Like everyone else, I had an opinion about the vice presidential choice, though I ultimately thought the most important thing was to have someone who is qualified to serve as president and meshes well with Harris on the campaign trail. Beyond those factors, here’s my case for Walz being a good choice, which I offered at New York:

Much of the Democratic veepstakes debate — which just ended with Kamala Harris picking Tim Walz as her running mate — involved the highly disputed premise that a running mate could have a tangible impact on the outcome of the race in the Electoral College. If you accepted that premise (and most political scientists more or less reject it), then Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania was a bit of a no-brainer, given the essential position of his state in the easiest path to victory for Harris. Arizona senator Mark Kelly also made sense as an electoral-vote magnet. Tim Walz? Not so much, since any scenario where his state of Minnesota was in play was one in which Democrats were already losing nationally.

There is a vague sense that Walz could help regionally, as he’s from an upper Midwest state that borders two battleground states (Michigan and Wisconsin). But Walz’s main asset may be that he does not have the overtly moderate ideological image that made Shapiro and Kelly the favorites of those concerned about Harris’s alleged vulnerability as “too liberal.” Progressives unhappy with Shapiro’s position on school vouchers and Gaza or Kelly’s weak labor record stampeded into Walz’s camp as speculation reached a frenzy during the last week.

So we are now hearing complaints that in choosing the Minnesotan Harris has thrown away a potential ticket-balancing option. The counter-argument, as my Shapiro-favoring colleague Jonathan Chait conceded, is that Walz is super-normie and a bit hard to square with the standard image of a “radical leftist:”

“A somewhat modified version of the left’s belief that moving left can increase political viability is that personal style can make up for a deficit in substance. Rather than move to the center on policy, they hope nominating candidates with a reassuring personal affect and personal biography can reassure moderate voters.

“Walz generates so much enthusiasm on the left in part because he represents the apotheosis of this strategy. He is jolly, fun, a rural veteran and former football coach with a personal comfort with white rural voters.

“There is probably something to this theory. If Harris had nominated a pink-haired professor from Brooklyn with a centrist voting record, that candidate probably would not provide a huge political heft.”

There is no doubt that Republicans will nonetheless try to depict Walz as a sort of heartland Trojan horse who conceals a grim anti-American devotion to Marxism beneath his jovial exterior (just as they would have smeared Shapiro or Kelly, truth be told). But before assuming that tactic will work, as Chait fears, let’s look a bit more closely at Walz’s “personal affect and personal biography” and their possible impact.

Walz is authentically a product of the rural and small-town Midwest. He was born in West Point, Nebraska, a small town in the northeast segment of that famously agricultural state, and raised in Valentine, Nebraska, an even smaller town in north-central Nebraska, then in Butte, Nebraska, a tiny village not far from there. Far from the Ivy League campuses at which Donald Trump and J.D. Vance received degrees, Walz got his undergraduate education at an open-admissions teachers college in northwest Nebraska (Chadron State College). After he launched a public-school teaching career and got married to another teacher, he earned a master’s degree from Mankato State College in his wife’s home state, where he was indeed a football coach and also adviser to his school’s gay-straight student alliance. He eventually ran for Congress in the largely rural and relatively conservative First Congressional District, winning reelection there five times. There’s just no whiff of elitism or radicalism in his background.

His military service, moreover, isn’t just a line on a résumé or a brief engagement prior to a real adult career. He spent 24 years in the Army National Guard, beginning right after high school, and ultimately obtained the highest rank available to an enlisted person. He was named Nebraska Citizen-Soldier of the Year in 1989. Walz was never deployed in a combat role, but neither was Marine public-affairs officer J.D. Vance or the draft-evading Donald Trump. In Congress and as governor, Walz has made veterans affairs an emphasis. No one, and certainly not the keyboard warriors of the online right, will be able to malign Walz’s patriotism or respect for the flag and the uniform.

Yes, as governor of Minnesota, Walz was able to compile a progressive record, particularly after his party won a trifecta in 2022. But as his remarkably successful quasi-candidacy for veep has illustrated, he hasn’t lost his folksy manner or cracker-barrel sense of humor. He isn’t just normie; he’s super-normie and will present a constant contrast to the distinctly radical intellectualism of Vance — which you might even call weird. Walz may or may not be able to help Harris gain votes in some tangible way, but he adds toil and trouble to every Republican effort to depict Democrats as a party in the grip of un-American forces (one example of a problem he presents is that both of his children were conceived via IVF treatments, which the anti-abortion lobby has frowned upon). And unlike the last Democratic veep chosen to offset fears about a female president, Tim Walz (so far) does not come across as boring.

Should both Harris and Walz do everything possible to rebut allegations of radicalism and strengthen their reputation as sensible centrists, as Chait recommends? Absolutely. But in Walz, Kamala Harris has given herself a running mate who won’t look out of character campaigning among rural or small-town Americans, or among military veterans, or among people who’ve worked real and relatable jobs instead of managing real-estate fortunes or hanging out with Silicon Valley’s tech bros. His appeal should extend well beyond the Midwest to voters all over the country who share elements of his life trajectory. And it’s a good start for the short sprint to Election Day for the Democrats’ new presidential ticket.

As one in a series of ruminations on the Biden-Harris switch, I offered some thoughts at New York on the very different message and strategy the new Democratic nominee might offer:

Even for Democrats who had faith in Joe Biden’s ability to defeat Donald Trump, the Biden strategy and message were unquestionably a bummer. Having apparently lost the ability to convince swing voters his administration was doing a good job on the key issues of inflation and immigration, Team Joe had to make the election about the terrifying prospect of a Trump presidency rather than any happy thoughts about a second Biden term.

