Analysis
Democrats chart a new course with Biden’s departure
With young people, Biden's departure should also have a positive effect, bringing new interest, and potential enthusiasm, into a race that will play out largely on the level of voter disaffection.
An event that had already become inevitable on one evening in June, almost a month ago, finally happened on Sunday morning, July 21. It had been 24 days since millions of Americans had watched, dumbstruck, the president’s disastrous debate performance, after questions had long swirled about the state of his cognitive abilities. Since that catastrophic debate with Donald Trump, the clock started to tick down for Joe Biden, with the growing realization that it would be impossible to erase from voters’ memories the image of an old man overwhelmed by a truculent opponent, eager to take back power once again after he had tried to hold onto it by force.
That image was the exact opposite of the strength and leadership that one absolutely must project in a modern political campaign. The first instinct of the president and his supporters was to rally around his presidential record – the same list of accomplishments he was inevitably keen to stress at the end, in his letter announcing his withdrawal from the race.
The administration of the man chosen in 2020 to pacify and return the nation to normalcy after the earthquakes of the Trump era – the pandemic and an attempted coup – has indeed achieved a lot, objectively even more than Obama, on welfare and employment, as well as the economy, with the exception of the sore point of inflation (although this has also dropped to 3 percent). However, it was always going to be completely futile to try to fight this new battle on past achievements, when it was centered around doubts about the future.
The worries were about whether he still had the ability to engage in the campaign, not to mention handle four more years as president. And, after the debate had turned anxiety into panic, there was never really any way to put the genie back in the bottle. Now, after the long-announced earthquake of him withdrawing from the race has arrived, the party is looking towards the deep aftershocks that might follow, particularly involving his “succession.”
Shortly after his initial announcement, Biden followed up by endorsing Kamala Harris as the new nominee. The endorsement makes sense for many reasons, the most important one being that the vice president is already an incumbent candidate as part of the Biden-Harris campaign, an enormous mechanism that has been built over more than a year, with all the legal trappings, staff, critical fundraising apparatus, as well as a political team that could proceed with a measure of continuity. Starting from scratch less than three months before the elections would be impractical from a pragmatic point of view, as well as very risky from a political one.
For example, there is no time to organize new primaries open to a field of candidates (the Chicago convention will be held in less than a month), which could also trigger destructive infighting on the threshold of the election. The most realistic scenario was for the party to unify behind Biden’s “appointment” of Harris as candidate and focus on the selection of the vice-presidential candidate for her ticket, an aspect expected to play an altogether crucial role in the attempt to rebuild a winning coalition that has become frayed due to the uncertainty around Biden.
The coalitions that led to Obama's and Biden's victories brought together women, young people, minorities and the progressive wing of the party, and this is the task ahead for the Democrats in the coming months. Women have been the key component in holding the line in the 2022 midterms, thanks largely to widespread anger over the Trumpian Supreme Court's repeal of abortion rights. The good news for the Dems is that Kamala Harris has been a leading advocate for abortion rights in the Biden administration, and is thus well-prepared and has a head start on an issue on which Republicans are quite vulnerable, especially after the addition of staunchly anti-abortion J.D. Vance to the ticket.
With young people, Biden's departure should also have a positive effect, bringing new interest, and potential enthusiasm, into a race that will play out largely on the level of voter disaffection and the motivation to overcome the apathy that had been apparent towards both of the elderly candidates before Biden withdrew – especially on the part of the younger generation. And a high rate of absenteeism among young people could prove fatal for the Democrats. (In this regard, the Gaza war is a major issue all by itself, and there is no indication that a President Harris would adopt a significantly different stance on the support for Israel, the main driver of the student protests).
One of the most sensitive issues concerns African-Americans, historically the most reliable Democratic voting group (and directly responsible for Biden's 2020 victory), and which has been among the groups most explicitly opposed to replacing Biden after the debate. Paradoxically, a number of Black female politicians – a decisive bloc for the party's contemporary grassroots activism – spoke out against the plans being discussed to replace the president with Kamala Harris. Last week, a letter calling for Biden to stay in the race garnered 1,400 signatures, including those of Carol Mosley Brown, the first Black senator, and Keisha Lance Bottoms, former mayor of Atlanta.
On Sunday, controversy still raged on social media from Biden die-hards denouncing his “betrayal” at the hands of the elites, the media and “powerful white men.” Such harsh words looked like they might threaten a split in a party crisscrossed by identity fault lines, and showed the extent of the cracks that will now have to be patched up quickly. There are also issues to sort out with the progressive wing, with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez having stepped forward to offer “unconditional” support for Biden continuing his candidacy, and who will now have to be brought back into the fold for the new path ahead.
Most likely, they need the contest to be largely settled before the Chicago convention, or, alternatively, for the convention to be formally open on the question of the vice-presidential nominee, in order to give a semblance of a voice to the base and delegates, while the convention would still be “managed” to minimize real internal conflicts. At this point, it will take iron discipline to steer a campaign in historic turmoil towards the goal.
An encouraging development as of Sunday night was the news that Kamala Harris had already gotten the support of an absolute majority of delegates, effectively securing the nomination. Renewed enthusiasm from Democratic supporters and donors translated into a fundraising haul of $231 million between Sunday and Monday, with over $80 million from small donors – according to her campaign, the biggest fundraising day in U.S. history.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/le-incognite-del-nuovo-corso-dem on 2024-07-23