The Case for Kamala Harris

If there is a shift from Biden, a Harris-[Fill in the blank] ticket is the most sensible way to proceed.

I, like many of you, have continued to reflect on the state of the presidential race in the aftermath of Biden’s disturbing debate performance.

I continue to believe that those clamoring to replace Biden at the top of the ticket are vastly underestimating the hazards of going down this path. I am also closely reading the views of campaign professionals – not professional pundits – who are arguing that the debate did not damage Biden as much as one would expect with the voters who will eventually decide this race. They also believe that the strength of the anti-Trump message continues to be sufficiently powerful to prevail in November with majorities in the country and the swing states.

My confidence in this position, however, has been tempered by two factors.

The media feels burned by the contrast between Biden’s debate performance and how it has been reporting on Biden’s mental sharpness the past six months. It is making up for that with a vengeance with deep reporting on Biden’s mental or physical lapses. It is going to be hard to turn this media narrative around. Any verbal gaffes, which Biden has been committing frequently for decades, will be magnified significantly by the media. The only way to move the media off this issue is for Biden to demonstrate his mental vigor by holding a press conference or sitting for extended interviews. This has not occurred. And it appears that both his White House and campaign staffs have been protecting him from these kind of appearances. It was inexcusable that Biden refused an offer from 60 Minutes to sit for an extensive interview before the Super Bowl, as many presidents have done in recent years. That should have been a real warning sign that should have influenced my thinking on this issue, but I, like many others gave in to denial.   

The second factor is that we now face a higher likelihood that there will be more examples of Biden’s mental lapses going forward, especially as this 81-year-old needs to endure the rigors of an accelerated campaign on top of the duties of the presidency over the next four months. Although the White House and campaign have been able to manage this issue fairly well over the past six months up until the debate, that does not mean it will be able to do so between now and November as the campaign goes into high gear. A tired Biden will look like a mentally declining Biden. Even if this is unfair, especially in comparison with the lackadaisical and frequently incoherent Trump, this is reality. More frequent examples of what happened during the debate could be fatal to Biden’s reelection.  

For these reasons, despite the risks, I am more open to the possibility of replacing Biden at the top of the ticket. But if Democrats choose to go down this path, I am convinced that the only do-able and smart pathway is to elevate Vice President Harris to the top spot and then have the convention pick a new vice-presidential nominee.

Many of my conversations with people advocating to replace Biden start with the premise -- indeed almost an “of course” -- that Harris could not possibly be at the top of the ticket. (In fact, most the dream tickets put forward by these folks don’t even include Harris as the VP!) This position is usually visceral, not based on any substantive arguments. When pressed for real reasons they are against Harris, people say, 1) she is even more unpopular than Biden; 2) she ran a terrible campaign in the 2020 primaries, so this shows she will be a bad candidate; 3) she is shown herself to be a bad manager; or 4) she does not have a strong political identity and appears malleable on many issues.

These are all exceptionally weak arguments (that I will address in a moment), which leaves me to believe that that much of the anti-Harris sentiment is driven more by concerns relating to her identity rather than her suitability for the job. Biden did Harris no favors in this regard in 2020 by announcing that he was focusing almost exclusively on Black women for the second spot on the ticket. This was offensive and stupid beyond words. It opened Democrats to the charge of being inescapably beholden to identify politics and unfairly tainted the eventual nominee as not having been chosen based on merit. (Remarkably, Biden then did the exact same thing with his Supreme Court pick).

The positive case for Harris starts with the fact that her candidacy would have democratic legitimacy since she was both elected vice-president and was Biden’s announced running mate during the 2024 primaries. Indeed, this is the vice-president’s only real job – to be there to take the place of a president that can no longer serve. The pre-convention endorsement of any other person to the top of the ticket would reek of 19^th and 20^th century smoke-filled room politics, and I fear will not sit well with the younger generation.

