The Problem With Coronating Kamala Harris
The No. 2 spot has never been a guarantee of a promotion.
President Joe Biden is insisting that his reelection campaign will go on. If it doesn’t, Kamala Harris is the most likely alternate Democratic nominee. That the vice president should be next in line is nearly an article of faith for many in the party. Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell last week that “this party should not in any way do anything to work around Ms. Harris. We should do everything we can to bolster her whether she’s in second place or at the top of the ticket.” He’s not the only one; even former President Donald Trump’s campaign has begun attacking the vice president in anticipation of her ascendancy.
But an automatic coronation of Harris would be a grave mistake. The No. 2 spot has never been a guarantee of a promotion to the top job. Only six vice presidents have been elevated to the presidency via an election; 12 have run and lost. Five have even failed to get their party’s endorsement. Yet some are arguing that Harris’s nomination should be a fait accompli if Biden steps aside.
I worked for Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign. Getting hired as her South Carolina communications director at age 23 was a dream—it was just my second job out of college. When Harris announced her candidacy in Oakland, California, I had just joined the campaign, and felt the pull of history as 20,000 people clamored to see her in person. Here was a young, fresh face—and, like me, she was Black. Finally, here was someone who represented the future, represented me. It was exhilarating, until it wasn’t.
Primary campaigns are tests, and Harris, who ultimately dropped out before the Iowa caucus, failed hers. That doesn’t mean she can never be president. Many unsuccessful presidential candidates have performed better in a subsequent campaign. But they had to beat out other candidates. The country witnessed the value of seeing a candidate perform in an unscripted format during the Trump-Biden debate, during which the incumbent’s rambling statements and confused demeanor startled many people in his own party. The first time the Democratic nominee is tested in a tough competition shouldn’t be when facing Donald Trump in the general election.
One common argument for why the party should coronate Harris in Biden’s absence is that skipping over her would be racist—or be perceived as such by Black Democratic voters. Yet Black voters have shown time and again that their interests are practical and that their demands are strategic: Give us a candidate who will win. Many were initially cool to Barack Obama in 2008. Obama volunteers in South Carolina tried to convince Black voters of his national viability by touting his strong showings in overwhelmingly white Iowa.
[Elaina Plott Calabro: The White House’s Kamala Harris blunder]
While campaigning for president in 2019, Harris was clear-eyed about the need to prove herself, and took Obama’s Iowa precedent very seriously. In South Carolina, where Black voters made up half of the Democratic-primary electorate, the Harris campaign wooed Black activists and officials by touting her aggressive campaign in Iowa, where she hoped to finish in the top three. Once the failure of her Iowa strategy became apparent—a mid-November poll showed just 3 percent of respondents selecting her as their top choice—she dropped out. Time and again in South Carolina, voters would tell me that they liked Harris but preferred Biden. They thought he would be the winner—and he was.
Given this history, I find the invocation of Black voters’ interests here extremely cynical. It looks more like a strategy by some Harris supporters to make potential challengers appear racist or indifferent to people of color than an actual argument about viability. During the 2008 Democratic-primary campaign, some of Hillary Clinton’s biggest supporters against Obama were prominent Black Democratic women, including Minyon Moore, who has been advising Harris. No one would call Moore racist for initially supporting Clinton.
A related argument is that questioning the electability of the first Black woman vice president is racist and sexist on its own terms. Certainly, I know well how easily Black women can be undermined through no fault of our own. The ubiquity of bigotry creates a type of mental prison: You navigate the world uncertain of when you are being brushed off for mundane reasons—a rude receptionist or store clerk is just having a bad day—and when someone you meet thinks Black women are stupid.
You never know for sure. But rejecting all criticism as a form of prejudice is a mistake. Democrats would not be bigoted to ask of Harris what they would demand of any other replacement for Biden. No politician deserves Democrats’ deference. Tough questions about Harris’s candidacy will come eventually, whether they are first answered during debates within the Democratic Party or when Harris has to face Trump.
But most important, Harris is not the one most at risk under a Trump presidency. If Democrats are sincerely worried about how a second Trump administration could negatively affect Black women, they should not allow any arguments other than electability to sway their choice of a presidential nominee.
Another worry that some Democrats express is that a competitive nominating process would result in irreparable havoc within the Democratic Party. A document circulating among some Democrats pushing the case for Harris argues that an open convention (or what the authors call “the chaos scenario”) would result in only two and a half months to “build a national operation” and “heal” the inevitable divisions within the party. Yet American presidential contests are bizarrely and unnecessarily long. Britain just concluded a momentous election campaign in six weeks. In France, President Emmanuel Macron called snap elections on June 9; a month later, the country has undergone two rounds of voting. In Mexico, which has a presidential system similar to our own, the candidates have a 90-day campaigning period.
Communicating to voters who you are and letting them make a decision does not have to take more than a year. A contested presidential primary season is always chaotic and brutal. Deep divisions always exist when someone loses. The Obama-versus-Clinton primary, the Clinton-versus-Sanders primary, and the Trump-versus-the-entire-Republican-field primary did not prevent partisans from rallying behind their candidate in November. In 2008, Clinton did not drop out until June. Fear of chaos is a staple among the educated elite. But a peaceful transfer of power is meant to happen after the disorder of debates, dueling op-eds, ad wars, backroom politicking, and actual voting, not before. In a bid to save democracy, you can’t just skip the democratic part of the process.
And when you’re behind—as the Democrats are, according to polls—you want to increase uncertainty, not decrease it. Statistically, this could end up widening your margin of defeat, but it actually boosts your odds of victory.
As I recently reported, Democrats are being harangued with other reasons, ostensibly dictated by federal campaign-finance and state ballot-access laws, that no one but Harris can replace Biden—or that Biden can’t be replaced at all. Insinuations that Biden’s $240 million war chest would go to waste, or that no other Democrat can go on the ticket, are clearly false. Money seems unlikely to be the deciding factor in the race.
[John Hendrickson: Biden isn’t listening]
To be frank, I don’t think Harris is the strongest choice to defeat Trump. She displays vulnerabilities in recent polling. She’s in the unfortunate position of either having helped conceal Biden’s current condition or having been too far from the action to observe it up close. But perhaps the biggest concern is that, according to multiple accounts, the Biden administration has not entrusted her with opportunities to lead. Of course, she could still come out as the nominee. She has many strengths, including a national profile, the ability to draw a strong contrast with Trump, and the likely support of many Democratic insiders. But if that’s enough, then let her compete.