Are there not enough real problems to fret over?
Democrats should have learned from the 2016 presidential race not to underestimate the commitment of the Republican tribe to its presidential frontrunner. Savvier GOP play-ahs may be nervous about having Donald Trump and his indictments running atop their 2024 ticket, but from what Mitt Romney revealed last week, many, many of them are too afraid of their violence-prone MAGA base to openly oppose him/them. An emergent “existential brand of cowardice,” as McKay Coppins put it, permeates the party leadership.
That is to say that Democrats should know better this time than to count on some deus ex machina to recast the race that seems already cast … for both parties. What was it Andy Dufresne said in Shawshank?
But Democrats being Democrats, they will. One thing Democrats are good at is self-doubt. Slate’s David Faris suggests (obliquely) that they get busy instead. He finger-wags at murmurings about a second-term VP for Biden:
“Maybe the president should dump the veep” is a Beltway parlor game as old as time. Or at least as old as the writers doing the speculating. There were calls for George H.W. Bush to replace Dan Quayle with Colin Powell in 1992, and gossip that George W. Bush would toss the gruff Dick Cheney overboard in 2004. Before the 2012 election, some thought that Barack Obama, reeling from his historic “sh ellacking” in the 2010 midterms, should eighty-six then–Vice President Biden and replace him with his 2008 rival, Hillary Clinton. In 2019, D.C. was rife with rumors that Mike Pence would be sacked as Trump’s running mate for former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
Not to give away the ending to Titanic here, but none of these incumbents cashiered their vice presidents. No elected incumbent in the binding primary era that began in 1972 has switched running mates before standing for reelection, and the last time it happened at all was in 1944, when Harry Truman replaced Henry Wallace on the ballot to be FDR’s vice president—and then that was only because he had made too many ideological enemies inside the Democratic Party to stay, a problem Harris does not have. And while Gerald Ford, whose journey to the presidency was highly unusual, picked Bob Dole in 1976, and not incumbent Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, that was because Rockefeller made it clear he had no interest in the job.
If Democrats could wave a magic wand and replace Harris with someone like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, as New York magazine’s Eric Levitz suggests, without the ensuing backlash and “Democrats in disarray” news cycles, would that be a good idea? Possibly. (Not so much for Washington Post columnist David Ignatius’ bananas idea to swap in Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who was for a time the least popular governor in America.) But there are no magic wands in politics—only unappealing options and constraints imposed by choices made in the past, what social scientists call “path dependence.” The moment Biden selected Harris as his partner in 2020, he all but ensured that she would be more or less irreplaceable.
Harris has some weaknesses, sure, writes Faris. She “has failed to stake out a clear policy space for herself inside the party,” and Biden putting her in charge of the southern border did her no favors. Her polling, like Biden’s, leaves much to be desired. Nonetheless, “Vice President Harris isn’t going anywhere.” Deal with it.
Faris suggests, “If Democrats are worried about her favorability ratings, they should remember that the best thing they could do for them is to somehow boost Biden’s.” Harris has something special going for her: Republicans fear a second Black president should Biden win in 2024 and leave the Oval Office … unexpectedly. Might that prospect further energize the MAGA base? Okay then, more than what?
Don’t you love how Republican candidates say, “A vote for Biden is really a vote for Kamala Harris”? WE SEE YOU. We know EXACTLY what you’re saying. #dogwhistle
— Suburban Guerrilla 💙 (@SusieMadrak) September 13, 2023
And for those taking the “he’s too old” bait, Joe’s not going anywhere either. Democrats need to get busy winning or get busy losing.