After Joe

Kamala Harris is likely to be the nominee. Here’s what she needs to do to win.

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden (Public Domain)

Joe Biden has served the United States honorably for five decades, as a Senator, as Barack Obama’s Vice President, and finally in the highest office in the land.

His four years in the White House have been a mixed blessing. He has been surprisingly effective at getting major legislation through a divided Congress, and had some notable successes in foreign policy, including strong support for Ukraine in the early months of the war. He has also made some consequential mistakes, including economic policies that contributed to a bout of perilously high inflation, and a disastrously executed withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Even when Biden ran in 2020, he was the oldest major presidential candidate in American history; in fact, he beat out his Democratic rivals, including Kamala Harris, in good part because he was too old to echo the apparent consensus among the loudest voices on Twitter, which had veered sharply to the left. His mental acuity declined throughout his years in the White House, something which was painfully revealed for the world to see in June’s debate against Donald Trump.

For a few weeks, Biden was in danger of entering the history books as a King Lear, someone who had failed to manage his ride into the sunset, and made the whole country pay the price. But today’s decision to resign his candidacy guarantees that he will be remembered as a genuine statesman, someone who took a selfless call, even if it took him a few weeks too long to do so.

It is too early to predict what judgment historians will make of his presidency. But it seems clear that their judgment of his personal qualities—like ours—should be a positive one.

The best thing for Democrats to do now is to stage a genuinely open competition for who should oppose Trump in the presidential race. Voters deserve a say in who represents them, and Kamala Harris was not on primary ballots in either 2020 or 2024. And the competition, even if messy, is likely to strengthen Democrats: Either they find a candidate whom voters prefer to Harris; or Harris will go into November strengthened by a democratic show of support for her.

But that course of action may not be likely. The Democrats—and the wider pundit class—ignored Biden’s failing health for months and years. Once it became impossible to ignore, they (and he) wasted additional weeks on hemming and hawing about what to do. Now, August’s Democratic National Convention and November’s elections are perilously close. Biden, briefly after announcing his decision, gave his full backing to Harris to become the nominee.

If Democrats do coronate Harris, the upcoming election will be very close-run. Like her boss, Harris is and has long been deeply unpopular. And she is unpopular both because she has in the past taken some very unpopular decisions (such as endorsing a bail fund supportive of violent protestors) and because her flip-flopping on major issues has left her without strong supporters in either the progressive or the moderate camp within the Democratic Party.

These are serious liabilities but—especially when faced with an opponent who, for good and deep reason, himself remains deeply unpopular—they can be overcome. Harris needs to prosecute the case against Trump with force and clarity, qualities which she proved to be in her possession back when she was on the Senate Judiciary Committee. But she needs to do so without seeming like she is sitting in judgment of those Americans who are genuinely torn about who to support come November. Even though some left-leaning pundits like to disclaim the existence of swing voters, it is the millions of people who changed their mind between 2012 and 2016, or between 2016 and 2020, who will make the difference again this year.

One way to appeal to these voters is to move fully into the political center. Trump has many personal and political vulnerabilities. But he has also proven to be willing to triangulate, for example by excising any pro-life messaging from the platform of the Republican National Convention and claiming that he didn’t support Project 2025, a radical and controversial set of policies put forward by the Heritage Foundation. If Harris wants to beat Trump, she must prove similarly willing to sacrifice the least popular positions Democrats hold on issues like the southern border or the participation of trans women in top female sporting competitions.

The election was starting to look like a foregone conclusion, with Trump comfortably in the lead. The party who is on track to lose has an interest in rolling the dice. Democrats just did. That is a good sign: After weeks in which it looked paralyzed, the party which claims that the future of American democracy will turn on this election has shown that it actually wants to win.