Republicans have a point

The Republicans are big mad about Kamala Harris becoming the de facto Democratic nominee for President of the United States. They have a point. Ignore for a moment the reality of the shifting political sands beneath their feet; in the span of a week they have gone from playing offense against an aging and unreliable campaigner to playing defense against a much younger, rousing campaigner with the energy of millions at her back.

They, correctly, point out that Harris was, essentially, selected for the Democrats by Joe Biden. Hers was a manufactured coronation, with the entire apparatus of the party machine arrayed for her to do with as she pleases. While she was already on the ballot as Biden’s running mate, none of the fourteen million people who bothered showing up for the Democratic primary (I did not) voted for her at the top of the ticket. All of that is true, and the Republicans are correct to point it out, presumably to anger the Democratic base.

Yet, that anger hasn’t materialized.

So why are Democrats delighted? How did this fractious party instantly unite behind Harris? How did the party of the people allow itself to be corralled by the elite within its ranks? Doesn’t this seem very… undemocratic?

Yes and no.

To be clear: I was one of the people supporting Biden’s withdrawal from the race. Within three minutes of the first presidential debate (I say “first” not knowing if there will be another), I declared Biden defeated and within ten minutes, I tweeted something like, “Getting psyched for President Gavin Newsome! (sic)” It was a joke and not a joke. Like millions of other Democrats, I immediately identified that the Joe Biden we were seeing – a Joe Biden that had been kept under tight wraps for most of his administration – was not the Joe Biden for whom I voted, nor was he somebody I believed could beat Donald Trump. After weeks of denying that he would be bowing to pressure to drop from the race, Biden caught covid. While isolated in Delaware, he withdrew.

It took me two seconds to find this image.

There is nothing undemocratic about a candidate withdrawing from a contest for whatever reason they see fit. When President Johnson removed himself from consideration in 1968, he did so not because he thought he could no longer serve, but because - like Biden - he believed he could no longer win. The eventual nominee, Senator Hubert Humphrey was not even a candidate during the primaries, which saw Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy emerge as the only two serious contenders to inherit Johnson’s nomination. After Kennedy was assassinated, both Humphrey and George McGovern threw their hats into the ring during the pell-mell Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Humphrey, despite not receiving any primary votes, won on the first nominating ballot.

Nominating contests are not like general elections. A candidate for the presidency must secure delegates, not votes. The difference is that the number of delegates is already fixed, the same way electoral votes are fixed. A candidate can always get more votes by driving turnout, but the electoral votes remain the same. This is also true for collecting delegates. Most – but not all - delegates are selected through the electoral process – primaries. When a candidate withdraws from the race, the delegates that person amassed become free to support another candidate. Biden had, of course, won every needed delegate. When he withdrew, those delegates became free to support whichever candidates stepped into the ring. As it happens, none but Kamala Harris did. (Except Marianne Williamson who, it turns out, could not manifest a single delegate.)

One could complain that the fix was in because Harris ran unopposed, and one wouldn’t be paranoid to assume that the Biden/Harris people did what they could to ensure exactly that outcome. On the other hand, it would also be fair to ask why nobody else ran? And the answer to that question seems as obvious as JD Vance’s eyeliner; because, like President Biden, those who could have challenged Harris set aside their personal ambition for the greater cause. Defeating Donald Trump.

A chaotic convention fight would have provided additional jet fuel to a Trump campaign already flying towards victory. Further, ceding the entire presidential contest to Trump for a month until the Democrats held their political convention would have been equally disastrous. The only way to staunch the bleeding was to rally around a single candidate, the most viable of whom was Kamala Harris.

She was already “next in line” should Biden become incapacitated. Harris also had a readymade campaign at her fingertips, a campaign of which she was already the co-star, a campaign whose funds any candidate would need to immediately access. A credible argument could be made that those fourteen million primary voters were devoting at least a portion of their vote to Harris. Further, as the nation still struggles to adjust to a post Roe v. Wade landscape, Harris was uniquely positioned to campaign on behalf of restoring that right for women. And, of course, her relative youth (only in presidential politics is 60 young) shifted the argument from Biden being too old to Trump being too old.

We’ve all seen the results. The woman a heartbeat away from the presidency has performed CPR on a moribund Democratic party. The presidential polls have flipped, with Harris tied, or beating, Trump. She’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars from a Democratic electorate desperate for new voices. She’s energized the party and received the kind of hero’s welcome at campaign stops that we haven’t witnessed since Barack Obama. Her sudden candidacy even introduced a new term to the language: hope scrolling, which is doom scrolling’s opposite. If the election were held today, she would win.

But the election will not be held today. We still have a hundred days to go, and as we’ve seen in the previous thirty days, that’s a looooong time. Harris will stumble. Some of the flailing attacks against her will eventually stick. She will fall under the kind of wilting scrutiny that has undone many who came before her. She may end up losing. But I find it impossible to reach any conclusion other than replacing Biden with Harris was the right move to make. Yes, the process was ungainly, but it was neither unjust nor unfair. Republicans may not like it, but only because the Democrats have flipped their weaknesses into strengths. Our candidate is now young, female, and joyous. Contrast that with the sweaty old man yelling about sharks.

Harris can run on policy and she can run on personality. We may never know her opinions on Hannibal Lecter, but that’s only because she’s out there talking about things that matter to Democratic voters: the booming Biden/Harris economy, women’s rights, the falling crime rates, the low unemployment rate, the manufacturing renaissance, the infrastructure bill, and just as importantly, she can run on human decency and compassion. She can run on the best of the American spirit instead of stoking the worst. The historic nature of her candidacy feels less important than the historic choice America now confronts. It is a choice less about two individuals than two visions of the nation we wish to embrace.

When Obama first ran, his campaign distilled his message down to a single word. It’s the same word Harris’s nascent campaign discovered lying just under the surface of an exhausted and dispirited electorate. Let Republican run on anger. We choose hope.