With President Joe Biden officially out of the 2024 race Vice President Kamala Harris is on a glidepath, seemingly guaranteed to secure the Democratic nomination at next month’s convention.
But nominating Harris is no slam dunk victory for Democrats.
Rather, the party should be cautious about nominating a candidate who was essentially anointed, and who has popularity and electability problems of her own.
The biggest problem with Harris’s inevitable nomination is that voters had no say whatsoever. The same could be said of Biden; Democrats failed to hold a proper primary, instead putting a heavy thumb on the scale to secure Biden’s repeat nomination.
Bypassing the primary for Biden was bad enough, deeply undemocratic, and completely pernicious. Biden may well have won a primary as an incumbent, and at least Biden can fall back on his genuine 2020 primary win amongst a crowded field as a reflection of some kind of voter endorsement, however outdated.
But when Biden stepped aside, and effectively handed the baton to Harris, all semblance of democracy was discarded.
Who decided that Harris would be the presidential nominee? Not the voters. Instead, a succession of elite elected officials threw their support behind Harris, implicitly blocking any other candidate. The cascade of endorsements started with Biden and the Clintons and proceeded from there to include just about anyone of relevance in the Democratic Party.
The reasoning was logical enough – the Party was urgent to unite and confront the looming Trump threat ASAP, and Harris was most well positioned to inherit Biden’s war chest and campaign infrastructure. Yet as convenient as the Harris tap-in was for Party elites, the simple fact remains is that voters had no say in her nomination, and that is heinously undemocratic – a fact exacerbated by the Democrat’s 2024 mantra: that Trump must be defeated because he represents an existential threat to democracy.
Well, only one of the 2024 major candidates will be democratically nominated, and it won’t be Harris.
Harris will be anointed as the nominee for practical considerations. But practical considerations suggest Harris is not a great choice. Namely, Harris has an atrocious electoral history, and today, suffers from low popularity.
When Kamala Harris ran for Attorney General of California in 2010, she won. But there was a problem in Harris’s victory, something concerning; she won by a margin of less than one percent. As a Democrat. In California. Indeed, Harris almost lost to Republican candidate Steve Cooley in the rock-solid-blue Golden State. Of course, Harris did win, and went on to serve seven years as California’s Attorney General. But the close call suggested Harris wasn’t much of a campaigner and/or a politician – a suggestion that would be confirmed a decade later.
Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign opened to great fanfare, with an announcement on Good Morning America. The then-Senator was billed as a top candidate to challenge the then-incumbent Trump. But Harris ran an abysmal campaign, never threatening to poll above five percent. Rather than make a serious push for the White House, Harris’s campaign fizzled, leading to a formal (and early) withdrawal in December 2019.
Can Harris turn things around and run a better campaign for 2024? She’ll have high-end assistance and a consolidated Party. But something about Harris’s low-popularity as Vice President lends to a suspicion that her campaign troubles are no fluke; something about Harris’s political instincts just seems off – she’s certainly no Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.
And Democrats may well come to regret subverting democracy to anoint Harris as the Democratic nominee.
Harrison Kass is a defense and national security writer with over 1,000 total pieces on issues involving global affairs. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, Harrison joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. Harrison listens to Dokken.
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