To use the language of political strategy, Biden had to avoid a “referendum” election like the plague and try to make swing voters focus with great intensity on Trump’s lawless character and conduct, recognizing all the while that his own age made it impossible to paint an optimistic picture of America’s future under his guidance.

So even before his horrific performance in the June debate brought his candidacy to a crisis point, the best-case scenario for the Biden campaign was a long, hard slog designed to make voters even more fearful and discouraged, driving both his and Trump’s favorability ratings to the bottom of hell in hopes he would win a lesser-of-two-evils contest. It tells you a lot that for the first time in living memory, Democrats were hoping for a low-turnout election to save their bacon from a sour and mistrustful electorate.

Kamala Harris’s replacement of Biden as the Democratic nominee has changed all these dynamics, and accordingly her strategy and message are looking very different as well, as Axios reports:

“Instead of portraying Trump as a dictator-in-waiting, Harris has dismissed Trump as ‘weird’ and mocked him as scared to debate while also calling his agenda ‘extreme.’

“She also initially signaled the campaign was not all about Trump, telling a rollicking crowd in Wisconsin: ‘Let’s also make no mistake: This campaign is not just about us versus Donald Trump. This campaign is about who we fight for.’

“Harris, more than twenty years younger than Biden, has also tried to portray herself as the candidate of the future as she has embraced the tagline ‘we’re not going back.’

“In her Atlanta rally Tuesday evening, Harris also did not mention Biden by name. The main super PAC supporting Harris’ candidacy also began running a new ad Wednesday that concluded with ‘let the future begin.’”

Harris appears to be adopting a “two futures” message, comparing her agenda to Trump’s instead of mostly offering dark warnings about her opponent. It enables her to promote the most popular elements of the Democratic platform — most notably a restoration of reproductive rights along with practical steps to help the middle class address high living costs, along with some targeted bashing of corporations — without an extended defense of the Biden record. It’s a decidedly upbeat message that accompanies a big strategic shift: With young, Black, and Latino voters beginning to return to the Democratic column, Harris’s potential winning coalition is beginning to look at lot like Biden’s in 2020, which would benefit from higher, not lower, turnout and open up the possibility of wins in Sun Belt states Biden had all but written off this year.

This doesn’t, to be clear, mean Harris won’t “go negative” on Trump; she will, particularly if she manages to get into a debate with the 45th president. It simply means her Trump-bashing will be more forward-looking and probably less apocalyptic. Axios suggests that Team Harris believes Biden’s efforts to get voters to dwell on Trump’s responsibility for January 6 just didn’t work, so we will probably get less of that, at least up until the moment MAGA preparations for overturning another loss go into high gear.

But it’s not just the tone of her campaign that will represent a big change from Biden’s: It’s the timeframe as well. Biden was engaged in a four-year struggle with Trump. Harris needs to navigate fewer than 100 days. If, as many Republicans believe, the veep’s big vulnerability is an ideology too far left of center for comfort, there will be less time for Team Trump to dramatize (or fabricate) it. As RealClearPolitics’s Sean Trende argues, Harris is a candidate better suited for a sprint than a marathon:

“I don’t think Harris is probably viable over the course of a year-long campaign …

“She doesn’t have to run a year-long campaign, though … Consider: Harris will almost certainly pick her vice presidential candidate this week. She has a large number of attractive choices from which to select, which will earn her another week or two of positive press.

“That gets us to mid-August, when the Democratic National Convention begins. It will likely be a carefully scripted, well-managed event …

“Then, in mid-September, Trump will be sentenced following his conviction in the New York fraud/hush money case. Regardless of whether or not he receives jail time, it’s another distraction from any substantive discussion of the issues in 2024. The attention is diverted from Harris and falls on Trump in a relatively unflattering light … [T]he election actually shapes up as a referendum on Trump at this point.”

Harris can wage a campaign that’s brighter, sharper, and shorter than what could have been expected with Biden as the candidate. You can expect more of a traditional Democratic effort to mobilize the party base while giving swing voters an attractive and, above all, fresh alternative to the ever-alarming Trump. The voters who will decide this election won’t be asked to face their greatest fears head-on before choosing a flawed incumbent.

Lighten up, America! Maybe even laugh a bit with “Laffin’ Kamala” Harris.

With so much going on in the major-candidate presidential race, it’s easy to forget there is a one-formidable indie candidate still in the game, so at New York I took a look at how the very new contest created by Kamala Harris’s replacement of Joe Biden has affected RFK Jr.:

Most of the buzz surrounding Kamala Harris’s replacement of Joe Biden as the presumptive 2024 Democratic presidential nominee has come from the revived intraparty enthusiasm she has generated and her stronger performance in general-election polls against Donald Trump. But separately from and perhaps contributing to this Democratic comeback narrative has been a notable fall in the political standing of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In the RealClearPolitics averages of national presidential polls that include Kennedy and other non-major-party candidates, RFK Jr. dropped from 8.7 percent before Biden withdrew from the race to 5.8 percent now. Looking at longer trends, Kennedy was at 10.3 percent in the RCP averages as recently as July 6. So it’s been a pretty steep downward drop for the former Democrat. And in terms of his personal favorability, he’s been struggling for a while. FiveThirtyEight’s averages showed RFK Jr.’s favorability ratio going underwater on May 14, and is now at 33.7 percent favorable–41.5 percent unfavorable.

