A fiercely xenophobic demagogue – who fomented an insurrection against the US government less than four years ago – is on track to win the White House this fall. And the only remotely viable alternative for him, for now, is a hugely unpopular geriatric Democrat who just announced on national television his inability to speak in complete sentences.
This is the reality we face in the wake of Joe Biden’s catastrophic performance in Thursday night’s presidential debate. A full account of how we got to this grim moment would require a multi-volume history. But one cause of our current predicament is worth highlighting: Democratic presidential candidates repeatedly failed to select their running mates with their party’s best long-term interests in mind.
Vice presidents don’t always become presidential candidates, but they often do. In partisan primaries, few elements of a resume are more advantageous than a tenure as the heir apparent to a beloved president. Given this reality, a presidential candidate should try to choose a running mate he considers highly eligible.
Unfortunately, the last two Democratic presidents did not prioritize political skills when selecting their vice presidents.
Barack Obama did not choose Joe Biden because he thought the then-Delaware senator would be a great Democratic candidate in 2016. On the contrary, according to most opinions, Obama thought that Biden would be a completely unviable candidate when his hypothetical presidency ended. And he reportedly chose Biden for precisely that reason.
According to senior Democrats who spoke to New York magazine’s Gabriel Debenedetti in 2019, Obama had assumed that Biden would be too old to run for president in 2016. And he reasoned that this fact would make Biden an especially loyal second-in-command: Devoid of political aspirations of his own, Biden would have no qualms about putting Obama’s interests and goals above all else.
Obama miscalculated his running mate in more ways than one. In retrospect, it seems likely that Biden would have been a stronger candidate in 2016 than Hillary Clinton, Obama’s hand-picked successor, turned out to be.
Yet Obama was certainly right to assert that even eight years ago, Biden, then 71, was far older than an ideal presidential candidate. Rather than making the Delaware senator his running mate, or putting his thumb on the scale for Clinton, Obama should have found a vice president who was in his political prime and who boasted a demonstrable ability to compete in a swing state. Instead, he put the interests of his own campaign and his future administration ahead of the best long-term interests of the Democratic Party, likely damaging his own legacy in the process.
Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris in 2020 was even more misguided. When he made that decision in August 2020, there was little basis to believe that Harris was one of the most politically formidable Democrats in the country.
Harris had just launched an exceptionally lackluster presidential campaign. She was then a senator from California and had entered the race for the Democratic nomination with strong donor support and a rapid rise in the polls. Despite these early advantages, Harris failed to maintain (let alone build) her coalition in the months that followed, and her campaign collapsed before the first primary votes were cast.
Harris’ electoral record before 2020 was also not particularly encouraging. She had never won an election in a swing state or competitive district. And in his first statewide race in deep California in 2010, Harris defeated her Republican rival by less than 1 percentage point. Two years earlier, Barack Obama had won that state by more than 23 points.
Given that Biden was 77 years old in August 2020, the likelihood that his running mate would one day become his party’s standard-bearer was unusually high. It was entirely plausible that health problems would force him to retire before the end of his first term, let alone his second. And if Harris became the incumbent president, no other Democrat would have a chance of defeating her in a close primary. For these reasons, Biden’s primary consideration in choosing a running mate should have been his electability.
Instead, he placed enormous weight on demographic considerations. “I think he came to the conclusion that he should pick a black woman,” former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told the New York Times in the summer of 2020. “They are our most loyal voters, and I think that black women in America deserved a black vice presidential candidate.”
Without a doubt, it is desirable for a vice presidential candidate to galvanize the most loyal voters of the Democratic Party. That is a dimension of eligibility. But it is not obvious that Harris actually possessed that ability; After all, her 2020 campaign resonated so little with black voters in South Carolina that she was forced to drop out before that state’s primary.
In any case, the ability to appeal to undecided voters is far more electorally valuable than a penchant for pleasing loyal Democrats. Getting a Democratic voter to stay home increases your margin by 1 point; getting a Republican voter into your column increases it by 2.
The desire to give representation to historically marginalized groups at the pinnacle of American power is righteous. Such representation has the potential to shift cultural perceptions about race and gender in a progressive direction (although, as Obama’s presidency demonstrated, it also has the potential to catalyze a reactionary backlash). But these diffuse cultural changes are ultimately less consequential than public policies, especially for the most vulnerable in American society. Working-class black women have more to lose from a Congress that guts Medicaid and a civil rights division that prioritizes discrimination against whites than they have to gain from watching someone of their race and gender waste a national election.
In 2020, there were plenty of nonwhite Democrats with a proven track record of appealing to swing voters for Biden to choose from. Amy Klobuchar had repeatedly won landslide victories in Minnesota, a Democratic state. Tammy Duckworth had unseated a Republican in a Democratic House district in Illinois before subsequently winning election to the Senate. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had demonstrated her appeal to Rust Belt independents. Tammy Baldwin had repeatedly won Senate elections in Wisconsin.
Instead, Biden opted for a running mate that few in the party considered an optimal candidate for a general election, despite the fact that if Biden won, there was a high likelihood that Harris would be his party’s standard-bearer at some point in the near future.
Over the past two years, Harris’s poor poll numbers — and Democrats’ lack of confidence in her political acumen — reduced pressure on Biden to step down and allowed his party to field a less elderly and unpopular candidate. Many party leaders seemed to reason that Biden was a safer bet than his vice president.
After Thursday night, it appears that this view was wrong. For all her shortcomings, Harris’s approval rating is somewhat better than Biden’s right now. The vice president has some oratorical chops and is not lacking in vitality. Given the immense difficulty of coordinating behind a candidate other than Biden at this point, there is a plausible argument that she is now the Democratic Party’s best choice.
But given the importance of keeping Trump out of power, we deserve a better option. And if Obama and Biden had put their party’s best long-term interests first when choosing their running mates, we’d probably have one.
