The naysayers have their points.
It would be unprecedented for Joe Biden to step aside this late in the game—and risky to do so, particularly given the political weaknesses of Kamala Harris, his most obvious potential successor. Isn’t the threat of Donald Trump—whose movement openly seeks to usher in a “second American Revolution,” which may or may not remain “bloodless”—too great to take such a gamble?
But to highlight the scale of that antidemocratic threat, as Biden allies have done in recent days, also underscores the inadequacy of our current bulwark against it: a senescent 81-year-old who boasts of being the only Democrat to have ever defeated Donald Trump, but now may be the only one who would actually lose to him, as evidenced by the fact that Trump and his allies appear to want Biden on the ballot in November.
“We have to rip the band aid off,” as former Ohio Representative Tim Ryan put it Tuesday, as buzz around a Harris candidacy began to grow. “Too much is at stake.” Harris has “significantly grown into her job, she will destroy Trump in debate, highlight choice issue, energize our base, bring back young voters and give us generational change,” Ryan continued. “It’s time!”
He’s right.
Harris has struggled to find her footing as vice president—partly because of racism and sexism, partly because of her own political flaws. And while those factors aren’t going anywhere, they are outweighed by the need for the kind of campaign reset only a younger, more dynamic candidate can provide. And it seemed clear—in an interview with CNN after last week’s disastrous debate—that Harris can far more effectively articulate the administration’s successes and the existential threat of Trumpism right now than the current party standard bearer she’s running with.
“The job is to rouse the country out of an alternative universe in which the Trump presidency was actually not that bad,” as Lydia Polgreen argued in the New York Times last week. “I think she can make that case better than almost anyone else in the Democratic Party.”
Biden was already languishing in the polls when he took the debate stage against Trump last week. But his excruciating performance has made matters worse: He not only appears to be losing in the swing states he needs to hold the presidency—he may be falling behind in states like New Hampshire, Virginia, and New Mexico that had been seen as safe, raising the prospect of an electoral rout in November. “Everyone is freaking the fuck out,” as a White House official told Axios.
Not all surveys are quite as dire: a CBS News poll released Wednesday found Trump growing his national lead to about three points in battlegrounds and two points nationally, which is unsettling, but possible to overcome. Can he overcome it, though? Biden has given little cause for optimism: He has had uneven outreach to worried Democrats, his closest staff has further insulated him from “bedwetting” skeptics, and he so far hasn’t ventured out of his choreographed confines to address the public. “It’s easy to settle this right now,” CNN’s Jake Tapper, who moderated last week’s debate, said Tuesday, suggesting a live press conference could help the campaign put the escalating fears to rest. “It’s not a crazy thing to expect the president to do.”
That he hasn’t yet, and perhaps won’t, speaks volumes about the limits of his candidacy: A CNN poll found that a full 75 percent of voters believe Democrats would stand a better chance of beating Trump with someone other than Biden at the top of the ticket. And while Harris and others on Democrats’ deep roster of potential successors also seem to trail Trump right now, they are polling at least even with Biden—and in some surveys better than him—without the attention, resources, and support that a campaign centered around them would afford. With the party unified around them, their prospects could improve—especially as it would allow them to refocus the race on Trump’s corruption, authoritarianism, and his own advancing years and declining coherence.
It’s unclear if Harris is the strongest candidate on the Democrats’ bench, but she is likely the best option to avoid what the New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang recently described—in a piece arguing against replacing Biden—as the “chaos of the unknown.” She could inherit not only the campaign’s current war chest—something apparently unavailable to other alternatives like Gretchen Whitmer or Wes Moore—but also a sense of continuity. She could enjoy some of the trappings of incumbency, without being saddled with the unique vulnerabilities of this particular incumbent. “The more people understand the physics of the nomination fight, the stronger her candidacy becomes,” as Jamal Simmons, her former communications director, told Politico, which, on Wednesday, noted the “vibe shift” around Harris. The Drudge Report went even further: “It‘s Her Party Now,” was splashed atop the home page.