A number of factors are hurting Kennedy’s candidacy. Perhaps the most obvious is the abrupt decline in the supply of “double-haters” (voters who gave both major-party candidates unfavorable ratings) from which the indie candidate naturally fed. The Times-Siena pollsters showed double-haters declining from 20 percent before Biden dropped out to 8 percent afterward. That seems to be the consequence of improvements in favorability for both Trump and Harris, squeezing Kennedy from two directions. An additional problem for Kennedy is Harris’s gains over Biden among Black, Latin, and under-30 voters, all major reservoirs of support for RFK Jr.

What’s unclear is whether the apparent reset of the presidential contest is the principal source of Kennedy’s misery or if instead (or in part) we’re just at that point in the election cycle when non-major-party candidates tend to fade. Kennedy has some additional problems that don’t directly stem from Harris’s or Trump’s standing, most notably a money shortage, as The Hill reports:

“Federal Election Commission filings show Kennedy spent nearly $1 million more than he took in last month and that the campaign is also carrying debt of approximately $3 million …

“His biggest super PAC, American Values 2024, brought in a modest $228,000 in June, according to the FEC.”

It’s unclear how deep RFK Jr.’s most important funding source, his running mate Nicole Shanahan, is willing to dig into her personal wealth to keep the campaign going. But it is clear most of the dough is going to the very difficult and intermittently successful effort to get the ticket onto general-election ballots. According to the New York Times, the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket is on the ballot in just 13 states at the moment, including just one battleground state (Michigan), though that number is sure to rise.

As for Kennedy’s strategy moving forward, it’s not very clear. His conversations with Trump during the Republican National Convention fanned Democratic fears that the wiggy anti-vaxx pol might be joining the MAGA cause. If that’s not in the cards, RFK Jr. still has his previous strategy, which focused on making the stage in the second presidential debate in September that Biden and Trump agreed to back in June. But it’s unclear if the ABC debate for September 10 is still on. And Kennedy’s lagging poll numbers (he’ll need 15 percent of registered or likely voters in four high-quality national polls, a level he hasn’t reached in a good while) mean he likely won’t make the grade even if he meets the debate’s ballot-access requirements.

In retrospect, the end of the much-loathed Biden-Trump rematch probably spelled the end of the Kennedy campaign as an ongoing enterprise. But he and his supporters can still make a difference on the margins, where close elections are often decided.

It’s pretty obvious Kamala Harris’s candidacy changes the 2024 presidential race more than a little, and I wrote at New York about one avenue she has for victory that might have eluded Joe Biden:

During her brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, Kamala Harris was widely believed to be emulating Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign strategy. She treated South Carolina, the first primary state with a substantial Black electorate, as the site of her potential breakthrough. But she front-loaded resources into Iowa to prepare for that breakthrough by reassuring Black voters that she could win in the largely white jurisdiction. She had the added advantage of being from the large state of California, where the primary had just been moved up to Super Tuesday (March 3). For a thrilling moment, after her commanding performance in a June 2019 debate, Harris seemed on track to pull off this feat, threatening Joe Biden’s hold on South Carolina in the polls and surging in Iowa. But neither she nor Cory Booker, who also relied on the Obama precedent, could displace Biden as the favorite of Black voters or strike gold in the crowded Iowa field. Out of money and luck, Harris dropped out before voters voted.

Now Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for 2024 without having to navigate any primaries. But she still faces some key strategic decisions. Joe Biden was consistently trailing Donald Trump in the polls in no small part because he was underperforming among young and non-white voters, the very heart of the much-discussed Obama coalition. Can Harris recoup some of these potential losses without sacrificing support elsewhere in the electorate? That is a question she must address at the very beginning of her general-election campaign.

There’s a chance that Harris can inject a bit of the Obama “hope and change” magic into a Democratic ticket that had previously felt like a desperate effort to defend an unpopular administration led by a low-energy incumbent, as Ron Brownstein suggests in The Atlantic:

“Polls have shown that a significant share of Americans doubt the mental capacity of Trump, who has stumbled through his own procession of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and incomprehensible tangents during stump speeches and interviews to relatively little attention in the shadow of Biden’s difficulties. Particularly if Harris picks a younger running mate, she could top a ticket that embodies the generational change that many voters indicated they were yearning for when facing a Trump-Biden rematch …

“In the best-case scenario for this line of thinking, Harris could regain ground among the younger voters and Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted away from Biden since 2020. At the same time, she could further expand Democrats’ already solid margins among college-educated women who support abortion rights.”

Team Trump seems to believe it can offset these potential gains by depicting Harris as a “California radical” and a symbol of diversity who might alienate the older white voters with whom Biden had some residual strength. Obama overcame similar race-saturated appeals in 2008, but he had a lot of help from a financial collapse and an unpopular war presided over by the party of his opponent.

Following Obama’s path has major strategic implications in terms of the battleground map. Any significant improvement over Biden’s performance among Black, Latino, and under-30 voters might put Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina — very nearly conceded to Trump in recent weeks — back into play. But erosion of Biden’s support among older and/or non-college-educated white voters could create potholes in his narrow Rust Belt path to victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

These strategic choices could definitely affect Harris’s choice of a running-mate, not just in terms of potentially picking a veep from a battleground state, but as a way of amplifying the shift produced by Biden’s withdrawal. Brownstein even thinks Harris might consider following Bill Clinton’s 1992 example of doubling down on her own strengths:

“The other option that energizes many Democrats would be for Harris to take the bold, historic option of selecting another woman: Whitmer. That would be a greater gamble, but a possible model would be 1992, when Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate; Gore was, like him, a centrist Baby Boomer southerner—rather than an older D.C. hand. ‘I love Josh Shapiro and I think he would be a great VP candidate, but I would double down’ with Whitmer, [Democratci consultant Mike] Mikus told me. ‘I don’t think you have to go with a moderate white guy. I think you can be bold [with a pick] that electrifies your base.’ I heard similar views from several consultants.”

