Member Newsletter
We’re now a day out from President Biden’s semi-expected but still shocking decision to depart the presidential race and the rapid ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris as presumptive nominee. We don’t know what the first polls will tell us. We should be prepared for them, at least at first, not to be dramatically different from Biden’s in the weeks leading up to the big and now genuinely historic debate. That’s not pessimism about Harris’ campaign. It’s a recognition that the best argument for the switch is not that she would instantly transform the campaign but be better able to make the case against Donald Trump over the next three months. But now the great majority of Democrats are treating her ascension with something approaching euphoria.
That’s both a measure of her as a candidate and an end to the protracted agony of the last three weeks. But already we’re hearing that this rush of support for Harris is yet another bad thing. Democrats have only just changed the last terrible thing pundits said they were doing only to be told that their solution is also a disaster in the making or at least a mistake. I don’t want to pick on anyone but this piece by Graeme Wood seems to capture this whole new storyline. In a way the argument is just a continuation of the Thunderdome craze of the last six months: a contested convention, blitz primaries, and the like. The new terrible mistake is rallying around Kamala Harris too quickly. Because this just compounds what Wood and seemingly many other pundits and columnists feel is the belief that “Democratic politics felt like a game rigged by insiders to favor a candidate of their choice, and to isolate that candidate from the risk associated with campaigning.”
The argument is essentially that Democrats are so afraid of losing that they’re not willing to allow real politics to happen. They fear their candidates are too fragile to be exposed to the thrust and jostle of politics in the wild. What’s necessary is a truly contested process over the next month and a decision that gets made at the convention itself.
A very serviceable counter argument, which a number of writers I respect most have been making, is that the modern American political convention is meant to be a four-day advertisement for the party ticket, not a public series of vote counts where the decision gets made. That and a fast-forward month of blitz campaigning sounds awesome to people who cover politics. But it’s not remotely what anyone charged with winning a presidency would ever want.
But there’s something deeper at work here and it’s been clear in a lot of the contested convention/Thunderdome discourse for months. While notionally valorizing the mechanisms and pageantry of politics it’s actually rooted in a deep anti-politics that only becomes clear after watching it for some time.
As President Biden’s decision to withdraw seemed increasingly likely, a number of Democratic leaders expressed concern that Harris’s campaign not seem like a coronation by the leaders of the party. That seems certainly why at first Pelosi, Jeffries, Schumer, Obama, and others limited themselves to encouraging words short of endorsements. They wanted it to be bottom up rather than top down. But over the first 24 hours lots of the actual delegates, numerous members of Congress and senators, local elected leaders and activists have rushed forward to endorse Harris. Meanwhile, ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising platform, has recorded more than $100 million in small donor donations to the Harris campaign in the first 24 hours after Biden’s withdrawal.
It’s always been the issue with this kind of late campaign candidate switch that there’s simply not a voting option available to do an actual democratic canvassing. But taken together all these actions suggest and really represent a groundswell of support for Harris’ candidacy. This isn’t to romanticize Harris herself. There are lots of things Democrats like about her. They have high hopes. Many really love her. But it’s also a desire to move on from an agonizing month of uncertainty and to meet the final three months of the campaign with a plan and a candidate and move forward.
The point is that it’s what Democrats really seem to want – even those who were bitterly opposed to seeing Biden pushed off the ticket and most who might have had questions about Harris as a candidate. What a political community actually seems to want, expressed through the mechanisms of the political process, somehow isn’t quite good enough for these commentators. They are demanding that they slow down, compel a few rising star governors to declare their candidacies and duke it out for a month. They’re in love with forms and visual contests and look on actual politics when it presents itself with something that looks a lot like contempt.
We even saw a decent amount of this during the primaries proper. We heard from many of these people that the first mistake Democrats made was shutting down the primary process and preventing the kind of contested campaign that would have energized the party and tested whether Biden was ready for a real campaign. Given how things worked out, there’s certainly some merit in the final part of that argument, though I think there’s a lot of evidence that much of the President’s physical decline is quite recent. But it’s born of the same kind of anti-politics.
The idea that Democrats prevented a competitive primary or stacked the deck is basically all hot air. No candidate for office ever encourages others to run again them. That’s obvious. Historically American presidents never face a serious challenge to renomination unless their parties are seriously divided or, relatedly, they face serious discontent within their parties. Neither of these were ever the case with Biden. While there was concern about the President’s age, Democrats overwhelmingly think Biden has been a strong and successful president, beyond most of their expectations. Quite simply, no one challenged Biden because they knew that Biden would win. And actual politicians don’t mount campaigns to entertain pundits or political scientists. They want to win. The idea that Biden would ever have encouraged a competitive primary to challenge himself is just perverse and silly. The only real argument is that Biden shouldn’t have run at all. And maybe that was right all along. But it’s never stated that way because presidents run for reelection. Always.
The point is that beneath this seeming appetite to let politics run its course in all its ferality is something quite different: It’s a kind of disdain for actual voters and how actual politics works – not always pretty, mixed with peoples overweening ambitions, their intense loves and fears, and all the rest. If Democrats want to get behind Kamala Harris, stop fighting with each other, stop watching the unmerited pain of an aging leader most of them respect and even love, and get on to running a campaign against a menacing adversary … well, that’s just fine. They don’t have anything to prove to folks who write for a living.