Kamala Harris Is Now the Safer Choice for Democrats 

E ver since Joe Biden’s honeymoon ended in 2021 and the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and rising prices pummeled his approval ratings, it became abundantly clear that Democrats had not only a Biden problem, but also a Kamala Harris problem.

Harris has been so consistently unpopular that, however bad things have gotten for Biden, her existence has meant there was no real pressure for him to step aside. Given the identity politics involved in sidelining Harris, the idea that the Democrats would ever be able to ditch Biden and somehow swap in California governor Gavin Newsom or somebody else was pure fantasy. Thus, for the past several years, Democrats have had to ask themselves: Would we rather stick with Biden, or take our chances with Harris?

For much of Biden’s presidency, most political observers and professional Democrats answered that, for all his foibles, he was the safer choice. But after the stunning revelations in special counsel Robert Hur’s report about Biden’s memory lapses and his train wreck of a press conference meant to assuage fears about his mental capacity, I’m not so sure. In fact, I increasingly believe the opposite is now true. That is, Democrats would be better off facing Donald Trump with Harris as their presidential nominee than taking their chances with a rapidly declining Biden.

To be sure, the easiest path for Democrats would have been if Biden had said, a year ago, that he was declining to seek a second term. That would have set up an open primary. If Harris won, she would have come out stronger for it. If another candidate supplanted her, the optics of voters giving her the boot would have been more palatable than the various Hollywood scenarios involving the powerful denizens of mythical smoke-filled rooms taking her down.

But Biden’s insistence that he is capable of being president until he is 86 years old — and as he asserted last night, the most capable person to do the job — has put Democrats in a pickle. At this point, the primaries are under way, and Biden is already racking up delegates (he has won all 91 delegates that have been allocated so far). In theory, Biden could be taken out at the convention. Democratic delegates are “pledged” to support the winning candidate, but are not legally required to. Still, even if somehow an alternate candidate could convince thousands of delegates to violate their pledges to “in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them,” waiting until August 22 to ditch Biden would put any replacement at a severe disadvantage.

So the quickest way to replace Biden would be an extremely messy one: a majority of cabinet officers declare, consistent with the 25th Amendment, that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” making Harris the president, and clearing the path for her to emerge as the Democratic nominee. Putting aside how plausible this scenario is — I view it as a longshot — what I’d like to do is game things out politically.

If Democrats took this dramatic action, they would still have almost nine months to go before Election Day. While it would be a bit chaotic at first, it would remove the biggest obstacle to their retaining the White House: Biden’s age. Democrats would be able to argue that they took a tremendously difficult step that nobody wanted to take — ousting a sitting president of their own party — to do the responsible thing for the country. This would be in stark contrast to Republicans, who are standing by their own nominee even though, in his first term, he inspired a mob assault on the Capitol because his ego was too fragile for him to admit that he lost reelection.

For a long time, there was a wide gap between Harris and Biden in public opinion. But that gap has narrowed. In the most recent NBC poll, Biden’s 54 percent unfavorable rating had supplanted that of Harris, at 53 percent. Granted, currently only 28 percent of those polled viewed Harris positively. But she also has nearly double the number of voters who are “neutral” about her (16 percent) than the number ambivalent about Biden or Trump. So that means that Harris has room to grow, and we have to consider how the media’s treatment of Harris would change were she to replace Biden and become the incumbent.

Harris would go from being a sideshow act defined by rambling and incoherent musings, to the first female president, and the only one standing in the way of a Trump second term. Media would be replete with profiles of the “new” and politically rehabilitated Harris. As Shakespeare put it, “My reformation, glittering o’er my fault/Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes/Than that which hath no foil to set it off.”

Instead of hiding from the age issue, as Biden would have to, Harris would be able to lean into it, by highlighting that if elected, Trump would be turning 80 during his next term. Democratic operatives would not have to spend the campaign debating whether it would be better for Biden to make fewer public appearances, in which case it will look like they’re hiding him, or more public appearance to dispel those rumors, in which case they risk train wrecks like last night’s press conference. Instead, Harris could vigorously campaign while Trump maintains his lazy schedule of holding occasional rallies mixed in with statements outside his court appearances.

Obviously, swapping in Harris — who ran a presidential campaign so inept that it didn’t last until Iowa — would carry risks. But the question is: With the prospect of a second Trump term looming, could it be any more risky than treating the special counsel’s account of Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” as totally wrong? Gambling that the behavior Hur detailed won’t surface during a nine-month campaign? Hoping that Biden is a unicorn 81-year-old whose mind gets sharper with time and stress?

Considering the dangers of betting on Biden’s mental acuity, Kamala Harris is now the safer choice for Democrats.