Biden Bows Out

Can Harris Save The Democrats?

Apparently, Mark Halperin’s sources were correct. Joe Biden has agreed to step aside as the Democratic Party’s 2024 Presidential nominee.

Shortly before 2PM Eastern, Joe Biden tweeted out this letter to the American people, announcing his withdrawal from the Presidential election.

Intriguingly, the letter did not explicitly endorse Kamala Harris to take his place. That endorsement did not come for about 30 minutes, when he tweeted his support for her assuming the top spot on the ticket.

That little omission from Biden’s withdrawal letter was enough to send the political watchers in Harris’ home state of California into mini-meltdown.

Even with Biden’s endorsement, however, Kamala Harris is getting only a lukewarm reception from corporate media:

Will Kamala Harris automatically replace Biden?

No. Biden is still president and says he has no plans to step down until after his term ends in January 2025. Harris’ government role as vice president elevates her in the event that Biden vacates the presidency itself — not his campaign. The Democratic National Convention has its own process for selecting presidential nominees in this scenario, and Harris would have to follow it to secure the nomination.

Even the Los Angeles Times, another home state media mouthpiece, paid more attention to Harris’ numerous negatives than to Biden’s endorsement.

Many anxious Democrats have clamored for other candidates, including Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California or Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania — worrying that Harris remains too polarizing a figure to win a majority of voters.

She has ground to make up against Trump and her national approval rating, while improved, remains at about 39%, compared with 50% of voters who don’t approve of her, according to the latest 538 polling average. She also has ground to make up in swing states, according to polls.

Between a tepid media reaction and Biden’s delayed endorsement, Kamala Harris apparently has some work to do if she intends to garner the full-throated support of her own party.

That said, as of this writing Harris is now the runaway favorite for the nomination on betting site Polymarket.

We should note, however, that the punters have already eased off her slightly, from where they stood immediately after Biden’s withdrawal announcement..

We should also note that Polymarket still does not give her much hope against Donald Trump. As of this writing the punters have Trump at a 65% chance of winning.

This is a slight increase from right after Biden’s announcement, when Trump stood at 64%.

These minor fluctuations in betting odds are hardly indicative of a major softening of money support for Harris either in terms of the nomination or the overall election. They are, however, a subtle reminder that the corporate media is not entirely wrong about Kamala Harris. She is a problematic candidate for the Democrats even if she is a woman and a person of color.

Nor is it merely the betting odds. Donald Trump still commands a significant albeit not insurmountable polling lead, based on the RealClearPolitics poll aggregate.

That advantage increases in “battleground states” such as Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania is important because if Trump picks up just that battleground state, and holds the other states which already are likely to go Trump’s way, he will immediately reach the magic 270-electoral count threshold to win the election, based on the breakdown assessed at 270ToWin.

Currently, Pennsylvania is a tossup, but Trump arguably has a significant margin already.

We will be a full week at least before we can effectively assess the impact Biden’s withdrawal has on the overall race. However, anyone expecting a tectonic shift based on Biden bowing out is likely to be disappointed. Voters and pollsters had already been factoring in a Biden withdrawal and had already begun to gauge a Trump vs Harris matchup, even as the Democratic Party was gleefully shooting off both feet over it.

Moreover, there is good reason to believe that while Harris theoretically could make up ground against Donald Trump, she will struggle to do so. Biden was unpopular against Trump long before the debate debacle, with his negatives being driven principally by policy. Harris inherits all of those negatives, while remaining stuck with the reality that, to date, she’s done little to shift those perceptions.

The major problem in comparing these Harris figures to Biden’s actual standing against Trump is that Biden’s numbers factor in every negative thing that he and his campaign have endured so far. Biden backers would point to the fact that opinions of Harris could still change for the worse as her theoretical campaign becomes not so theoretical anymore, and that her performing about as evenly as Biden against Trump is not that great of a sign when there is more uncertainty about how Harris would even campaign.

As I have explored already, Harris also has a number of additional negatives that Biden had not had to address, and might not have had to address. In particular, Harris’ tenure as Biden’s “border czar” has been, even among Democrats, disastrous, and the fact that on her watch as many as 85,000 unaccompanied children may have been labor trafficked, with the Biden Administration facilitating that abuse, is not a statistic Harris is going to want to confront.

Biden Has Dementia. What Does Kamala Harris Have?

The abuse angle also potentially opens the door to Trump’s team revisiting Harris’ problematic record as California Attorney General, where she was repeatedly in hot water with federal judges over her resistance to federal mandates to relieve prison overcrowding.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), a leading candidate to be Joe Biden’s running mate, repeatedly and openly defied U.S. Supreme Court orders to reduce overcrowding in California prisons while serving as the state’s attorney general, according to legal documents reviewed by the Prospect. Working in tandem with Gov. Jerry Brown, Harris and her legal team filed motions that were condemned by judges and legal experts as obstructionist, bad-faith, and nonsensical, at one point even suggesting that the Supreme Court lacked the jurisdiction to order a reduction in California’s prison population.

We should not forget that Tulsi Gabbard savaged Harris in the 2020 Democratic primary debates, pounding her hard on her AG record and effectively kneecapping her campaign by highlighting the more corrupt aspects of that record.

Nor will she be able to play these items off as part of an overall “tough on crime” stance. Fact-checking from her 2016 Senate campaign validated her opponent’s claim that crime in California increased by ten percent on her watch.

Sanchez has criticized Harris over crime. Sanchez claimed in the Los Angeles Times that there have been “increases in crime rates during her [Harris’] tenure, including a 10 percent increase in violent crimes.”

Is it true? Yes. According to a report released July 1, incidents of violent crime in California—which include homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault—rose 10 percent between 2014 and 2015.

These are all items that most voters nationwide have not digested about Kamala Harris. These are but a few of the items the Trump team is sure to pound Harris with in coming weeks. These are items that all dovetail very neatly into the disaster of her tenure as border czar.

Will there be an open convention and a “floor fight” for the Democrats next month? Technically, yes. With Biden withdrawing that is now a procedural necessity. How much of a fight there is will depend largely on whether or not other Democrats decide to jump in and challenge Harris for the top spot. As of this writing, no other Democrat has indicated they were going to take that plunge.

However, as has been the case throughout the entire Biden psychodrama from the debate debacle on June 27th, the constant caveat is “as of this writing”. At the time Biden announced his withdrawal I was putting the finishing touches on an assessment of what would happen because he had not pulled out yet, which article had to get scrapped for this. By tomorrow, there could easily be one or more challenges to Kamala Harris’ claim on the top spot. The only constant in this story has been change.

Yet as the historical record for Kamala Harris shows, even if Harris gains the nomination by acclimation, there is far from anything like the enthusiasm within the Republican Party for Donald Trump among the Democrats. There remain voters and donors who are alternately unimpressed and unenthused by Kamala Harris. Given the the residual unexamined baggage in her political record, it remains very much an uhpill battle for her to close ground against Donald Trump nationwide, and especially in battleground states such as Pennsylvania.

About the only saving grace for Kamala Harris right now appears to be the rather sobering reality that no other Democrat who is plausibly going to run can plausibly claim to beat Donald Trump. As bad a prospect as Harris is in the minds of many, she may very well be the best the Democrats can muster this time around.

If the Democrats who forced Joe Biden to the sidelines expect Kamala Harris to be the savior of the party, they are likely to be gravely disappointed. She may not even be able to head off the simmering civil war within the Democratic Party the collapse of Biden’s candidacy has revealed.

The Democrats may have managed to step back slightly. However, they are still likely to be screwed—bigly.