Whitmer’s expressed disinterest in the veepstakes may take that particular option off the table, but the broader point remains: Harris does not have to — and may not be able to — simply adopt Biden’s strategy and tweak it slightly. She may be able to contemplate gains in the electorate that were unimaginable for an 81-year-old white male incumbent. But the strategic opportunity to follow Obama’s path to the White House will first depend on Harris’s ability to refocus persuadable voters on Trump’s shaky record, bad character, and extremist agenda. Biden could not do that after the debate debacle of June 27. His successor must begin taking the battle to the former president right now.

Getting a lot of deja vu from the early Republican attacks on Kamala Harris, so I took a look at how a past Democratic nominee handled similar heat, and wrote about it at New York:

A Democratic politician from a famously liberal state who once was ranked as “the most liberal senator” runs for president. They’re pounded relentlessly by Republicans and conservative media as an elitist radical who can’t be trusted with national security or other responsibilities requiring toughness and common sense.

That’s not from today’s news, but from the candidacy of Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts in 2004. Kerry dealt with the “too liberal” label by stressing, then overstressing, his own heroic war record in Vietnam, setting himself up for an intensive smear campaign by a shadowy group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who disputed the details of his military service. That Democrat, of course, narrowly lost to George W. Bush.

During the past week, Vice-President Kamala Harris has been thrust into the harshest spotlight imaginable as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Like most vice-presidents, she has not gotten a great deal of public attention in that job; all glory and honor in the White House is reserved for the president. Her brief and unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2019 had given her a national profile but not a terribly distinct identity other than as a critic of Joe Biden’s civil-rights record, then as a running mate who was acceptable to all elements of the party and fit Biden’s promise to select a woman.

What Americans do generally know about her is that she’s half-Black, half–South Asian, and from California. And it’s very clear Republicans plan to give her the John Kerry treatment, calling her “too liberal,” “extreme,” and “radical” in an effort to thwart Harris’s plan to refocus the campaign on Trump’s bad character, shaky record, and hair-raising agenda of “vengeance.” As Axios reports, there’s already a clear consensus in the GOP about how to go after the veep:

“The National Republican Senatorial Committee is urging its candidates to hit Vice-President Kamala Harris for being too liberal, at fault for the border crisis, and ‘weird,’ according to a memo obtained by Axios …

“The theme throughout: Republicans will paint Harris as a ‘radical’ progressive, pointing to an old ranking of her as the most liberal senator and reminding voters of past pledges to ban fracking, decriminalize illegal border crossings, and eliminate cash bail among other things.”

The “old ranking” in question was a one-year profile of senators from GovTrack in 2019. It was a very dubious enterprise that rated senators as “liberal” or “conservative” strictly on the basis of how many bipartisan bills they sponsored or co-sponsored; it did not factor in actual voting in the Senate or differentiate between significant or insignificant legislation. The rating was discontinued after 2019. Its deployment as a campaign weapon is highly reminiscent of the use of a National Journal rating in 2004, which labeled Kerry as the “most liberal senator.” At least in Kerry’s case, the rating was based on his voting record rather than the meaningless metric of bill co-sponsorships. But it also failed to distinguish major from minor legislation.

Harris critics will be on firmer ground in attacking specific policy positions she has taken, particularly during her presidential campaign; like nearly every other Democratic candidate in the 2020 cycle, she backed decriminalizing (but not indiscriminately allowing) border crossings. And she co-sponsored Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill while later supporting Medicare expansions that did not preclude private health insurance. During her candidacy, Harris briefly supported a ban on fracking but walked that position back after joining Biden’s ticket.

To a large extent, Harris’s issues profile is right in the center of her party, and Republicans waving the “too liberal” banner may just simply excoriate positions very common among Democrats, such as support for what the Trump campaign calls the Green New Scam and federal abortion-rights legislation.

But Team Trump will also try to associate Harris with “radicalism” based explicitly on her geographical background and, more quietly, on her racial and gender identity. Republicans outside California have invested billions of dollars in typecasting the Golden State as a hellscape of crime, high taxes, overzealous regulation, rampant illegal immigration, voter fraud, and hedonistic culture. In part, that’s because San Francisco — the home of longtime GOP devil figure Nancy Pelosi and where Harris served as district attorney — has been a particular object of conservative-media wrath. Much of the plan to depict Harris as not only radical but “weird” will rely on negative stereotypes of California and the City by the Bay.

How will Harris counter these insinuations that she’s out of the mainstream politically and culturally? It’s very likely that much as Kerry responded to the “too liberal” accusation by emphasizing his record as a Navy officer, Kamala Harris will emphasize her record as a career prosecutor. As my colleague Jonathan Chait explained when Biden withdrew his candidacy and endorsed Harris, the framing of the general election as “the cop against the criminal” could not only help refocus the contest on the scofflaw former president but might “convince a few hundred thousand voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and Omaha, Nebraska, that she is not too liberal.”

