By the time you’re reading this post, it will be old news, but President Biden announced he would not seek re-election in 2024. At the time of writing, the likely nominee is Vice President Kamala Harris.
While I was hoping for the chaos (and, quite frankly, the sheer political science interest) of a brokered convention, it seems even the Democrats realize that would probably not work well for them.
It’s an interesting situation: Kamala Harris has the opportunity to become President in spite of the fact that she was jaw-droppingly unpopular in the 2020 Democratic primaries. At the same, she’s assuming the mantle barely over 100 days out from the election. She’s going up against a yugely popular Trump campaign, coming on the heels of a triumphant Republican National Convention and President Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt.
That perhaps explains why no other likely Democrat has announced his or her candidacy. While there are notable Democratic figures who have not endorse Harris at the time of writing, there does not appear to be any eagerness to challenge her, either. Doing so would be a Pyrrhic victory: seizing the Democratic nomination from Harris only to go down in flames against Trump. Indeed, it would be seizing a Pyrrhic victory from a Pyrrhic victor, as Harris does not seem likely to win the election.
Now, that’s a bold claim. President Trump had slam dunk after slam dunk against Biden. Biden is barely functioning mentally and physically. He short-circuited at the debate. Trump is a folk hero around the world, with even skeptical Never Trumpers and moderates in awe of his courage (even Mark Zuckerberg is saying it’s hard not to feel patriotic when looking at the famous picture of Trump with his fist in the air—which suspiciously did not appear after multiple image searches on Bing). Biden’s record is abysmal on the border and the economy (the Biden administration loves touting this economy as the best ever, but everyone who has purchased groceries knows that is not the case).
But Harris is not Biden. She will energize the jaded Hillary Clinton voters who feel like they lost their “historic moment” to elect the first woman President. She checks off the diversity boxes; she’s ostensibly black, but also East Indian, so she has the “racial exoticism” appeal that President Obama possessed. She can pretend to be “down with the sistahs” while also making white female liberals feel good about themselves for voting for a “black” woman. “Look how tolerant and progressive I am: I vote for people based on their race and sex!”
Still, those voters weren’t going to vote for Trump anyway. Sure, you’ll have a few suburban soccer moms defect because they want to look cool, but those same soccer moms are the ones seeing the prices doubled and tripled at the grocery store. Harris is saddled with the Biden legacy, mostly for ill. She was also in charge of the border, so to speak, and failed spectacularly at that job, to the point that people were demanding she actually go to the border she was charged with securing, because she apparently refused to go.
Further, she is a progressive from California. The tenor of this election is akin to 1828: people are in the mood for a bold, reforming populist who represents the “forgotten man,” not another Establishment crony who will continue the government’s failed, overweening policies.
I invoke 1828 intentionally: Andrew Jackson won a landslide that year after losing the 1824 election in the House of Representatives to John Quincy Adams, the son of John Adams, the second President of the United States. JQA won in the House because Henry Clay, the living embodiment of the Washington Establishment of the time, hated Jackson (he thought he was dangerous and a threat to democracy, just like they say now about Trump). While Jackson lost legitimately (even though he trounced Adams in the Electoral College and popular votes, he lacked a majority of electoral votes, so the election was thrown to the House), he and his supporters could not kick the sensation that they’d been robbed. Given that his supporters would soon make up a majority of the American people, he coasted to a massive victory against the unpopular, uncharismatic JQA in 1828.
The parallels are striking. The nation at the time was increasingly divided over sectional issues, and there was a sense that a small group of moneyed elites were dominating national politics and the economy through a combination of the National Bank and protective tariffs. JQA’s schemes to build massive internal improvements projects, including national observatories (which he dubbed “lighthouses of the skies“) were met with mockery in Congress and throughout the nation. He was aloof and out-of-touch with the concerns of everyday Americans.
Jackson, on the other hand, was the physical embodiment of the hopes, dreams, and desires of the forgotten farmers and workers. He, too, had survived being shot—multiple times!—and was known for his steely courage in the face of death.
There are obviously important differences—Trump is calling for tariffs, for example, instead of railing against them—but the overall pattern is very similar. History does not repeat itself, nor is it destiny, but it does rhyme.
I do suspect Harris will make for a more formidable opponent than Biden, in large part because she is not an octogenarian. However, she exudes the same kind of insincerity and fakeness that Hillary Clinton did, and her penchant for word salad makes her almost as unintelligible as Biden at times. She will struggle to win over new voters, though she may make things a bit more interesting in swing States.
We shall see. I’m still confident in a Trump victory in 2024, but the sauce continues to thicken. Stay tuned.