Bye Bye Biden, Err...Hello, Harris?
The Choice No Democrat Wanted To Make
By the end of this coming weekend, we are told, Joe Biden will be stepping aside as the presumptive Democratic Party Presidential nominee for 2024.
Such was the reporting late yesterday afternoon, when the rumor mill cranked it up to 11 that Joe Biden was getting ready to throw in the towel.
As of this writing, Biden’s announcement that he is no longer seeking to run for re-election is still in the future, which is to say it is still speculative. He may yet decide against stepping aside.
However, if the early reporting proves correct and Joe Biden does step aside, we will immediately see what manner of feeding frenzy open convention awaits the Democrats net month. Although the Vice President would normally be expected to step into all the President’s shoes, Joe Biden is presumably not going to endorse Kamala Harris as the 2024 Democratic nominee, and the hope within Democratic circles is that Biden will put his imprimatur on the nomination question being resolved at the convention with a roster of possibles competing for the top spot on the ticket.
Presumably, Kamala Harris would be one of those competing, although the Democratic Party leadership is far from pleased with the idea of a Kamala Harris candidacy, even as she seems to be the inevitable “heir apparent” to Biden’s mantle.
Well-connected Democratic Party insiders say they expect President Biden to make a major announcement about his future soon after the Republican National Convention concludes in Milwaukee and that congressional leaders expect that Vice President Harris will become their nominee for president if Biden drops his reelection bid.
When the Congressional leadership in your party is only “lukewarm” about you being on the ticket, that means they really don’t want you on the ticket.
Congressional leaders are “lukewarm” on Harris as the nominee but recognize that her favorable rating is higher than Biden’s and believe the president can help boost her numbers by campaigning for her, according to a person familiar with the leadership-level discussions.
However, despite what the Democrats in Congress want, at present the betting odds are heavily in favor of Kamala Harris securing the 2024 Democratic nomination.
However, getting the nod at the convention is for Harris but the beginning of the battle. She still will have to go head to head with Donald Trump, and the poll trends in a matchup between the pair have been increasingly favoring Donald Trump.
If you’re a Democrat with visions of taking back the House while keeping the Senate and the White House, these are not encouraging signs!
In fact, the signs are not only not encouraging for Kamala Harris, they are extremely bad. In poll after poll conducted by The Hill, Trump beats Harris handily.
Even the betting money, heavily on Harris for getting the Democratic nod, goes to Trump in the general election.
This has long been the sobering reality of Vice President Kamala Harris: she is not, according to the data, who America wishes to see elected President. While many view the Vice Presidency as a stepping stone to the Oval Office, the best that can be said of Kamala Harris is that she remains a political cipher for many voters.
Research by several different Democratic groups has found that even after three and a half years in office, Harris largely remains a blank slate for voters. Mike Lux, an independent Democratic media consultant, is leading a major study of the party’s decline in blue-collar factory towns across the Rust Belt. “In the counties that we study, she is more of a cipher,” he told me. “People don’t know her. They don’t know what she stands for.” He’s found that people vaguely know she’s from California but have forgotten she was the state’s attorney general. “They don’t know what her big issues are,” he said, “other than abortion rights.”
In Kamala Harris the Democrats have a Presidential pick who comes with more than the usual amount of political baggage, not the least of which has been her disastrous tenure acting as Joe Biden’s “border czar”.
Small wonder, then, that corporate media has kept alive the speculations of other options to replace Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political activity, including his support for Democrats in elections outside of California, prompted rumors last year he was running a “shadow campaign” for the White House, but Newsom has firmly dismissed the possibility, vowing his allegiance to Biden’s 2024 campaign and serving as a Biden campaign surrogate.
Other Democratic governors who have elevated their national profiles—Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro—are also regularly listed as potential Biden alternatives, especially after all four won gubernatorial races by double digits in 2022, but they’re all stumping for Biden’s 2024 campaign and have defended him in the wake of the debate.
This does not mean that Harris is not, at present, by far the most likely to become the Democratic Party nominee. As much as portions of the corporate media firmament are diffident about Harris atop the ticket, others are firmly convinced that she all but has the nomination locked up.
While a new Politico–Morning Consult poll with data about Harris shows that she shares her boss’s general election vulnerability, Democrats remain bullish on her. Seventy-four percent think she’d make a good president. By a 59 percent to 31 percent margin, they think she could win a 2024 general election. She’s stronger than Biden among the Black and Latino voters that have been stressing Democrats in recent years. And in terms of early 2028 preferences among Democrats, she’s far ahead of the competition (Harris is at 41 percent; Pete Buttigieg is at 15 percent; Newsom is at 14 percent; Whitmer is at 5 percent). Harris is already the principal voice of her administration and her party on the GOP threat to abortion rights, which will very likely become a more prominent issue as November approaches. She’s not going anywhere.
With the truncated period before the convention for alternatives to Harris to press their claim, there is considerable logic to the presumption that Kamala Harris is the default nominee.
Still, there is no avoiding the reality that the Democrats have known about Biden’s increasing infirmities for at least the past few months, ever since Robert Hur’s scandalous report that Biden was too senile to be charged with mishandling classified documents after serving as Barack Obama’s Vice President.
Despite that warning, the Democrats resisted turning to Harris as Biden’s replacement.
Even though Harris might be the favored replacement now, the lack of enthusiasm for her candidacy remains palpable.
Should Biden follow through and withdraw from the race, can Kamala Harris unite the disparate factions within the Democratic Party and generate a level of party enthusiasm to match that of Republicans for Donald Trump?
That is the challenge Harris faces. That is the challenge any successor to Biden faces.
At the same time, every possible successor to Joe Biden, including Kamala Harris, must meet that challenge against a background understanding that no one in the Democratic Party had them as their first choice for the 2024 ticket. For many Democrats, a senile Joe Biden was preferable to a sentient Kamala Harris or a conscious Gavin Newsom.
With their first choice being pushed off the political stage, we shall soon see just how happy those same Democrats are with their second or third choice for President.
Don’t expect them to be happy with it at all.
This is a beautifully crafted sentence!
"For many Democrats, a senile Joe Biden was preferable to a sentient Kamala Harris or a conscious Gavin Newsom."
A clear-headed and insightful analysis, Peter. And (guffaw) “feeding frenzy/open convention”! Seriously, I love your mind.
I can’t think of a single accomplishment by Harris during the past four years. She’s a nothing. She’s never even made a memorable speech. If she gets the nomination, I’d expect to see Democrats switching their votes to Kennedy in droves.
But let’s suppose that the MSM scares the populace into believing that another round of President Trump would destroy not only democracy, but literally the country. Thus, Harris wins the election by a thin margin, and presides over the country during the next four years - four years of financial troubles, wars, border problems, and other huge problems. Disaster! Long-term, she’d destroy the Democratic Party. In 2028 people would be so disgusted with Democrats that the party would be struggling for twenty years or more afterwards.
And I’m sure that the political pros realized this. But as you’ve pointed out, Peter, they have no good options here. “Heads, the Democrats lose; tails, they don’t win”.
Oh, here’s a tidbit that may be telling. I was just out running errands, stopped at a garage sale, milled around looking at the stuff along with about thirty other people. There was a table full of books, and prominently displayed was a book about Kamala. It had her name in large letters and a big picture of her. Yet not one of those thirty people picked it up, or even gave it more than a passing glance. She should be generating huge interest right now, but NOPE!