President Biden’s announcement that he will stand down from seeking a second term in office, and his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place atop the Democratic ticket, has provided a salutary shock to the American political system. For weeks now, a campaign unraveling over question about his fitness to run and then serve four more years has distracted the Democrats, and the country, from the gravest domestic threat we have faced since the Civil War: the possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, this time supported by a fully authoritarian Republican Party. In retrospect, the Democrats have gone through an unavoidable reckoning sparked by Biden’s parlous debate performance a scant three weeks ago. The president’s announcement is providing massive infusions of oxygen to a public discourse that had felt dangerously claustrophobic and self-defeating to anyone who cares about the survival of American democracy.
Concerns about Biden’s age have clearly turned some voters off from supporting him, though it can be difficult to say where such worries end and concerns about his record in office begin, as the electorate has been deeply reluctant to recognize Biden’s role in even objectively strong achievements (the smashing of inflation, the passing of the transformative Inflation Reduction Act, the withdrawal of U.S troops from Afghanistan). But there can’t be any question that had Biden remained in the race, the result would have been a campaign in which attempts to draw attention to the threat posed by Trump and the GOP would have been constantly undermined by concerns about Biden’s age. In a worst-case scenario, the Democrats could have faced a wipe-out from the presidency down through Congress.
Not only would there have been the possibility of significant numbers of a demoralized base staying home, but both Democrats and independents would have had legitimate concerns about the credibility of a party that left unchallenged a president clearly incapable of defeating Trump. The dissonance between the stated urgency of beating the former president and the simultaneous insistence on casting a vote for a man that strong majorities saw as too enfeebled to run would have been toxic for the party’s standing. Even worse for the country, Trump and the GOP would have had a decent chance of hiding the extent of their extremism from the American people; with a nation unprepared for the chaos to come, and the Democrats discredited in the eyes of millions of former supporters, the damage to the country could have been unfathomable.
That full-on nightmare scenario just became far less likely.
But for a Kamala Harris campaign to maximize its chances of victory, it needs to learn from some major errors that Biden and other Democrats have made over the last three and a half years. It’s not just Biden’s age that has dragged him down; it’s also the party-wide failure to hit consistently against Trump and against a GOP that has continued to radicalize even while Biden occupied the White House. In the name of not rocking the boat and restoring “normalcy” to American politics, the Democrats’ deep-seated aversion to conflict has become a huge drag on the party’s prospects. Rather than fearlessly broadcasting the truth about the GOP — that it has transformed into a white supremacist, Christian nationalist, authoritarian party engaged in de facto insurrection against American democracy — the party has too often bought into self-sabotaging rhetoric about “lowering the temperature” and the cult of bipartisanship.
In contrast, the Republican Party has been playing a far different game this whole time. The GOP has plotted a path to power based on the American public perceiving chaos, danger, and failure all around; based on Americans fearing for their lives and livelihoods beyond rational thought, beyond the evidence of statistics, facts, even lived reality. And so the Republican Party, and its allied media organs, have steadfastly promulgated the idea that the economy is in ruins, communistic elites run an oppressive government bureaucracy, trans youth are spreading like a zombie apocalypse, and violent immigrants constitute an invading army storming across the southern border. Alongside this, the party has engaged in a slow-motion insurrection against democratic governance, eviscerating voting rights for millions, echoing the incendiary rhetoric of the previous president about illegal voting and stolen elections, and preparing the way for Trump’s destructive return to the Oval Office. And paralleling the GOP’s legislative efforts and propagandizing, the Supreme Court’s majority has confirmed itself to be an equally partisan player, eliminating fundamental rights (the most prominent being the smashing of abortion rights) and, most destructively, allowing Donald Trump to evade justice for his crimes in office while laying the groundwork for a lawless second term.