But just as Republicans went directly after Kerry’s military record to undermine a source of strength and perceived moderation, they will now go after Harris’s record as a prosecutor in Oakland, in San Francisco, and as attorney general of California with demagogic zeal. They will use every bit of real and manufactured evidence to suggest that like famed “rogue” California prosecutors Chesa Boudin and George Gascon, Harris is a crime abettor, rather than a crime fighter, and a radical advocate for defunding the police and emptying the prisons. It is worth noting that one of the main impresarios of the “swiftboating” of Kerry in 2004 is now Trump’s co–campaign manager Chris LaCivita.

Harris will almost certainly respond to attacks on her record with abundant evidence of her tough-but-fair approach as a prosecutor, as Reuters sums it up:

“Over more than a dozen years as San Francisco’s district attorney and then as California’s attorney general, Harris took some stances welcomed by the party’s left flank, including opposition to the death penalty and staking out a hard line during negotiations with big banks over home foreclosure abuses.

“But she rankled progressive critics with other moves, including a policy of criminally prosecuting parents of children who skipped school and rejecting a request for DNA testing from a Black man on death row who says he was wrongfully convicted of murder …

“Harris has characterized her approach as being ‘smart on crime’ and has spoken of the importance of preventing and punishing crime while also protecting the rights of defendants and curbing excesses.”

But it’s supremely important that she learn Kerry’s lesson and not overemphasize this one aspect of her background, record, and character. If the election becomes to a significant degree a debate over the complex undercurrents of criminal-justice reform in California and her role in it, Harris will sacrifice opportunities to build on her strength as an advocate for abortion rights, universal health care, accountability for financial predators, and other themes she has mastered. She’s not simply “a cop” any more than Trump is simply “a criminal.”

The battle to clearly define Kamala Harris will occur with incredible speed and intensity over the next 100 days. She needs to stay on the offensive and make sure Trump’s well-known flaws in character and outlook are front and center.

In all the talk about whether Joe Biden should “step aside,” there hasn’t been enough discussion of the rationale he should present if he does so. So I offered one at New York:

The Democratic Party’s semi-public bickering over what to do with Joe Biden needs to come to an end very soon, lest it turn into a horrific party-rending conflict or a de facto surrender to Donald Trump. While he can technically be pushed out of the nomination, it would be nightmarishly difficult to do so given his virtually unopposed performance in the primaries and the lack of precedent for anything like a forced defenestration of a sitting president. It would also express disloyalty to a brave and dedicated leader. But Biden has already lost the united, confident party he needed to make a comeback. He’s trailing in the polls right now. And even more importantly, his own conduct and fitness for office will command center stage for the rest of the general-election campaign, which is precisely what he cannot afford given his poor job-approval ratings and the sour mood of the electorate.

So Joe needs to go of his own accord, and it needs to happen quickly before Republican and Biden-loyalist claims of a “coup” become all too credible. But it’s obviously a humiliating exercise. So if Biden comes to realize the futility of going forward, what can this proud and stubborn man say that will make him something other than an object of derision or pity?

I have a simple answer: He can tell the truth.

The truth is that Biden’s firm commitment to the pursuit of a second term, despite his advanced age and increased frailty, hardened into inflexible determination when Trump made his own decision to launch an initially unlikely comeback. When Biden took office, Trump was a disgraced insurrectionist whose very defenders in his second impeachment trial mostly denounced his conduct, even as they urged acquittal on technical grounds. The 46th president was in a position to serve one distinguished “transitional” term and retire with a wary eye on his fellow retiree festering in anger and self-righteousness in Mar-a-Lago. But as Trump slowly recovered and eventually reemerged as a more dominant figure than ever in a MAGA-fied Republican Party, Biden became convinced that as the only politician ever to defeat Donald Trump, he had the responsibility to do it again and the ability to remind voters why they rejected the 45th president in 2020.

As this strange election year ripened, Biden had a perfectly plausible strategy for victory based on keeping a steady public focus on Trump’s lawless conduct (including actual crimes), his erratic record, and extremist intentions for a perilous second term. The polls were close and Biden wasn’t very popular, but these surveys also showed a durable majority of the electorate that really didn’t want to return Trump to power, particularly as economic conditions improved and the consequences of Trump’s Supreme Court appointments grew more shockingly apparent each day.

Then came the June 27 debate, and suddenly Biden lost the ability to make the election about Trump. He needs to look into a camera and say just that, and conclude that just as the threat posed by Trump motivated him to run for a second term, the threat posed by Trump now requires that he withdraw so that a successor can make the case he can’t make as he’s become the object of endless speculation about his age and cognitive abilities. Biden does not need to resign the presidency, since his grounds for withdrawing his candidacy are about perceptions and politics rather than any underlying incapacity. Biden would be withdrawing as a weakened candidate, not as a failed president.

For this withdrawal to represent a stabilizing event for his administration and his party, it’s critical that Biden not equivocate or complain, and that he show his mastery of the situation by clearly passing the torch to the vice-president he chose four years ago. For all the talk of an “open convention” being exciting (for pundits) and energizing (for the winner), the last thing Democrats need right now is uncertainty. No matter what the polls show and how badly his old friends want him to succeed, it’s the prospect of 100 days of terror every time Biden makes unscripted remarks that is feeding both elite and rank-and-file sentiment that a change at the top of the ticket is necessary. The fear and confusion needs to end now, and Biden effectively made his choice of a successor when he made Kamala Harris his governing partner. The president needs to reassert his agency now, not look like he is abandoning his party and his country to the winds of fate.

