President Joe Biden just relinquished his claim on the Democratic nomination and handed it to Vice President Kamala Harris.
Since his disastrous debate performance last month, it has been clear that Biden could best prevent Donald Trump from retaking power by withdrawing from the presidential race. More than 70 percent of voters consider Biden unfit to seek another term in office. His poll numbers in swing states have fallen sharply in recent weeks, while the Democrats’ internal data has shown Trump only narrowly trailing in blue states such as Minnesota, New Mexico, and New Jersey.
Plenty of candidates in American history have closed larger polling gaps than Biden’s in a campaign’s last four months. But in recent weeks, the president repeatedly demonstrated a gross inability to effectively communicate, with each public performance generating multiple misstatements or brain freezes that reinforced the public’s doubts about his cognitive functioning.
Biden was undoubtedly right to step aside, but the wisdom of his decision to immediately endorse Harris — rather than clearing the way for a more open competition for the nomination at next month’s convention — is less clear.
After all, the vice president has many liabilities as a candidate, and the Democrats boast multiple popular swing-state governors whose hypothetical nomination might ease the party’s path to an Electoral College majority. Given the stakes of keeping Trump out of power, Democratic convention delegates may have been justified in picking whichever ticket seemed most likely to bring victory in November.
Nevertheless, I think Biden made the right call. If there were some mechanism for instantly achieving party unity around nominating Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro — or one of the party’s other top-tier talents — then Democrats would be wise to take it. But no such mechanism exists.
Failing to rally around Harris would have left Democrats bereft of a nominee until late August, giving Trump a month to campaign unopposed. And the vice president would have been highly likely to prevail at that convention anyway, given her official status as Biden’s heir apparent and the democratic legitimacy that comes with it.
At this point, it is unlikely that the most promising candidates on the Democratic bench would have chosen to compete, given the risks of alienating key constituencies within the party and the widespread sense that Republicans will be favored to win in November, irrespective of whom the Democrats nominate.
Biden made a mistake in seeking a second term. And he made another by refusing to bow out swiftly once the debate made his unfitness plain. But on Sunday, he did the best he could to reverse some of the damage. It’s now incumbent on Harris — and all other Democrats — to put together a campaign strong enough to reverse the rest.
The (reasonable but probably wrong) case against Kamala
Before examining why endorsing Harris was (probably) the right call, it’s worth taking stock of the case for an open convention.
That argument boils down to three fundamental claims: 1) Harris is not an especially strong candidate, 2) nominating the vice president prevents Democrats from getting a clean break from Biden’s vulnerabilities, and 3) the party has several strong alternative candidates.
All these claims seem right to me.
Harris currently has a net disapproval rating of roughly negative 12 percent. And her electoral track record is unimpressive. In her first statewide election in 2010, Harris beat a Republican in the race for California attorney general by less than 1 percentage point (two years earlier, Barack Obama had bested John McCain by more than 23 points in that state). In 2020, Harris began her run for the Democratic nomination with strong fundraising and an early surge in the polls. Yet her campaign collapsed before the primary’s first ballots were cast.
Further, as a Californian whose Senate voting record put her on the left wing of her caucus, Harris is not an ideal figurehead for a party anxious to appeal to Trump-curious Midwesterners.
Making matters worse, Harris’s candidacy did not fall out of a coconut tree. It exists in the context of her current boss’s unpopularity and conspicuous cognitive decline. For many voters, Biden has become a byword for inflation and infirmity. A Democratic nominee with no connection to the Biden administration would have given the party distance from both of these liabilities: They would have faced much less of a compulsion to defend Biden’s record, while confronting few questions about their own hypothetical complicity in concealing the president’s frailty.
On both these fronts, Harris could find herself saddled with her boss’s baggage.
Finally, the Democrats have some formidable politicians on their bench. Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer both boast majority approval in their critical swing states.
Democrats would likely be better off with one of those governors as their standard-bearer, all else being equal. But this does not mean that the party would have been better off holding a completely open convention.
An open convention probably would have resulted in Harris’s nomination
The problems with withholding endorsements from Harris and pursuing an open convention are threefold.
First, the Democratic Party is poorly positioned to organize and legitimize a contested convention. It has been more than half a century since the Democrats chose a nominee through convention wrangling, rather than purely through the primary process. In that time, the institutional structure of the party has dramatically changed.
In the mid-20th century, Democratic delegates consisted in no small part of the leaders of trade unions and urban machines — individuals who were directly accountable to mass constituencies. This made it possible for them to credibly speak on behalf of key Democratic voting blocs.
