IT IS BAD form to be dour, doubting or dissenting at a coronation. And Democrats are a well-behaved lot. On July 21st President Joe Biden abandoned his bid for re-election, less than a month before he was to be formally nominated at the party’s convention in Chicago. One day later, his anointed successor, Vice-President Kamala Harris, had secured the spot before any simulacrum of a contest could even begin. Mr Biden transferred his whole campaign infrastructure immediately; his campaign renamed itself “Harris for President” within hours. Her mooted opponents went prostrate: every sitting Democratic governor had endorsed her within a day.
The switch was not regarded with scepticism, but with relief. The party watched in agony as Mr Biden tried to salvage his candidacy after his debate disaster on June 27th. All the while, Republicans were completely united around Donald Trump, who had surged in the polls and appeared messianic after an assassination attempt nearly took his life. Relieved of the albatross of Mr Biden’s bid, Democrats have entered a state of collective euphoria. “It’s the future versus the past now,” says Jake Auchincloss, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts. “Seventy percent of Americans said we want the top of both tickets to change…Democrats just did it and Republicans didn’t.”
Gargantuan sums of money are pouring into Ms Harris’s campaign accounts: $81m arrived within 24 hours of Mr Biden’s announcement, the most lucrative day in the history of presidential fundraising. The vice-president was once an object of mockery on social media for her word-salads, undying devotion to Venn diagrams and quirky quotes. She was quickly transformed into an object of veneration.
It is a remarkable reversal of fortune for a vice-president who was not thought of as particularly accomplished while in that office, and who seemed to have squandered the goodwill built up during a short Senate career on a misbegotten campaign for the presidency in 2020 that actually ended in 2019. Ms Harris has many attributes that explain the newfound enthusiasm. At 59, she counts as young compared with gerontocrats like Donald Trump, who is 78. She can complete her sentences, often with vigour. She could appeal more than Mr Biden could to disaffected young voters or to African-Americans veering to the right.
But after the euphoria fades—perhaps in a week, perhaps after the Democratic convention concludes in one month’s time—Democrats might consider asking themselves exactly who has been placed at the top of their presidential ticket.
Ms Harris has adopted several avatars over her political career. As she was coming up the ranks in California she was once a tough-on-crime prosecutor and then a progressive prosecutor. She ran well to Mr Biden’s left in the last presidential campaign, sharply attacking him in one debate for opposing racial integration through busing, only to settle comfortably into the position of his running-mate.
Her portfolios as vice-president have included securing voting rights, tackling the root causes of illegal immigration (unsuccessfully) and defending the right to abortion, on which she has been an effective messenger. As the world’s most prominent understudy, her policy disagreements with Mr Biden are hard to decipher. When progressives were at their strongest in the Democratic Party, Ms Harris embraced their flashy ideas like Medicare for All, a single-payer health-care system; the Green New Deal, a utopian proposal for climate-infused statism; and decriminalising illegal border-crossing. But those positions may be uninformative about the current Ms Harris.
Ask Democrats or diplomats where they think she diverges from Mr Biden on economic and foreign policy, and most will simply shrug their shoulders. “We want to make sure that she runs as a Biden-Harris Democrat and doesn’t drift to the left,” says Matt Bennett of Third Way, a centrist think-tank. “She needs to ignore the voices of the advocacy groups telling her to soften on immigration and crime.”
The vision thing
In the coming weeks, Ms Harris will have the opportunity to sketch out her own vision for America. The first speech she gave as the presumptive nominee, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 23rd, had plenty of vim and vigour—more in 15 minutes than Mr Biden had mustered in the past 15 weeks—much of it directed at Mr Trump for being a fraud, a predator and a criminal. She was energetic in her defence of the right to abortion. But she ticked through other policy priorities swiftly: passing a ban on assault weapons, subsidising child care and health care, creating a paid family-leave programme.
