WASHINGTON DC – In the hours since President Joe Biden bowed out of the race for the White House, Democrats hurried to rally around Vice President Kamala Harris, many of them hoping an uncontested effort to secure the party’s nomination might finally put an end to their misery.
For nearly a month, Democrats have frittered away vital weeks as Biden pushed back against efforts to oust him and dug in. Now finally, belatedly, the way may be clear for the party to try and get its act together.
Many grassroots supporters eagerly shared a posting on social media showing that in 2011, former President Donald Trump donated $5,000 to Harris’ campaign for the post of Attorney General in California. Two years later, he liked her so much that he gave her another grand. Should the two ever come face to face in a TV debate, Harris will finally have the opportunity to deliver a personal “thank you”, and perhaps query why he liked her then, but calls her “pathetic” now.
While the Democrats were prepared to pounce on Trump’s former admiration for Harris, the Republicans had a TV ad at the ready that is already airing in three critical battleground states. “Kamala was in on it”, the narrator intones, suggesting the Vice President bears culpability for lying to the American public about the true state of Biden’s health. “She covered up Joe’s obvious decline,” the ad continues before tying Harris firmly to “a border invasion, runaway inflation, the American Dream dead. Kamala owns this failed record,” it concludes.
For weeks, Republicans have fervently hoped that Biden would remain in the race, confident in polling that showed Trump beating him in six of the key battleground states that will ultimately decide the election’s outcome. Harris has her own massive vulnerabilities, and an approval rating of just 38.6 per cent, barely better than Biden’s 38.5 per cent. But in national polls, she outperforms Biden, and trails Trump by two points (Biden, at the time of his withdrawal from the race, was three points behind his rival).
It is swing state polling that is attracting Democrats’ attention, because Harris – assuming she becomes the party’s standard bearer – currently performs better than Biden in the most recent surveys conducted. In Pennsylvania, she’s just one point behind Trump where Biden trailed him by three. In Virginia, she’s five points ahead of Trump where Biden bested him by three.
Some analysts believe those numbers relate more to Biden’s collapse following his 27 June TV debate with Trump, rather than Harris’ strength. But they are allowing Democrats to imagine a reality in which – united behind the Vice President – they can rebuild and recover from the catastrophes of the last month.
Republicans, though, have fresh ammunition to lob at Harris, including the argument that Democrats are themselves subverting the outcome of an electoral process – the primaries earlier this year – that delivered Biden a clear victory.
Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, claimed on social media that “having invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who selected Joe Biden to be the nominee…the self-proclaimed ‘party of democracy’ has proven exactly the opposite”. It’s a message that Republicans will use in an effort to neutralise Harris’ claims that Trump is a danger to the future of American democracy.
Johnson also previewed the Republicans’ other new strategy: to tie Harris firmly to the immigration crisis on America’s southern border that Biden charged her with resolving as his immigration tsar. Harris, he wrote, “co-owns the disastrous policy failures of the Biden Administration”, calling her a “gleeful accomplice…in the destruction of American sovereignty, security and prosperity”.
But Democrats also have the potential to pivot, with Harris eager to elevate further the issue of abortion rights in the remaining weeks of the campaign. A passionate and ardent defender of freedom of choice, she was already relishing the prospect of going head to head with Senator JD Vance, the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, who favours a ban on abortion even in cases of rape or incest, except where the mother’s life is at risk.
Now, in any TV debate that occurs, Harris will be able to hold Trump to account for his shifting positions on abortion, and for his pride in the US Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe vs Wade, the opinion that kept the procedure legal for half a century.
Democrats will hope that Harris will particularly galvanise female voters in key swing state suburban areas and energise them to show up at the polls in November. She faces bigger challenges reinvigorating support among Arab-American voters furious over the Biden-Harris Administration’s handling of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. African-American voters also have a complex relationship with Harris, with some accusing her of fuelling the mass incarceration of black offenders when she served as California’s Attorney General.
For now, Harris must scramble to name a running mate, develop a strategy for uniting the party behind her, and consider how to separate herself from Biden in the minds of undecided voters, even while she remains a heartbeat away from him.