Meanwhile, since contested conventions were routine occurrences in American politics at that time, there was a great deal of institutional knowledge about how to broker such competitions and reach consensus.
Today, by contrast, Democratic delegates are largely volunteers who speak for no one beyond the primary voters in their areas. In this context, a contested convention could be chaotic, and its nominee lacking in democratic legitimacy.
To be sure, anointing Harris is not especially democratic either. She was not elected by primary voters, any more than any other non-Biden Democrat. But the US electorate did vote to make her the president’s heir apparent, and this gives her a source of legitimacy that any other selection would lack.
Second, and more importantly, failing to coalesce behind a nominee today would have left Democrats without a standard-bearer for a month. This would inhibit fundraising, at a time when the Trump-Vance ticket is taking in serious cash. And it would mean ceding swing-state airwaves to the Republican message — or else, running exclusively negative advertising — for the next four weeks. This is especially risky in a context where Democrats face the challenge of introducing a new nominee to the country.
As Biden’s default replacement, having been elected to fill in for him in the event of his death or disability, Harris was uniquely capable of becoming her party’s consensus nominee in the absence of a protracted process.
Finally, Harris would have been highly likely to win an open convention, anyway. Before Biden dropped out, South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn — a highly influential member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) — let it be known that he would favor Harris were Biden to drop out.
Due to her uniquely high name recognition, meanwhile, Harris would likely outperform any other individual Democratic candidate in opinion polls. And as such polls, in combination with her title, rendered her the frontrunner for the nomination, various Democratic interest groups would have had an incentive to line up behind her, so as to ensure their influence in the likely Democratic nominee’s hypothetical administration.
Assuming that congressional caucuses, Democratic interest groups, and poll respondents did indeed all indicate their preference for Harris, Democratic delegates would almost certainly have felt compelled to back her.
Most critically, it seems unlikely that Shapiro, Whitmer, or other top-tier Democratic talents would have entered the fray in any case. For the reasons already stated, any non-Harris candidate would have faced an uphill battle for the nomination. And merely trying to win that nod would have come at the cost of potentially alienating constituencies that they would need to win during a future primary: A white candidate hoping to one day compete in the South Carolina primary might be wise to avoid being the person who tried and failed to block the first African-American vice president from claiming a nomination that was hers to inherit, at least from the perspective of some Black Democratic elected officials.
What’s more, even if the gamble of challenging Harris paid off initially, the prize would ultimately have been the mixed-blessing of serving as the Democratic nominee in a year when the Republican ticket is favored. We cannot know exactly how polls and betting markets would have shifted had Democrats endorsed Shapiro or Whitmer. But Republicans have long held an advantage over Democrats this cycle on the issues most important to voters, chief of all inflation and immigration.
Given the balance of risks and benefits here, an ambitious and promising younger Democrat might prefer to sit back and position themselves for 2028 or 2032. At the very least, no swing-state Democrat let word of their interest in potentially running leak in the weeks since Biden’s bad debate.
Harris may be stronger than she looks
Finally, although Harris has weaknesses, she is not devoid of political gifts. At 59, she is young by the standards of American politics. She is an able speaker, whose recent appearances have brimmed with more vitality and coherence than either Biden or Trump have mustered in years. Her recent remarks debunking the GOP’s claims of being the party of “unity” were especially effective.
Harris does have a negative approval rating. But it is nevertheless better than Biden’s. And the public’s disapproval of her is less strongly held. As the political consultant Sarah Longwell has reported, voters in focus groups tend to have a negative impression of Harris — but it is just that, an impression, rather than a deep-seated evaluation. They do not know much about her and are aware of that fact.
Today, Harris’s political brand is essentially indistinguishable from Biden’s. Many of her detractors may therefore be simply giving pollsters their views of the president. Those who are actually familiar with Harris, meanwhile, may see her through the lens of her 2020 primary campaign, during which she joined many other Democratic candidates in a bidding war for the allegiance of the party’s left wing. Now that she has been vaulted directly into the general election, Harris has the opportunity to reintroduce herself to the public in a manner tailored to the sensibilities of swing voters by, among other things, leaning into her experience as a “smart on crime” prosecutor.
Thus, if she can nail her campaign’s rollout, it is possible that Harris would see her numbers significantly improve.
Put all of this together and the case for uniting around Kamala is clear: Democrats can line up behind Biden’s logical successor today, put an end to their party’s internal chaos, and begin the work of rehabilitating Harris’s image — or they can pursue a path that likely ends with the same outcome, only after a month of internal disorganization, discord, and subpar fundraising.
The former isn’t a perfect option, but it was probably the best decision available to the Democrats at this late date. Joe Biden deserves credit for making it.
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