A straightforward and honest admission of why Biden 2024 is coming to an end could go a very long way toward enabling Harris and other Democrats to shift the nation’s gaze back to the ranting old man whose acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention showed that he has not mellowed or moderated at all. Of course Biden wants to solidify and extend his legacy over the next four years. But right now, the clear and present danger is that it will be extinguished altogether. He alone can address that threat, not as a candidate, but as a president and a patriot who recognizes his duty.

Plenty of good and bad ideas are popping up in this summer of Democratic anxiety, but it’s one of the latter I tried to knock down at New York:

Coming out of the agonizing intra-Democratic debate about Joe Biden’s fitness to beat Donald Trump is a sort of plan B scheme. Donors, we are told, are considering shifting resources to an effort to flip control of the House (just four seats away) in order to block a Trump-led Republican trifecta and a bacchanalia of authoritarian extremism next year. The reigning assumption is that absent a presidential win (which provides the tie-breaking vote in the Senate), maintaining Democratic control of the upper chamber will be almost impossible, since Republicans are sure to flip West Virginia, and all the other competitive races are on Democratic turf. So making Hakeem Jeffries House Speaker offers the best return on investment and perhaps relief from the agony of watching Biden like a hawk every time he’s on-camera.

It’s an interesting strategy but not terribly promising from a historical point of view. The last time House control flipped in a presidential-election year was in 1952, when Republicans benefited from a presidential landslide. The last six times House control has flipped (in 1954, 1994, 2006, 2010, 2018, and 2022), it’s happened in midterm elections featuring a very common backlash against the president’s party. You know how often a party has lost the White House and flipped the U.S. House in the same election? Zero times. There were times when Senate races (with their highly eccentric landscapes thanks to only one-third of seats being up in any one election) moved in a very different direction from the presidential election. But the House has always been harnessed to White House results in fundamental and even predictable ways, as political scientist David Faris points out:

“Political scientist Robert Erikson found in 2016 that for ‘every percentage point that a presidential candidate gains in the two-party vote, their party’s down-ballot candidates gain almost half a point themselves.’ A 1990 study by James E. Campbell and Joe A. Sumners found that for every 10 points that a presidential candidate gains in a state, it boosts that party’s Senate contender by 2 points, and its House hopefuls by 4. This basic logic is a large part of why the past five presidents brought congressional majorities into office with them when they were elected to their first term.”

And most of this historical record, mind you, was forged in the bygone era of relatively nonideological major parties that made ticket-splitting immensely more common. House Democrats entered the 2024 cycle optimistic about making gains since 16 Republicans are in districts carried by Biden in 2020 while only five Democrats are in Trump ’20 districts. But as J. Miles Coleman of Sabato’s Crystal Ball observes, an even Biden-Trump race in the national popular vote would turn six Democratic-held House districts red. A 3.3 percent Trump advantage in the national popular vote (his margin in the polling averages Coleman was using) would turn 19 Democratic-held House districts red.

Flipping the House if Biden loses decisively is hard to imagine. Even now, with polls showing a close presidential race, all of the major House prognosticators give Republicans a slight advantage (Cook Political Report, for example, shows the GOP favored in 210 races and Democrats favored in 203, with 22 toss-ups, half of them currently controlled by each party). The congressional generic ballot, polling that estimates the House national popular vote, is dead even (on average, Democrats lead by 0.5 percent in FiveThirtyEight, Republicans by 0.3 percent in RealClearPolitics). This will be an uphill fight for Democrats in the best of circumstances. And it should be remembered that Biden’s party lost 13 net House seats in 2020 even as he won the White House.

History, current analysis, and common sense indicate that abandoning the presidential ticket to focus on House races as though they are isolated contests is a fool’s errand for Democrats. Whether it’s Biden, Kamala Harris, or some improbable fantasy candidate heading the ticket, the presidential race needs to stay highly competitive if Democrats want to make House gains. If Trump rides back into the White House with a solid win, his toady Mike Johnson will almost certainly be there to help him turn his scary plans into legislation.

At New York I discussed and tried to resolve one source of anxiety about a potential alternative ticket:

One very central dynamic in the recent saga of Democratic anxiety over Joe Biden’s chances against Donald Trump, given the weaknesses he displayed in his first 2024 debate, has been the role of his understudy, Vice-President Kamala Harris. My colleague Gabriel Debenedetti explained the problem nearly two years ago as the “Kamala Harris conundrum”:

“Top party donors have privately worried to close Obama allies that they’re skeptical of Harris’s prospects as a presidential candidate, citing the implosion of her 2020 campaign and her struggles as VP. Jockeying from other potential competitors, like frenemy Gavin Newsom, suggests that few would defer to her if Biden retired. Yet Harris’s strength among the party’s most influential voters nonetheless puts her in clear pole position.”

The perception that Harris is too unpopular to pick up the party banner if Biden dropped it, but too well-positioned to be pushed aside without huge collateral damage, was a major part of the mindset of political observers when evaluating Democratic options after the debate. But now fresher evidence of Harris’s public standing shows she’s just as viable as many of the candidates floated in fantasy scenarios about an “open convention,” “mini-primary,” or smoke-filled room that would sweep away both parts of the Biden-Harris ticket.

