Kamala Harris the frontrunner as Biden bows out

22 Jul 2024

The Spinoff

The vice-president says she is ready to take on the mantle, but her road to the nomination won’t be easy.

Kamala Harris - Figure 1 — Photo The Spinoff

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What happens now

Today’s announcement by president Joe Biden that he is withdrawing from the presidential race caps one of the most dramatic 10-day periods in US political history. It was only just over a week ago, on July 13, that former president Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt. Since then the Republican Party has held its national convention to officially nominate Trump as the party’s candidate, while the Democrats continued to grapple with the question of Biden’s future. Now that question has been answered, and attention moves to what happens next. Biden has endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, who issued a brief statement saying she intends to “earn and win” the nomination. In the hours since, more endorsements for Harris have rolled in from leading Democratic political figures, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, while Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan governor widely seen as a potential contender, has said she will not seek the nomination.

For the party, a Harris coronation is by far the easiest route. As Semafor notes, she’s already vetted for the highest office, and has assuaged lingering worries about her political skills with a series of public appearances in recent weeks. “Financially, she would simplify the issue of transferring Biden’s campaign resources, since she’s already part of the same ticket.” Her ascendancy is far from certain, however. Party delegates will vote on their nominee at the Democratic convention in Chicago from August 19-22. If Harris is unable to shore up enough support in the intervening weeks, that event will be a contested, or “brokered”, convention, with candidates battling it out on the convention floor and in the (now metaphorical) “smoke-filled rooms” of political lore. The timeframe doesn’t give a potential Harris challenger much time to launch a campaign, however. “Things are moving extremely fast, and Harris’ big advantage may simply be the lack of time for lesser-known figures to quickly consolidate support from voters, donors, activists, and especially delegates ahead of a convention,” writes Semafor.

The homepage of the Washington Post today (Screengrab) The case for Harris

With the clock ticking, Harris’s ability to rapidly gather resources and kickstart the Democratic campaign is perhaps her greatest selling point. As the consensus candidate, she would be able to immediately hit the campaign trail, taking the fight to Donald Trump in a way that Biden was singularly ill-equipped to do. She is relatively young at 59, further amplifying the contrast with Trump, who is now the oldest presidential nominee in US history. Harris is particularly strong on two issues seen as key to a Democratic win in November: reproductive rights and Trump’s criminality. Since the overturning in 2022 of Roe v Wade, the law guaranteeing Americans the right to an abortion, Harris has been the White House’s go-to surrogate on abortion rights, giving regular speeches on the issue and making official visits to states where reproductive rights are under threat. Harris’s background as a prosecutor would be a major advantage in a contest against this particular rival. “‘Prosecuting the case against Donald Trump’ is now a go-to part of her stump speeches,” writes Vox, “both in talking about his and his party’s record on abortion and in talking about Trump’s convictions and indictments.” Harris’s legal background would also help bolster the Democratic argument that a Trump re-election is a risk to the rule of law, as evidenced by the events at the Capitol of January 6, 2021.

Kamala Harris - Figure 2 — Photo The Spinoff

The homepage of the New York Times today (Screengrab) The case against

The problems with a Harris nomination are numerous – whether they are insurmountable remains an open question. The first is perhaps the most obvious: the public perception of her as both an unimpressive political talent and a little odd. She has been mocked for giving perplexingly esoteric answers to interview questions, including one about “falling out of a coconut tree” that became an internet meme. Harris has approval numbers nearly as low as Biden’s, and could be seen as “more of the same” by an electorate that is dissatisfied and hungry for change. Republicans will also seize on Harris’s role as the White House lead on deterring migration at the southern border – a challenge at which she has clearly failed, they say. Immigration is a key issue for Republicans, who tie border policy to a range of other problems from the fentanyl epidemic to violent crime. Expect to hear more attacks on the “border czar” in the coming weeks.

Then there is the issue of Harris’s race and gender. Both can be answered with historic facts – a black man was elected president in 2008 and 2012 and a woman won the popular vote in 2016 – but it remains the case that a woman of colour has never been a major party’s presidential nominee. Finally, there’s the will of the party itself. In an Instagram live video last week, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez issued a stark warning: “If you think that is going to be an easy transition, I’m here to tell you that a huge amount of the donor class and these elites who are pushing for the president not to be the nominee also do not want to see the VP be the nominee.”

The Trump response

Minutes after Biden dropped out of the race, the principal pro-Trump campaign funder, MAGA Inc, said it was immediately launching Harris-focused commercials in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona. One ad says Harris was “in on it” and had “covered up Joe Biden’s obvious mental decline”, reports Politico. On Thursday, Trump’s senior adviser told Politico that Trump’s team would still “love” if Harris became the nominee. Chris LaCivita called Harris a “gaslighter-in-chief” for defending Biden’s competence. “That’s a character issue,” he said. However, behind the scenes, the mood is a lot less sanguine. “It’s striking how much GOP (Republican) anger there is over today’s news. Donald Trump’s campaign is built to beat Joe Biden,” writes Politico’s Jonathan Lemire. “One GOP source tells me he doubts Trump will debate Vice President Kamala Harris – he’ll likely call her an illegitimate candidate.”