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Yesterday, Joe Biden did the right thing, after weeks of denying that anything needed to be done. His announcement took his party by surprise, and now, in a rush, the Democrats are making a colossal mistake and ensuring that they will get as little benefit as possible from Biden’s decision. The mistake is not the choice of Kamala Harris, but the sudden mobilization around her, the torrent of support, right after Biden stepped down. Biden’s senescence was only one part of the party’s crisis. The other part was the impression that Democratic politics seemed like a game rigged by insiders to favor a candidate of their choice and insulate him from the risk associated with campaigning. For 27 minutes, between the moment Biden announced his withdrawal and the moment he broke the seal of support for Harris by granting his own, the race felt excitingly and bracingly open. The Democrats should have kept it open until next month’s convention in Chicago.
“The Democratic National Convention is not the time to litigate[Harris’s]ability to replace Biden,” Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote yesterday in a column titled “Kamala or nothing.” “The time to do it was in 2020.” She’s right about the second part. The urgency of defeating Donald Trump in 2020 convinced many Democrats that intense internal debates about the party’s direction needed to be postponed in favor of party unity. Under those circumstances, neither Biden nor his running mate were afforded the scrutiny they deserved; they were the embodiment of Obama’s desire for a third term, and on that basis received the party’s warmest, most breezy approval. Four years later, both were running on the strength of their record (a strong if unpopular economy, a somewhat muddled foreign policy), but had not yet articulated a distinctive vision. The party should have demanded such a vision in 2020, or even in 2016.
Candidates who fail to develop articulate principles and coherent viewpoints end up campaigning on nothing, like Harris’s now-famous rant about “faith in what can be, unburdened by what has been.” Most politicians resort to absurd rhetoric like this early in their campaign: “Yes, we can,” “A thousand points of light,” “MAGA” in all its forms. But at some point, naturally, such rhetoric gives way to the details of policy — unless the politician delivering it still plays a largely ceremonial role, like vice president, and never faces the stress of an election campaign. I’d like to know whether Harris’s unburdened faith means that as president she will equip Ukraine with long-range strike capabilities against targets in Russia, and whether she plans to eliminate tariffs or increase them.
If a campaign launch is a candidate’s chance to flash his pearly smile, the primary is a candidate’s chance to flash that smile after taking a few punches to the face. And as in boxing, it’s better to take practice punches from a sparring partner than from the defending champion waiting for you on fight night. Harris now risks bypassing that jaw-hardening process, which Democrats might have drawn out over a period of weeks as other candidates tried to displace her and, if they failed, showed they might have vice presidential material. The process would also, like a normal primary, have salutary long-term effects for the party, by showing which young talents seem most likely to mature into Democratic leaders.
A drawn-out process would also confer strategic advantages. Typically, a party commits to a platform and formula several months (or in the case of incumbents, years) before an election. My colleague Tim Alberta has described the Trump campaign’s meticulous planning for a Biden run. “Even the selection of Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate,” Alberta writes, “was aimed at increasing margins with the base in a landslide victory rather than persuading undecided voters in a close fight.” Now that Trump is committed to his path, Democrats have a rare chance to revise their strategy to neutralize Trump’s chances. “The Republican Party just spent tens of millions of dollars running against Joe Biden,” former Trump adviser Stephen Miller said on Fox News yesterday, with a querulous, wounded sense that Democrats had violated the bounds of fair play. And in some ways they have, but now that they are redefining those bounds mid-campaign, they might as well make the most of their opportunity. This means not giving Trump a fixed target and calibrating his selection process to achieve maximum lethality for his campaign’s fixed options.
The other strategic advantage is attention. To get airtime yesterday, after Biden withdrew, Trump would have had to be shot in the other ear. His entire political career has depended on the sometimes morbid fascination of the public when he says unexpected and bizarre things. No American politician can match his ability, but collectively, with genuine competence compressed into the next few weeks, they can create a circus more capable of captivating voters than a series of Trump rallies.
Harris herself seemed keen to avoid the mistake of a premature appointment. She promised to “earn and win” her party’s nomination, with no apparent expectation that it would be secured within hours. Barack Obama, his party’s last strategically gifted politician, also seemed keen to take advantage of the competition. He said he hoped the party would “create a process from which an outstanding candidate would emerge.” But now that option is fading. Biden had to go, and replacing him with almost any candidate born after the Korean War would have improved Democrats’ chances. But the way that replacement is done presents (or presented: as I finished writing this, even Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia had lined up behind Harris) opportunities. Democrats, as they say, never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
