratic Party is a political party. It’s a political party that wants to win.
Now the Democratic Party has a decision to make: an open convention or a coronation of Vice President Kamala Harris.
As you know if you’ve been listening to the show over the last year, I’ve been arguing for an open convention since February. I still believe it would have been a good idea. The right idea. What Democrats denied themselves with Biden was information. He ran functionally unopposed in the primary and avoided debates and interviews and news conferences. Democrats didn’t know until it was almost too late the toll age had taken. What a mini-primary leading up to an open convention would have offered is information.
But that’s not what happened. And in my conversations with top Democrats in recent weeks, I’ve come to the view that it’s unlikely to happen now for a few reasons. The first is that Biden did step aside, but it took a grueling, uncertain, painful month. The party is exhausted. It is tired of its internal drama. It wants to turn its attention back on Trump. It wants to raise money, build get-out-the-vote operations, run ads. And time is now short. The convention is mere weeks away.
But something else happened, too. Campaign strategists sometimes talk about the tangibles and the intangibles of candidates. The tangibles are everything that’s obvious about a candidate on paper. Josh Shapiro is the governor of Pennsylvania, a swing state. Mark Kelly was an astronaut, the coolest job in the world. J.B. Pritzker is rich enough to self-fund a campaign. But the intangibles are trickier. How do candidates respond to pressure? Do they seem honest and authentic to voters, or does something about them read as false or opportunistic? Do they have that charisma that convinces people to knock on doors for them, share memes of them, proselytize to family members about them?
Harris’s reputation was as a candidate with the tangibles but not the intangibles. She was great on paper but, in 2020, couldn’t put the pieces together. I remember watching her campaign announcement speech and finding it hollow. It was built around cliché refrains — “for the people,” “let’s speak truth” — but there was no core to it. That’s how many in Washington saw Harris: as a talented politician without a stable vision and message.
I’ve come to see that as a consequence of the moment in which she ran. Harris’s identity in California was as a moderate, smart-on-crime prosecutor. That’s not what the Democratic Party wanted nationally in 2020. And so Harris tried to match her moment. She foregrounded her life story, her Jamaican father and Indian mother, in an echo of Barack Obama’s campaign. Aware of Bernie Sanders’s success in 2016, she endorsed Medicare for All, only to bring out a plan that I’d say sensibly fell short of abolishing private insurance but that satisfied no one. She attacked Biden for his past position on busing without having herself a very different position on busing. Her candidacy felt tactical, not strategic. She dropped out before Iowa.
There were other problems, too. Her Senate office was badly run, and so, in the first few years, was her vice-presidential office. She was known for burning through staff and she has few advisers who’ve been with her for long enough to deeply know her. The Biden administration gave her impossible portfolios, like the root causes of the border crisis, which she never had the power to solve.
But Harris found her footing in the administration after becoming its primary messenger on abortion and the Supreme Court. She’s developed a steadiness in her presence on the campaign trail. Since the night of the debate, Kamala Harris has been running a race of her own. From the first interview she gave that night on CNN, where she made the case against Trump that Biden had failed to make, she’s been in an almost excruciatingly delicate position of backing Biden absolutely while showing Democrats that she’s fit to take his place atop the ticket. And she has not misplaced a foot. Her speeches have been searing and clear. Her interviews have been strong.
She’s been far better than some of Biden’s other eager surrogates at admitting the concerns about his performance while convincingly defending his record and taking the fight to Trump. It is easy, if you’re doing that work, to fall into a kind of Baghdad Bob-like denial of reality. But she’s been walking that line very gracefully.
In Washington, the estimations of Harris’s political skill and acumen had fallen sharply since 2020. In the last few weeks, they’ve risen sharply.
And at the same time, Trump’s criminal charges and convictions have made her prosecutorial background appealing. She is battle-hardened in a way that rarely comes without the kinds of political losses she’s experienced. There are a lot of candidates who look good on paper and wilt under pressure. Harris has been under enormous pressure for the last month and has never faltered.
And people have gotten excited about her. A vast array of very online liberals have proclaimed themselves “coconut-pilled,” making memes out of this quirky story Harris likes to tell.
Videos of her describing recipes circulate on TikTok. Her dances get set to music. She’s not connecting just because she can deliver an anti-Trump roundhouse. She’s connecting because she’s her. Something intangible has taken hold.
And now the party is converging around her: When Biden dropped out, he endorsed her fully. And so has much of the rest of the party: She’s rolled up the endorsements of other top-tier presidential possibilities, like Gavin Newsom and Josh Shapiro. Elizabeth Warren endorsed her, and so did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, endorsed her, and so did Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky. The Tennessee delegation for the Democratic convention endorsed her, and so did the powerful S.E.I.U. labor union.