If the alternative is to allow the top of the ticket to be chosen by the delegates in an entirely open Democratic National Convention (DNC) in mid-August, we will endure six-weeks of intra-party fighting followed by gavel-to-gavel coverage of disorder, chaos, and internecine warfare less than 90 days from election day. This is not a strategy to generate enthusiasm for the ticket coming out of the convention, especially among swing voters. I think those arguing for the virtues of an open convention are, for the most part, deeply intelligent political observers who haven’t a clue of what is required to win a presidential campaign (yes, Ezra Klein, that is you.).

As for Harris as a campaigner, I think she easily fits the bill. She has over three years of experience under her belt defending the Biden record and, more importantly, prosecuting the case against Trump. She advocates for abortion rights, the Democrats’ best issue, as effectively as anyone. She also has three years of being under the national media spotlight and having had her personal background and finances fully vetted. That is more than can be said for any of the governors or cabinet members being bandied about for the new ticket. It is just not the same running statewide as it is running nationally. If Democrats are going to go down the unprecedented route of replacing its nominee after the primaries, the is no margin for error with post-nomination surprises.  The chances of this happening are minimized if Harris is the nominee.

Harris can smoothly transition to the role at the top of the ticket. The Biden-Harris war-chest, I understand, can be seamlessly transferred to her. Americans may not adore her, but at least they know her. The same cannot be said for, let’s say, Gina Raimondo. The GOP will try to eviscerate the character and qualifications of whomever the Democrats put forward, but this will be harder to do for the known quantity of Harris than any of the other potential candidates, who will be blank slates to most of the nation.

Finally, the big problem with picking anyone other than Harris is that Democrats have absolutely no acceptable answer to the question: “If you believe Harris was an acceptable Vice President for past three and a half years (one heartbeat away from the presidency) and you were ready to nominate her to be vice-president again to an 81-year-old presidential nominee, why is she not your choice now?”  Every possible answer to that question will harm Democrats’ chances of winning in November.

As for Harris’ unpopularity, I believe she has done very little to deserve this other than being a vice-president to an unpopular president. She entered office with about a +10 approval rating (Biden’s was about +20), but this rating quickly eroded in the same pattern as Biden’s with the country being disappointed by how COVID continued to affect our lives in 2021, even after vaccines became available. Like Biden, Harris’ approval rating went underwater and increased steeply both as the deadly COVID Delta variant spread over the summer of 2021 and the Administration botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan in late August. Both Harris and Biden’s unpopularity reached a high in the summer of 2022 at virtually the same time as inflation reached its peak. However, it is worth noting that whereas Biden’s unpopularity has grown from -13.1 to -19.6 over the past year, Harris’ has narrowed slightly from -12.8 to -12.1.

Yes, Harris ran a poor campaign in 2020. So what? Biden ran three bad campaigns for the Democratic nomination before winning in 2020. Most presidential nominees in the modern era ran for president previously and lost in the primaries or general election. Moreover, Harris would simply inherit what I perceive to be a very strong, effective Biden-Harris campaign operation. Her job would not be to run the campaign machinery, but to communicate the Democrats’ message – which is both strong and popular.

As for the charges of being a bad executive or having malleable views on issues -- give me a break. When have we ever evaluated a president on whether they would be good managers of the executive bureaucracy? And what politician has not been malleable on the issues (i.e., Bill Clinton)? Moreover, this campaign is clearly NOT about the nuances of policy. It is about a values gut-check for America. Harris is well-positioned to make the case that her values are far more aligned with the soul of America than the corrupt, anti-democratic narcissist she would be running against.

As for a new vice-presidential nominee, putting Harris at the top of the ticket provides Democrats with a wide variety of options, especially in a party that values multiple aspects of diversity. Democrats would have plenty of options to use this part of the ticket to focus like a laser beam on the three upper Mid-West states that will most likely decide this election. While I criticized the idea of choosing the entire ticket at an open DNC, it might be interesting to allow an open process for the new vice-presidential nominee.  The stakes are much lower (given that Harris is a healthy 59-year-old), this process would give the ticket a boost of democratic legitimacy, and this contest would draw more attention to the DNC. 

For all these reasons, if Democratic party leaders decide that Biden cannot be the standard-bearer, the best choice is Kamala Harris.