I Was Wrong About Biden Dropping Out

But I’m happy that the party is uniting behind Harris.

I’m on record saying repeatedly that Joe Biden was going to be the nominee. And he was! And then he wasn’t. So much for my prognosticating ability. Ezra Klein wins.

Such is punditing. But I’m not too upset about being wrong in this instance. My main worry with replacing Biden (right to the end) was the fear that without him Democrats would have a divisive nomination fight and lose the advantages of incumbency.

Democrats probably have lost the incumbency advantage, though Biden’s polls were so bad it doesn’t seem like it will matter that much. More importantly, the divisive nomination fight has not materialized, because Democrats are uniformly united around Vice-President Kamal Harris as the nominee.

In the last few weeks pundits made a lot of silly suggestions about how to replace Biden; some argued that Biden shouldn’t endorse Harris, or that there should be some sort of lightning primary. Those people were all fools, but sometimes Democrats listen to fools.

They have not listened this time, though. Biden did endorse Harris, and he’s been followed by basically everyone else. Endorsements includes as of yesterday evening the Clintons, a whole range of Senators, from lefty Elizabeth Warren to centrists like Tim Kaine and Amy Klobuchar, House leaders like Jim Clyburn, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Congressional Black Caucus, and leaders of the Congressional Hispanic, Progressive, and New Democrat Caucuses. Major Democratic issue groups like Emily’s List have also endorsed, as have unions, cabinet members, and a bunch of governors.

Many of Harris’ plausible rivals, like California Governor Gavin Newsom and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, have rushed out endorsements. The only party figure who has made noises about challenging her is Joe Manchin, who isn’t even a Democrat right now (he switched to independent earlier in the year) and who has zero party support even among the right wing of the party. Ex-Republicans in the Lincoln Project were dumping on his candidacy along with everyone else.

The party base also has weighed in decisively; Harris raised $46.7 million through Act Blue in small dollar donations by 9 PM, roughly eight hours after Biden made his announcement. That’s the biggest fundraising day of the 2024 cycle by a lot. And again, that doesn’t count large donors, who also have said they are excited by the Harris candidacy.

None of this guarantees Harris a victory of course. Her polls have been slightly better than Biden’s, but still show her running behind Trump for the most part.  538 has her approval at only 38.6% approve/50.4% disapprove, or 11.8 points underwater. That’s better than Biden’s -17.7 point approval, but it’s not great. It’s possible that the enthusiasm and publicity surrounding Harris’ candidacy will give her a decisive boost over Trump in polls—but it’s also possible it won’t. And of course there’s no way to know for sure whether she’ll do better than Biden would have done; history only happens once, and you don’t get to rerun elections.

So, there’s no guarantees. Democrats still have a long fight till November. But what Biden has given us by dropping out is something we haven’t had at least since his terrible debate performance, which is unity. For the last month or so Democrats have mostly been fighting each other over who should be the nominee. That’s been exhausting and horrible and obviously not conducive to defeating Trump. The worry (and frankly my worry) was that that dysfunction and divisiveness would drag on into a divided convention, and maybe even beyond that.

But that isn’t what seems to be happening. Instead, we have a party that is virtually unanimous in its enthusiasm—partially for Harris, but also just for having this last miserable episode behind us. We have a solid candidate, we have a party whose factions—left, right, center; pundits, electeds, donors, voters—are all almost uniformly happy with and hopeful about the nominee. I think we maybe could have had this if Biden had been the decisive candidate at the convention too, but whether or not that’s the case, the fact is we have it now. Harris it is. Let’s fucking go.