Which does not mean Harris is a safe bet, or even the candidate Democrats would draft if they were starting from scratch. People argue here about the polling. I don’t find the polling on her very telling. In head-to-head polling with Trump, she’s similar to, or a bit above, Biden. Her favorables and unfavorables are similar to, maybe a little bit better than, Biden’s.
I think that’s to be expected: She’s his vice president. She should poll like him. But Harris has never won an election atop the ticket in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or Michigan. She’s never won an election atop the ticket anywhere but California. The Biden administration’s record is unpopular, and she cannot make a clean break from it. Immediately uniting around Harris feels safe to some Democrats. To other Democrats, it’s risky. They risk making the mistake they made with Biden, which is being so afraid of disunity that they’re failing to gather the information they need to know how their candidate will really perform.
And here’s the truth: It’s all risky. It could all go bad, no matter what path is chosen. But I think there’s a middle path here that Democrats should consider. None of the top-tier candidates are going to challenge Harris for the nomination. But what about some second- or third-tier candidates? Let a few up-and-comers make their case against Donald Trump. Let’s see some CNN town halls, some multicandidate forums. Nobody is going to go negative on each other here. Give the country a reason to watch a lineup of young Democrats, most of all Harris, make their cases against Trump day after day for the next few weeks.
Think of it not as a contest. Think of it as an exhibition. Maybe the people who’ve endorsed Harris can participate, too. She’s going to need a vice president. So maybe Gretchen Whitmer and Shapiro and Kelly and Beshear should be up there, too. The Democratic Party has been acting like a party lately. Maybe it should show up in these next weeks as a party, not just as one person. Maybe a little strategic ambiguity about what these candidate forums and voter town halls are would be good. It would be the kind of free media, excitement, anticipation that Democrats could never otherwise get. It’d mean Trump and Vance would have a hard time breaking into a news cycle. And by the way, when Trump has trouble attracting attention, he reacts by getting outrageous, chaotic, aggressive. That’d be a gift to Democrats.
Harris would have to falter catastrophically to lose the nomination. But it’d be good for Democrats and voters to see her win the nomination, not just be handed it. It would help her sharpen her message before the convention. It might convince those who still doubt her. And if Democrats should have learned anything from the last year, it’s that more information about their presumptive nominee is better than less. If she really isn’t up to it, they need to know that now. But the point of an exhibition isn’t fear. It’s to showcase talent — most of all, that of the likely champion.
And I think Harris is up to it. I went back recently to read her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime.” It was different than I’d expected. I’m used to the gauzy, memoirish quality of quickie campaign books. But Harris speeds through her biography as if she can’t wait to be done talking about it. This is a book about policies and programs to prevent and reduce crime, and to make prison a place of rehabilitation rather than a place that turns out more hardened criminals. But from the first pages there’s a clarity to what Harris cares about, and what she’s trying to achieve, that I haven’t heard from her since she burst onto the national stage.
She writes, “Nothing is more important than how we choose to keep ourselves, our families and each other safe.” A few pages later, she says, “Still driving me is the notion that safety is a fundamental civil right” — I like that, “safety is a fundamental civil right.” She goes on: “I believe that people have a right to feel safe on the streets and in their homes, and they have a right to keep and protect the things for which they’ve worked.”
None of that is earth-shattering. I’m not trying to pretend it is. But I’ve heard for so long Harris saying that she is a prosecutor, that she can prosecute the case against Trump, that it was almost jarring to read a whole book about what she was trying to achieve as a prosecutor: safety.
And it got me thinking about what the case against Trump really is: Trump is unsafe. He poses as a strongman but he makes us less safe. Our democracy is less safe under Trump. The world is less safe with Trump cozying up to dictators. We were less safe while Trump was bungling the response to Covid. Fundamental rights have been erased because of Trump’s Supreme Court picks. The people he appointed to top positions, the people he’d appoint in the future — they make our water and our air dirtier and less safe; they make our financial regulations weaker. It’s all in Project 2025, which is why Trump is running away from this thing that his own top staffers wrote.
And most Americans know and sense this about Trump. It’s another one of those intangibles. The guy is chaotic and threatening and out for himself. And in picking JD Vance rather than Doug Burgum or Marco Rubio, Trump reminded people of that side of himself. He didn’t go for a comforting pick. He went for an ideologue and an enforcer. He went for somebody who sends the message that this time, there will be nobody holding Trump back, nobody to check him. If you were worried about Trump then, you should be much more worried about him now.
And that puts Harris, I think, in a pretty strong position to take back an idea Democrats have not been fighting for nearly hard enough in recent years. Harris’s ideas about crime from 15 years ago are not the basis for a campaign. But safety: That’s a value I’d like to see Democrats win back. And I think Harris could take that from Trump. And the time to show it is right now.
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
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