Erika D Smith
To understand how much has and hasn’t changed within the Democratic Party, consider a campaign ad from Trumpworld, which mocks President Joe Biden as old, feeble and befuddled.
"Do you think the guy who was defeated by the stairs, got taken down by his bike, lost a fight with his jacket and regularly gets lost makes it four more years in the White House?” a narrator intones as Vice President Kamala Harris appears. "And you know who’s waiting behind him, right? Vote Joe Biden today, get Kamala Harris tomorrow.”
When the ad first aired during last week’s disastrous presidential debate — in which Biden appeared old, feeble and befuddled — it seemed almost smart, if also needlessly offensive and cruel. What better way to rattle Democrats and undecided voters than to question the health of an 81-year-old president and threaten that if he’s unable to continue, a vice president more often seen as a liability than an asset would take over?
That was then. Now many Democrats are suddenly clamoring for Harris to replace Biden. From top donors to rank-and-file voters, people seem to realize what they should have realized long ago: The party needs Harris, as a presidential nominee or as a hyper-visible vice president. As South Carolina Representative James Clyburn said, if the president steps aside — and that’s still a big if — Democrats "should do everything to bolster [Harris], whether she’s in second place or at the top of the ticket.”
But missing from all this speculative chatter are some important questions that need to be asked and answered.
As so crudely posed in that Trumpworld ad, what would it mean for Democrats to "get” Harris? As the nominee would she be able to inspire confidence as a candidate, when her own presidential campaign died before the first votes were cast in the Iowa caucuses? Would she be able to win over enough swing states to beat Donald Trump? And would voters be able to get over their dislike of her, a lot of it rooted in racism and sexism, enough to vote for her?
Don’t assume Harris’ rising poll numbers or the explosion of coconut tree emojis on social media are evidence that the vice president’s many critics have suddenly found new confidence in her. Rather, this is about fear and desperation.
Democrats will do anything to keep Trump out of the White House. And Biden’s debate debacle and subsequent drop in the polls have made such a scenario scarily possible. Just weeks out from the Democratic National Convention, it has become clear that Harris has the easiest path to replacing Biden as the party’s nominee. Not only has she been fully vetted, election lawyers also mostly agree that she’s the only candidate who would be able to access all the campaign’s funds. The governors who might be interested in running, including California’s Gavin Newsom, don’t have such advantages.
I’ve always wanted to believe in Harris. As someone who has followed the latter half of her rise through the ranks of California politics, she is charismatic, brilliant and funny. And as a former district attorney of San Francisco, she’s also a force of nature when she’s playing the role of an interrogator. She would have ripped Trump to shreds during last week’s debate, debunking his nonstop lies without breaking a sweat.
Yet Harris has long been known in her home state for being cautious — too cautious, even for a Black woman of South Asian descent trying to make her way in the patriarchal world of politics.
Her views are maddeningly poll-driven, leaving voters to often question what she genuinely believes. It’s why many Californians rolled their eyes when she told rapper Fat Joe that "nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed.” As the state’s attorney general, she refused to support a ballot measure to legalize the drug.
More than anything, though, Harris tends to get overly attached to her talking points. She stays on message, sometimes to a fault, and she can be caught flat-footed and seem unprepared when asked unexpected questions. This is what I suspect happened during her infamous 2021 interview with NBC’s Lester Holt about her work to address the root causes of illegal immigration.
"This whole thing about the border, we’ve been to the border,” she said. "We’ve been to the border.”
"You haven’t been to the border,” Holt interjected.
"And I haven’t been to Europe either,” Harris responded.
Still, I can’t help but see Harris, who has hit her stride as vice president lately, as the right person to lead the Democratic Party at a time when its coalition is fraying along generational, economic and racial lines. She is 59 years old, a woman and a person of color — and, critically, fresh polling shows she has more support than Biden does from younger voters of color in some swing states.
In Georgia, Harris could bring reluctant Black voters back into the fold. In Michigan, she could persuade the sizable bloc of Arab American voters to cast ballots in November because she has shown more empathy than Biden for the Palestinian civilians who’ve been killed in Gaza. In Nevada and Arizona, she could talk about the economy and inflation from the far more salient perspective of affordability. As a native Californian, she is surely familiar with how housing costs can overwhelm lives. And Harris has already been all over the country talking about reproductive rights.
Then again, it’s possible that none of this will happen. Harris told campaign staffers on Wednesday that Biden wouldn’t drop out: "In this moment I know all of us are ready to fight for him.” Biden said he was "in this race to the end.”
A lot will depend on how the president’s interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos goes on Friday. But assuming, just for a moment, that we can take Biden and Harris at their word, then the campaign must work harder than ever to elevate the vice president’s profile and help her ride this wave of good vibes from voters as long as possible. In short, they need to do what the Biden administration should have done from the beginning — and that’s treat Harris like the future of the party, not sideline her and set her up for failure with an impossible agenda. Now that Democrats have gotten a glimpse of Biden at his geriatric worst, voters will look to Harris for reassurance.
Biden made a selfish bet that he could force millions of Americans to vote for him despite concerns about his age because the alternative would be so much worse. And it has backfired. Harris isn’t the perfect candidate. Nor has she been the perfect vice president. But she’s certainly a better option than the lesser of two evils.
(Erika D Smith is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.)