President Joe Biden flanked by Vice-President Kamala Harris.
Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
When President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he was suspending his reelection campaign and endorsing Vice-President Kamala Harris to succeed him, he gave Democrats new life. Within hours, the party was chasing its single-day online fundraising record. Seventy-eight-year-old Donald Trump has taken Biden’s place as the race’s senescent candidate, while the president is being hailed as a selfless patriot. Democrats are rallying around Harris as their presumptive standard-bearer at warp speed. But what should be a brightly lit path to electing the first Black woman president is fraught and uncertain — largely because of Biden’s hesitance to treat her seriously as a successor.
For all his accomplishments, Biden has spent the past four years engaged in a pattern of crude patronage with his Black supporters. Ever since Black South Carolinians resuscitated his presidential campaign in 2020, he has treated Black loyalty like a debt to be repaid by filling key positions with Black officials, starting with his running mate. Harris was his rival from the primary who, despite her ardent fan base, telegenic appeal, and obvious talents as a Senate-hearing interrogator, struggled to distinguish herself as a candidate. “Kamala the campaigner couldn’t live up to Kamala the idea,” lamented Politico after she dropped out in 2019.
But Biden’s criteria did not require Harris to be a proven campaigner, merely what she already was: a qualified Black woman. This was a limiting framework, emblematic of Biden’s famously clumsy approach to race and politics. Here was a man who, in 2008, described Barack Obama as the first “clean” Black presidential candidate and who recently called his own secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, “the Black man” after seeming to forget his name. The latter slip suggested that Biden was, especially in his advanced age, less attuned to the biographical particulars of his administration than to the political currency of tokenage.
All of which made things harder for Harris, who at first looked like the obvious beneficiary of Biden’s claim in 2020 that he was a “bridge” candidate between the party’s past and future. Long before Trump’s reemergence as an electoral force dissuaded Biden from passing the torch, his team was not fully committed to the idea of Harris, who is 59, as his successor. Rather than viewing her selection as an anointment, Biden’s advisers cautioned the New York Times last year to view her as a short-term hire with growth potential. “He chose Harris as a running mate for 2020 and a governing partner for his first term — not necessarily as a future president,” reported the Times’ Astead Herndon.
This bearishness translated into a noticeable lack of cultivation of Harris’s potential, which Harris herself did not always help. Her 2020 campaign was plagued by reports of infighting, disorganization, and poor treatment of staff, problems that apparently continued when she got to the White House. Mere months after she was sworn in, murmurs about staff “dissent” paired with high turnover fed the notion that she was too chaotic a boss to be effective. “It all starts at the top,” one disapproving Biden administration official told Politico in June 2021.
Harris withdrew from the limelight, in some cases recoiling from signature issues that might have shifted the narrative about her lack of poise. As a former prosecutor who titled her memoir Smart on Crime, she was nudged toward taking on criminal justice and policing but chose a doomed push to pass voting-rights legislation instead. There were times when Biden seemed to set Harris up to fail, like when he assigned her, apparently against her wishes, to coordinate funds to support Central Americans at home before they got desperate enough to migrate north. She promptly incensed progressives by warning migrants not to come to the U.S. at all while getting smeared by Republicans as the country’s “border czar.”
Faith in Harris plummeted. Biden’s approval ratings were already setting off alarm bells in 2023, but hers were worse. High-level Democrats stuck with the president’s imploding reelection bid not because they believed in him but because they feared an even bigger wipeout if Harris faced Trump in his place. An article in this magazine made the case for Biden removing Harris from the ticket and choosing a different, more electable running mate. Elizabeth Warren at first declined to discount the wisdom of this strategy and was compelled to call Harris twice to apologize, according to CNN.
What a difference a few weeks makes. It was an article of faith among Bidenites that Trump would be toast once voters were reminded who he was. After the debate, the spotlight on Biden’s defects, which already had him trailing in most election polls, had become even brighter. Republicans started gleefully predicting a landslide in November, donors fled Biden’s campaign en masse, and Democratic power brokers pushed him privately to step aside. Onetime cheerleaders, like actor George Clooney and the hosts of Pod Save America, made the case in public that he was nearing his expiration date.
Now Harris, who until recently was considered so politically toxic that Biden had to at least consider cutting her loose, might become his redeemer. As far as succession stories go, it’s not exactly inspiring. Democrats are left with a remarkably untested heir apparent whose claim could still be challenged in the coming weeks. Harris is still the underdog against Trump. If nothing else, the past few weeks have proved how hard it’s been for Biden to actually entrust his own vice-president with the responsibilities her elevation seemed to portend.
But desperation can be a force unto itself. It already pushed Trump to seek the presidency again, which offers his safest bet at immunity from criminal punishment. It has pushed Harris into the center stage she used to shy away from and Biden to become the bridge he once claimed to be. If Harris makes history by accepting the nomination at the Democratic National Convention next month, it will be under duress — less a realization of her party’s grand plan for multiracial democracy after Biden than a sign that it didn’t really have one.
