Why Harris Beats Trump

He’s too old. He’s incoherent. He rambles. And after his performance on stage last Thursday, it’s hard to see his path forward. No, it’s not late June and I’m not talking about Joe Biden — it’s mid-July and I’m talking about Donald Trump.

Just days ago, Trump had a commanding lead in 2024 presidential election polling. His opponent, President Joe Biden, was hemorrhaging support across swing states and in demographic groups necessary to his success in November. His party was abandoning him and he was, as Politico reported, facing the prospect of powerful California Rep. Nancy Pelosi turning the screws over the next week. 

Staring down the twin barrels of embarrassment and doom, Biden dropped out of the race Sunday afternoon and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris. With the sitting president’s backing and the support of a number of high-ranking Democrats already — including prospective challengers — consolidation by the time the Democratic National Convention  meets in Chicago in August is likely. 

Policy-wise, Harris is a mixed bag. She has expressed support for labor and backed the Biden administration’s plans for student and medical debt. Her staff has leaked stories to the Beltway press that she has been a voice of reason in the White House on Gaza policy and she made a more forceful call for at least a temporary end to fighting in March. On health care, Harris supported a Bernie Sanders Medicare for All bill (only to later back away from it after benefitting from the progressive exposure she received), but showed she can move with the party’s base. As a former prosecutor, her record on criminal system policy still raises questions, and on immigration, she has given lip service to fixing the causes of mass migration while backing the draconian Biden border bill from this year. 

She’s morally flexible. On the Democratic primary debate stage in 2019, she hammered then-rival Biden on his friendliness with segregationists by calling on her own experience with busing. When Stephen Colbert asked her about this deeply personal story — “That little girl was me” — that she featured on T- shirts during her short-lived 2020 campaign, Harris dismissed it as just politics.

This November, Harris’s greatest strength will be her opponent. Until Sunday, the 2024 election was shaping up to be an historic contest between two candidates the country despised. Trump wasn’t winning because people like him — he remains broadly unpopular — but because people found Biden’s clear cognitive decline to be off-putting and seemed to feel voting for him to be irresponsible. Following Harris’s coronation by Biden and party leaders, that advantage is gone. Trump can no longer use Biden’s mental decline as a distraction from his own unpopularity. 

Instead, mental acuity goes from a source of Democratic weakness to a source of strength. Republicans are already saying they’ll use Biden’s cognitive decline as a cudgel. They intend to attack Harris on her culpability in hiding the extent of the president’s deficiencies from the public. While this is a valid and reasonable line of attack, it’s unlikely to stick. Republicans know this, and they and their allies are already reverting to form, attacking the vice president on her ethnic background and calling her a “DEI president,” when they’re not trying to decide if she’s a Machievellian string puller or world historic dunce. 

On Sunday, Trump and his ally Stephen Miller said on Truth Social and Fox News, respectively, that changing candidates before the official nomination was unfair given that the GOP and Trump had already spent money on Biden attack ads. Trump called it fraud, while Miller, imitating some liberals on the X alternative Bluesky, said Biden’s resignation was the result of a nefarious plot by big donors to subvert the will of the people. Official social media accounts, meanwhile, are attacking Harris by showing compilations of her laughing and being goofy. The right will get an attack line put together sooner than later and lock in with messaging discipline. But for now they’re short-circuiting.

Meanwhile, Democratic small donors have raised $75 million and counting for the vice president’s campaign in less than 24 hours. There has been a consolidation around Harris by party leaders and possible rivals in an open contest. For the left, there are policy reasons to be skeptical about or outright hostile to Harris. She needs to get Gaza right so as to not depress the activist base that drives get-out-the-vote efforts and door knocking. Her message needs to be palatable to the wide swath of party faithful, from educated left liberals to older and more conservative voters. But as far as the general vibe, the Democrats are more united and excited than at any time since 2008. The party knows she can win.