The rhetoric, strategies, and ambitions around the 2024 Trump presidential campaign have validated the theory that the GOP’s politics over the last three and a half years have been insurrectionary in nature. Trump vows to exact retribution against his enemies and to be “a dictator on day one”; to engage in “mass deportation” that will likely cost lives, massively violate civil and human rights, and deliver a body blow to the U.S. economy in one squalid go; and to abandon the alliances that keep Americans safe in favor of an incomprehensible deference to Russia and China. Meanwhile, the blueprint provided by Project 2025 would entail a massive assault on Americans’ freedoms, with the goal of establishing retrograde hierarchies of race, gender, and religion, with profound changes not just to American government but to the nature of our society itself.
With Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ presidential candidate, the party will have a chance to reset its stance towards the authoritarian, racist, and misogynistic GOP. If Trump and the Republican Party are as far gone as their critics allege, the attacks on Harris that are to come will provide plentiful, high-profile evidence of these disqualifying beliefs that unite the party. And if Harris and the Democrats are to blunt the impact of such attacks, and even better, to turn them into liabilities for the GOP, they have a massive incentive to describe early and often what such criticisms tell us about the nature of the GOP, its presidential candidate, and its retrograde vision for America. As Josh Marshall bluntly puts it, “Trump is about to show the kind of gutter white nationalist and racist pol he is. Force the press and all observers to see this totally predictable move through that prism.” For Harris is truly a nightmarish vision in the eyes of the Trump-dominated Republican Party. A woman, a person of color, a child of immigrants, a spouse of a non-Christian: in the value system propounded by Trump, such a person cannot be considered American or even fully human, much less a legitimate presidential candidate. Already, Trump has shown his true colors in his vile response to Biden’s exit from the race; it seems guaranteed he will show an equal lack of restraint in his comments about Harris.
Contrary to what some in the Democratic Party’s leadership think, it is to the benefit of the country and to the party to fully expose the contrast in basic moral visions between the Democratic and Republican parties, even if this inevitably results in an escalation of rhetoric and conflict with the GOP. The Republicans’ ability to win the presidency, as well as other levers of power, is enhanced to the extent that the party can fool Americans into believing that the GOP is not as bad as it seems. But the cold hard facts about the party’s true attitude towards people of color and women, and in favor of white supremacy, cannot be set aside:
A party that believes African-Americans are the equals of white Americans would not work to deny African-Americans fair representation in statehouses and Congress in order to enhance the political power of white people.
A party that believes Latinos are the equals of white Americans would not engage in gerrymanders that deny them power in states like Texas, and would not support a president whose slanders against immigrants act as an incitement of abuse and violence to all Latinos in the United States, regardless of citizenship or immigration status.
A party that believes women are the equals of men would not deny those women control over their own bodies and reproductive choices, or show indifference when some of those women die due to draconian laws based not on science but on religious extremism.
Democrats need to anticipate, contextualize, and refute the obvious racist and misogynistic attacks to come against a Harris candidacy. To do this, they must be unafraid to describe in blunt, unambiguous terms the white supremacist and anti-woman tenets that lie at the core of the GOP. Alongside this, they must unflinchingly describe how such hatreds help drive the party’s anti-democratic stance, unwilling as Trump and his ilk are to assent to equal citizenship to huge swathes of the American populace. Simply playing defense here is not enough; Democrats need to make the case to the American people that the hatreds that bring such energy and meaning to GOP politicians like Trump render them unfit to hold power in an egalitarian, future-oriented America.
I noted above the ways that a Biden candidacy threatened catastrophic losses for the Democrats and for the country. A huge part of the danger was that the Democrats wouldn’t simply lose, but lose in the most damaging way possible — in a way that failed to illuminate the true stakes of this election, and that might alert and energize Americans regarding the profoundly divergent visions before them. With Kamala Harris as the party’s candidate, and with the type of campaign that the Republicans will almost inevitably run against her, Americans are much more likely to experience this contest as the true choice that it is, and to mobilize a majority that can win both this election and the longer-term fight to preserve and expand American democracy.