For a good while now, Harris’s job-approval numbers have been converging with Biden’s after trailing them initially. These indicate dismal popularity among voters generally, but not in a way that makes her an unacceptable replacement candidate should she be pressed into service in an emergency. As of now, her job-approval ratio in the FiveThirtyEight averages is 37.1 percent approve to 51.2 percent disapprove. Biden’s is 37.4 percent approve to 56.8 percent disapprove. In the favorability ratios tracked by RealClearPolitics, Harris is at 38.3 favorable to 54.6 percent unfavorable, while Biden is at 39.4 percent favorable to 56.9 percent unfavorable. There’s just not a great deal of difference other than slightly lower disapproval/unfavorable numbers for the veep.

On the crucial measurement of viability as a general-election candidate against Trump, there wasn’t much credible polling prior to the post-debate crisis. An Emerson survey in February 2024 showed Harris trailing Trump by 3 percent (43 percent to 46 percent), which was a better showing than Gavin Newsom (down ten points, 36 percent to 46 percent) or Gretchen Whitmer (down 12 points, 33 percent to 45 percent).

After the debate, though, there was a sudden cascade of polling matching Democratic alternatives against Trump, and while Harris’s strength varied, she consistently did as well as or better than the fantasy alternatives. The first cookie on the plate was a one-day June 28 survey from Data for Progress, which showed virtually indistinguishable polling against Trump by Biden, Harris, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Josh Shapiro, and Gretchen Whitmer. All of them trailed Trump by 2 to 3 percent among likely voters.

Then two national polls released on July 2 showed Harris doing better than other feasible Biden alternatives. Reuters/Ipsos (which showed Biden and Trump tied) had Harris within a point of Trump, while Newsom trailed by three points, Andy Beshear by four, Whitmer by five, and Pritzker by six points. Similarly, CNN showed Harris trailing Trump by just two points; Pete Buttigieg trailing by four points; and Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer trailing him by five points.

Emerson came back with a new poll on July 9 that wasn’t as sunny as some for Democrats generally (every tested name trailed Trump, with Biden down by three points). But again, Harris (down by six points) did better than Newsom (down eight points); Buttigieg and Whitmer (down ten points); and Shapiro (down 12 points).

There’s been some talk that Harris might help Democrats with base constituencies that are sour about Biden. There’s not much publicly available evidence testing that hypothesis, though the crosstabs in the latest CNN poll do show Harris doing modestly better than Biden among people of color, voters under the age of 35, and women.

The bottom line is that one element of the “Kamala Harris conundrum” needs to be reconsidered. There should be no real drop-off in support if Biden (against current expectations) steps aside in favor of his vice-president (the only really feasible “replacement” scenario at this point). She probably has a higher ceiling of support than Biden as well, but in any event, she would have a fresh opportunity to make a strong first or second impression on many Americans who otherwise know little about her.

As a veteran of six Democratic National Conventions who is familiar with many more, I had to object to some of the loose talk about the likelihood and desirability of an “open convention” in August, and wrote about it at New York:

Sometimes in politics, a perfectly justified maneuver falls to the wayside because there’s no way to execute it. Justified or not, the scheme to replace Joe Biden and Kamala Harris with a wholly new Democratic ticket will fail because no one is in a position to make it happen.

My esteemed colleague Jonathan Chait makes a solid, if not incontestable, case that there are stronger options than a 2024 Biden-Harris ticket, or a replacement of the president by his vice-president, for what has now become a desperate fight to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. He argues that the reluctance of Democrats to toss the incumbents and start over represents a sort of failure of nerve induced by Biden’s stubborn selfishness and Harris’s weaponization of identity politics:

“At the moment, according to one post-debate poll, only 27 percent of Americans believe Joe Biden has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president. This poses an almost-insurmountable obstacle to his election, even with Trump’s manifest unfitness. Biden is losing, and he has already squandered what his own campaign considered his best chance to change the race.

“Again, even with all her limitations, Harris is probably a stronger candidate now than Biden. I also think there are better options than Harris.”

Democrats, Chait believes, can seize the opportunity presented by Biden’s debate debacle to make a fresh start, if only they show “the collective willpower to make political choices in the clearheaded interest of their party and their country.”

I have mixed feelings about my colleague’s assessment of the political situation. But about this I have little doubt: At this late date, there is simply no instrument for canceling or reversing all the decisions the Democratic Party has made over the past four years–or indeed, over the past five months. There is no way to muster the collective judgment of Democratic voters about an ideal 2024 ticket. The primaries are long past; every single potential Biden or Harris rival has already bent the knee to the reelection effort; the soon-to-arrive convention’s only conceivable managers are in the White House or in the Biden campaign; and, even if there was agreement among Democratic elites and rank-and-file party activists that “Joe must go and take Kamala with him,” there is no consensus on replacements. Chait likes the idea of a Whitmer-Booker ticket; dozens of other ideas would arise if the party was somehow forced to upend primary voters and pledged delegates and start anew. Who, specifically, will forge the consensus? Nobody comes to mind. How, mechanically, would it be imposed? It’s very hard to envision it occurring without magic far more fanciful than Biden and/or Harris picking up a few points to beat Trump in November.

Let’s be clear: There’s no template for what the would-be deposers of Biden and Harris are suggesting. The last major-party convention in which there was any doubt about the outcome was the Republican confab of 1976, which was in turn the product of two candidates slugging in out to a draw in the primaries. Both were battle tested and could claim a popular mandate. The last multi-ballot convention was the Democratic gathering of 1952, which produced a landslide losing ticket. You have to go back to the Republican convention of 1940 — 84 years ago, long before the era of universal primaries and caucuses — to find a convention that suddenly chose a dark-horse nominee because he seemed a better bet than the career politicians he shoved aside. That nominee lost too. And the last truly wide-open convention was exactly 100 years ago, when Democrats took 103 ballots to nominate a candidate who won a booming 28.8 percent in the general election. Open conventions always sound like fun to political pundits. They are a disaster for political parties, particularly parties in mid-panic.