Mr Biden himself had filled out only a sparse ledger of ideas for a second term, usually under the banner of “finishing the job”, leaving plenty of room for his successor. She will continue to evangelise about Mr Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which provides hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidise clean-energy projects, as well as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the student-debt forgiveness achieved through the president’s power of the pen (some $144bn). The underlying idea of “Bidenomics”—industrial policy, scepticism of free-trade deals, large social transfers and aggressive antitrust and environmental regulation—would be expected to stay intact in a Harris administration.
Whether there is a distinctive Harris doctrine of foreign policy is even more enigmatic. Her advocates tout her travels abroad while vice-president, including one meeting with Xi Jinping, China’s leader, and six with Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president. Her speech to the Munich Security Conference in February 2024 was textbook Bidenism: defending a rules-based international order, criticising American isolationists and staunchly embracing Ukraine “for as long as it takes”. Her schedule and call logs show conversation with many heads of state, especially those of Mexico, Japan and the Philippines. The only area where some see a difference between Mr Biden and Ms Harris is over Israel. “People think Harris might be moderately better than Biden, but we’re still waiting to see signals that she’s ready to turn the page on…our weapons’ backing for Netanyahu’s war,” says Waleed Shahid, a Democratic strategist who advises the Uncommitted campaign, which urged protest votes over Gaza against Mr Biden in primaries.
Republicans believe they have plenty of powerful lines of attack against Ms Harris. They have christened her the “border tsar” and are pinning the blame on her for high levels of illegal immigration since Mr Biden took office. On July 23rd Mr Trump hosted a call with reporters to level exactly this charge. “If she becomes president, Kamala Harris will make the invasion exponentially worse, just like she did with San Francisco,” Mr Trump said. “She’s far more radical than he is. She wants open borders.” Her rejoinder, that she was never border tsar but merely tasked with tackling the root causes of migration, may be too technical to be noticed.
Further down the ballot, Republicans feel they have more ammunition against the new candidate, not less. “If anything, she’s worse on these issues than Biden,” says Dave McCormick, the Republican nominee for a crucial Senate race in Pennsylvania, citing the border, the economy, crime and the environment. “We were looking at a bunch of clips of her on fossil fuels and she is 100% unequivocally opposed to fracking,” he adds. Her comments will be a liability in his state, a vital one on the road to the White House.
For Democrats, though, the most important question is less what does Ms Harris stand for—that can be filled out later—but whether or not she can defeat Mr Trump. Here, too, there is ample uncertainty (though it beats the near-certainty of Mr Biden’s impending loss). Mr Biden dropped out because of that near-certainty. As the president told Americans in an Oval Office address on July 24th, he felt his record and leadership merited a second term, “but nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition.”
Back in the race
Polls released since the switch look more favourable to Ms Harris than before. Our poll, conducted with YouGov from July 21st through 23rd, found her three points behind Mr Trump in the national popular vote—roughly where Mr Biden was, though better than her previous hypothetical matchup. Her net favourability is minus nine percentage points, up from minus 15 points the week before, which is roughly tied with Mr Trump’s margin of minus ten (and well ahead of Mr Biden’s at minus 19). Democrats have also closed the enthusiasm gap with Republicans, which had become dire (see chart).
Tony Fabrizio, Mr Trump’s pollster, has pre-emptively warned of a “Harris honeymoon” which may mean that polls show “Harris is gaining on or even leading” Mr Trump. He thinks this will fade. Ms Harris’s campaign disagrees. “About 7% of voters remain undecided in this race, and these voters are disproportionately Black, Latino, and under 30…and two times more likely to be Democrats than Republicans,” wrote Jen O’Malley Dillon, Ms Harris’s campaign chair, in a polling memo.
American voters do not decide based on past consistency, policy acumen and considered comparison of platforms—much as this newspaper might wish they did. Were they to do so, Ms Harris would be an improbable Democratic nominee to emerge from a properly contested convention (and the Trump-Vance ticket would be hopeless). Democrats have met this turn of fortune not with sorrow but with jubilation. That is not because they feel that Ms Harris is the greatest candidate possible. She is the only candidate possible. And with her, they at least have a chance. ■
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