This is a really interesting piece from Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine. A taste:
After absorbing the initial waves of shock from Thursday night’s debate debacle, allies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have begun whispering to the media their reasons why the Democratic ticket must consist of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It is that, if Biden steps aside, the party’s only option would be to anoint Harris. If they fail to do so, Black voters would be outraged and register their dismay at the polls (or by refusing to go to the polls), thus ensuring Donald Trump’s election.
The Biden logic then proceeds to its next step: Harris would be a worse nominee than Biden, thus nullifying any reason for him to relinquish his spot on the ticket.
You can see the logic being traced out via the media. “Biden allies have played out the scenarios and see little chance of anyone besides Harris winning the nomination if he stepped aside,” explains Axios. “Is the Democratic Party going to deny the nomination to the first woman, the first Black American, and the first South Asian American to be elected V.P.?”
“Most Democrats who want to replace Biden also remain extremely dubious that his incumbent running mate, Kamala Harris, could beat Trump — but if she sought the nomination, then denying that prize to the first woman of color who has served as vice president could tear apart the party,” reports Ron Brownstein. “The fear that such a fight could practically ensure defeat in November is one reason Democrats who are uneasy about renominating Biden have held their tongue for so long.”
Of course, Harris’s allies understandably dispute the premise that her nomination would be disastrous. But they very much cooperate with the implied threat that denying her the nomination would rip open mortal wounds in the Democratic coalition. “The fact that people keep coming back to this is so offensive to so many of us. They still don’t get that the message you’re saying to people, to this Democratic Party, is, we prefer a white person,” a veteran Democrat and Harris ally tells Politico, which notes that Harris’s allies and aides are “not shy about pointing out the optics of substituting any other candidate (likely White, possibly male) for Harris — a move that they suggest would upset not only Black delegates at the convention but also Black voters with whom the Biden campaign is already on shaky ground.”
And so, by the logic offered by the Biden and Harris teams, the ticket is frozen in place. Biden can’t step down because he would have to hand the role to Harris, and the party doesn’t trust her in that position. Harris’s allies are aiming a gun at the party, Biden is pointing at Harris, pleading his own helplessness.
If this reasoning characterized the situation accurately, then the party is indeed doomed to shuffle forlornly toward November and the likely restoration of Trump and all the horrors he would bring. But I find the rationale not only suspiciously self-serving but also wrong on several key points.
First, while there was good reason to believe a year ago that Harris was clearly worse than Biden, there is much less reason to think that today. His catastrophic debate performance was an out-of-sample event. We will await more polling to measure the scale of the destruction, but Biden’s campaign had been pointing to the debate as the event that would redirect public attention from Biden’s faltering performance and onto Trump’s maniacal unfitness. Not only did Biden fail utterly, he achieved the opposite of his intention. It’s difficult to imagine anything Trump could do or say that would attract more attention than Biden spending an hour and a half sounding like a cast member in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Is Harris a mediocre politician? At this point, mediocrity at the head of the ticket would be a welcome improvement.
Now, while I think Harris is probably a better option than Biden, she is not the Democrats’ best option. If you undertake a change as radical as swapping out your presidential candidate because he’s losing to a sociopathic criminal, then you should really go ahead and pick a candidate whose political and governing skills have the confidence of the party elite. As Napoleon said, if you start to take Vienna, take Vienna.
Read the rest here.