As it happens, the timetable for blowing up a settled nomination is particularly poor right now. Because of an Ohio ballot deadline, the Democratic National Committee has already decided to hold a “virtual roll call” for the presidential and vice-presidential nominations more than a full week before the convention begins. The idea, of course, was a pro-forma ratification that at most might represent a campaign infomercial. Is it now to become a deliberative and likely multi-ballot process that delegates enter with no idea of the outcome? That sounds like true chaos. And the only thing that could make it worse is an endless series of behind-the-scenes meetings where Democrats — which Democrats? Delegates? Delegation leaders? Party pooh-bahs? Donors? Interest-group leaders? The Clintons? The Obamas? — struggle to agree on a ticket.

Yes, there are reasons to worry about Biden’s capabilities as a candidate going forward and reasons to fear that Kamala Harris isn’t an ideal presidential candidate either. But the evidence is very mixed. If in a week or so that evidence turns unambiguously dark, the extremely efficient course for Democrats is the one Republicans chose in 1974 when congressional leaders of unimpeachable loyalty to Richard Nixon went to him and convinced him to throw in the towel. Another colleague of mine, Gabriel Debenedetti, says that the 46th president may not want to listen. But it’s the best bet for changing the ticket and eliminating the immediate source of panic. Indeed, it would be an important and appropriate consolation prize for Biden that as he “stepped aside” he would name a successor. The party could unite around this candidate and be spared the impossible chore of letting the ticket be chosen by pollsters for the benefit of politicians who did not enter a single primary. That successor will very likely be Kamala Harris, and she’s not ideal. But ideal presidential candidates do not fall from the sky or ascend via a landslide in the commentariat.

After watching with concern the Biden-Trump debate in Atlanta, I offered some thoughts at New York about the path forward:

After the debate debacle in Atlanta on June 27, the well-known hand-wringing tendencies of the Democratic Party are in very plain view. That’s particularly true in the left-of-center pundit class, where full-blown panic has erupted over the terrible sight and sound of Joe Biden struggling to debate Donald Trump. We still don’t know the extent to which American voters share the horrified perceptions of Democratic elites; those not accustomed to Trump’s own routine incoherence may have thought the debate was closer to a draw than a rout. It will probably be a week or two before we can properly contextualize Biden’s bad night.

But one thing should be very clear: Democrats are not going to dump the 46th president when they gather in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention on August 19 (actually, the balloting is likely to happen earlier and virtually). Yes, removing the presumptive nominee against his will is technically possible. Unlike the GOP, the party itself doesn’t enforce delegate pledges to back the candidate under whose banner they were selected, though 14 states do have laws binding delegates to one extent or another. The real problem is that the political damage to Democrats inflicted by Biden’s debate performance is but a shadow of what would happen if a sitting president were dragged kicking and screaming off the ticket. There would be some delegates legally obligated to vote for him anyway (though the convention itself could adopt rules that might supersede state laws binding delegates). Others delegates would stick with Biden as an act of loyalty. So you’d have a convention and a party deeply divided, to the delight of the opposition. Democrats would be fools to invite that catastrophe instead of carrying on in the sure knowledge that nearly half of the electorate really doesn’t want a second Trump administration. The “dump Biden” scenario just isn’t happening.

But Biden himself could withdraw as a candidate, instantly removing any legal obstacles to the selection of a different nominee (state laws binding delegates generally release them when their candidate’s tent folds) and mitigating the political damage significantly. And even as Democratic elected officials and party leaders publicly renew their vows of support for Biden, as they must, you have to figure private discussions are underway to determine if this proud and sometimes stubborn man will indeed step aside. He surely understands that he’s now given vivid life to widespread fears that he’s too old for another term in the White House. Reversing that impression will be very difficult, particularly since Trump is unlikely to give him a chance to redeem himself in a second debate. What was already a tough uphill slog of a campaign for reelection has now become a steep and perilous climb in which the incumbent, not his calamitous predecessor, will be the focus of constant malicious scrutiny.

Biden could reset the contest with one clear statement repeating his determination to keep Trump out of the White House and passing the torch to a successor. And, yes, he’d have to name a successor, lest the Chicago convention become a riotous playground for political egos, making a general-election campaign impossible to plan, finance, and execute. Sure, the punditocracy will clamor for the spectacle of an “open convention,” but it would represent political malpractice of the highest order. If he does “step aside,” Biden must help his vice-president “step up” with the backing of a united party. Any other option at this late date would smack of desperation and would divide Democrats even more bitterly than an effort to “dump” the incumbent.

The president chose Kamala Harris as his running mate in the full knowledge that an emergency requiring her elevation was an ever-present possibility. An imminent return to power by the 45th president is enough of an emergency to justify an extreme measure of self-sacrifice by the one man who stands in the way of that calamity.

Biden and those who advise him should, of course, carefully assess the damage wrought by the debate during the next few days. Perhaps the pundits are overreacting, and the Biden-Trump race will settle back into its familiar status as a barn burner that either candidate can win. There’s only a small window of opportunity for a presidential game-changing decision to flip the board and improve the odds of victory. It could be the most momentous decision of Joe Biden’s long and distinguished life.