Election Redux

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Nov. 16, 2024

The post mortem—and for Democrats that always involves finger pointing and blame—started as the votes were still being counted. This year they were way better at finding reasons they lost than they were at finding ways to win.

Senator Bernie Sanders, who seems to get crankier by the day, says Democrats lost because they abandoned working men and women and replaced them with show business elites. Seems a bit of a stretch; candidates always want support from celebrities because they help generate campaign contributions, though not necessarily votes.

But the Democratic consensus seems to be there is one person to blame for all of this and that person is President Joe Biden. Biden, we are told, should have never run for a second term, letting the party openly choose someone else. Or he should have resigned to let Harris assume the presidency and run as an incumbent. Or, after a disastrous debate, he should have withdrawn immediately to create a clear field for anyone. Clearly, the argument goes, he should not have waited until he did, dropping out late and giving Kamala Harris only 103 days to tell her story.

Perhaps any or all of that is true. Perhaps. But let’s play devil’s advocate and offer an alternative theory: the problem was not Biden’s timing but that he dropped out at all. Yes, he was damaged, he looked and sounded compromised, but it’s hard to believe he would have done worse than the actual outcome.

Democrats were so anxious to dump Biden after his painfully bad debate that they gleefully circled their wagons around Vice President Kamala Harris without thinking it through. That thought process needed to be more than “let’s get rid of Joe.”

Harris, you might recall, ran in the 2020 presidential primaries. The highlight of her candidacy, ironically, was her pummeling of Joe Biden on a busing question during a candidates’ debate. Her popularity peaked at 15 percent soon thereafter before tumbling back into the low single digits. She suspended her campaign in December of 2019 citing fundraising issues. She never really established any kind of national presence.

Some might assume being vice president is an excellent national platform from which to develop that national presence, but it isn’t. Vice presidents typically are handed the worst assignments, (like working with Central American countries to try and determine why their citizens are pouring through Mexico toward our southern border), go to state funerals in foreign countries, and check in regularly on the president’s health.

It is not a great jumping off point to become president. Eight times vice presidents have assumed the presidency upon the death of the president and once due to a presidential resignation, but since 1837, only once has a sitting vice president been elected president—George H.W. Bush in 1988.

So, unlike Biden, Harris had no national identity, and her natural constituency was mostly isolated to California. Unlike Biden, through no fault of her own, she did not spend the last half century cobbling together coalitions of organized labor/blue collar workers, women, and minorities, the demographic groups that helped him win in 2020.

Whether she had the intent to capture those groups is sort of irrelevant because she had almost no time to do so. She campaigned hard, hit the swing states repeatedly, spoke eloquently but turned down way too many interview requests and other opportunities to define herself. It began to appear as if she was playing preventative defense, trying to maintain a slim lead in the polls that was a mirage. She was unwilling to create much distance between herself and unpopular Biden policies, some of which he slid past simply because he was likable Uncle Joe. Harris wasn’t disliked, but she wasn’t really known at all.

Yes, Biden had a disastrous debate, and he appears physically compromised and a bit foggy. (The current president-elect gets a pass on his irrational rambling not ever afforded any other politician in the country.) And it’s equally true Harris had a terrific debate, but it did not translate to votes because she did not fully address or defend the administration’s anti-inflation efforts or flesh out her own immigration policy.

Would Biden have defeated Trump? Probably not, but it’s difficult to see how he could have done worse. Do we think he’d have lost all seven swing states, lost the Senate, failed to regain the House, and garnered 10 million fewer votes than he did in 2020? (And even with a Biden loss, Kamala Harris might still have a political future, which has now evaporated.)

Those who were engaged in the Machiavellian efforts to force Biden out of the race, including the celebrity op-ed writers, are oddly quiet these days. They practically dislocated their shoulders patting themselves on the back while they celebrated their coup.

So how’d that work out?