The Impossibility Of Gaming Out Where Things Go From Here

This is a special edition of TPM’s Morning Memo focused on President Biden’s decision to end his re-election campaign. Sign up for the email version.

Turmoil v. Uncertainty

The only two things we know with any certainty at the moment are (1) we’ll have a different president come January than we do now; and (2) if the Democrats lose the White House the “what ifs” of recrimination and second-guessing over the 2024 presidential campaign will last the rest of our natural lives.

That’s not much by way of certainty.

President Biden’s unprecedented withdrawal from the race – not even LBJ’s 1968 demurral was this close to Election Day, and the election calendar and rules of the game back then were dramatically different in fundamental ways – truly does unleash a kind of political turmoil that we haven’t encountered before. But let’s distinguish between genuine turmoil and more benign uncertainty.

Genuine turmoil would be Democrats collapsing into internecine warfare over who Biden’s successor as the party’s nominee will be. So far, there are almost no signs of that happening. Rather than Biden’s withdrawal creating a vacuum which triggered more chaos, as seemed at least possible, it looks in retrospect like the last three weeks of a campaign frozen in place was what actually created a vacuum. Democrats were desperate to see that vacuum filled, and Biden’s withdrawal enabled Harris to sweep in and fill it.

As quickly as Democrats coalesced (and worked to to look like they were coalescing) around Harris Sunday afternoon and evening, it is already difficult to imagine a scenario where she ends up in a protracted battle for the nomination. In gaming out what things would look like if Biden did withdraw, one big question was how much appetite would Democrats have for fighting amongst themselves versus finally being able to return to taking on Trump. So far, it looks like Dems have an enormous appetite for re-engaging with Trump, the greatest menace to democracy since the founding.

For Trump and MAGA Republicans, there is genuine turmoil in having to retool their entire rhetorical arsenal for a different race against a different candidate. For all of the dark and sinister reasons that we know Harris makes for an easier GOP target than Biden, Trump world had spent the better part of seven years running against Joe Biden. They reached as far as Ukraine to try to take him down in preposterous ways that nearly brought them down. They leaned on and mirrored Russian propaganda. They launched an auto-coup to keep Biden from assuming power after he won in 2020 and nearly took themselves down a second time. When all that didn’t work, they ran instead against his son, his brother, and anyone else they could lasso into the made-up notion of a “Biden crime family.”

They couldn’t easily “other” Joe Biden. The same isn’t true of Harris. But it takes time to draft and hand out the new scripts and get the entire right-wing Wurlitzer cranking out the same noise ad nauseam. You saw in the flailing response yesterday from Trump on down to Fox News that they weren’t on the same page yet. They only have 15 weeks to cement new attack lines, memes, caricatures, shorthand, and conspiracy theories. That’s doable, but it’s not a lot of time to establish a drumbeat and repeat it long enough to make it accepted truth. The top-down nature of the right-wing political apparatus makes it reasonably well-positioned to turn on a dime, but repetition is key and there’s only so much time remaining to drill in a new collective viewpoint of Harris and the race. It doesn’t help that some of the go-to attack lines against Biden, like his age, boomerang with Harris as Trump’s opponent.

Most of the rest of what we’re contending with isn’t turmoil but uncertainty. What will new polling show about a Harris v. Trump matchup that is no longer hypothetical? What will the new Electoral College map look like with Harris swapped in for Biden? Can Harris access enough fundraising dollars to mount a national campaign on such short notice and make up for the near-collapse of fundraising since the presidential debate (so far so good)? Is Harris personally up to the challenge of taking over and running a national campaign on the fly?

Those aren’t just unknowns; they’re unknowable in the short term. That’s another reason Harris and the Democrats want to race to lock down her support now. It’s not just to cow would-be rivals, but to secure the nomination before the current uncertainty gives way to the emergence of any hard or uncomfortable facts that would call her electability into question. They have a few days before the polling numbers coalesce, the Electoral College map clarifies itself a bit, and the Trump world attacks reach fever pitch. By then, Harris wants to be not only the inevitable choice but the only choice for Democrats.

Look, if there were any kind of playbook in politics, it would have a big, bold-faced, all-caps disclaimer that it’s not designed to be used in a last-minute campaign by a new candidate after her predecessor aged out of the role, let alone deployed as a last-gasp chance to save democracy from a would-be authoritarian who will almost certainly wind up in jail unless he wins the election and can abuse the powers of the office to make his criminal culpability vanish. So gaming out where things go from here is frankly impossible.

Let me end on one ironclad certainty: The stakes of this election are off-the-charts high. Our real national turmoil isn’t Joe Biden’s age or Kamala Harris’ candidacy, it’s that democracy itself is on the ballot. That’s not the mark of a healthy civic life or of a vital and resilient political system. There is some poetry that in our national “break the glass in the case of emergency” moment, we turn to a Black woman to bail us out. And it would be true to form for us to blame her for our own collective failures.

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