What did we just see?
We know that the Democrats pushed out Joe Biden and then rapidly — very rapidly — converged on Kamala Harris.
But that leaves a ton of questions. Some are important to political scientists and a deeper understanding of parties and the US political process; some are important to rank-and-file voters. Let’s see:
Q: Is there anything undemocratic about this kind of substitution?
Absolutely not, and it’s not close. Parties in democracies are entitled to choose their candidates, and (at least within whatever laws apply) they are entitled to choose how they do it. Democrats are essentially following their normal procedures here; the delegates chosen in primaries and caucuses are still going to vote in the convention. They’re just going to vote for Harris and her running mate instead of Biden/Harris.
Granted, the voters who selected those delegates by voting for Biden did not intend for Harris to be the nominee. Still, Biden voluntarily dropped out, at least in large part for health reasons. It’s not much of a stretch to think that voter-approved Biden/Harris delegates would be following the best guess at the will of the voters by switching to Harris when Biden isn’t available and supports Harris.1
Q: Why did this happen really?
We don’t know yet for sure. There are three possibilities. By far the most likely is that Democratic party actors accross the board decided after the debate that Biden was no longer up to the job — at least up to the job of the campaign, and probaby a second term. And after giving him some time to prove them wrong, they wound up even more convinced a change was needed, as he did relatively few unscripted events and some of those didn’t go great. The simplest explanation is that Democrats throughout the party really believed up until the debate that Biden was old but fine, and the debate and its aftermath convinced them otherwise.2
It’s possible but less likely that it was just a case of Democrats concerned about polls. Certainly party actors care about the chances of winning, but this was a costly, high-risk switch; I doubt they would have done it had Biden seemed capable even if the polls were identical. Even less likely is that it was about changing the party’s policy agenda and priorities. Harris was always the most likely substitute, and she just isn’t far enough from Biden to make it a plausible reason for the replacement.3
Q: But everyone says it was panic over the polls. Why shouldn’t be believe it?
Okay, this is speculative, but…Between the debate and Biden’s eventual decision, the outcome was unknown. Democrats who wanted him out had the tricky task of signaling to other party actors what they wanted, without damaging Biden if it turned out they didn’t get their way. Much safer for everyone to say publicly that the polls were scary than to say that Biden wasn’t up to the job.
Q: Whodunnit?
I see lots of folks on social media complaining that big donors (and/or The New York Times) pushing Biden out. We’ll need more reporting to be sure, but I’m extremely skeptical. Media pundits are highly visible, and one of the biases of political journalism is to emphasize big money over everything else. But politicians, party-aligned groups, campaign and governing professionals, and volunteers and activists may well be far more influential.
Again, we can’t really answer this one yet with much confidence, but it sure looked to me as if it was a broad consensus within the party. Whodunnit? They all done it. And remember that most highly visible party actors, such as interest group leaders and politicians and state party chairs, are chosen by and represent various constituents, and they were likely in touch with them. They’re not solo actors4
The strongest evidence for all of this was the reaction on Sunday, in which pretty much everyone in the party had endorsed Harris within hours. If they weren’t happy about it, many Oscars and Tonys and such need to be awarded.
Q: Was Sunday scripted?
We don’t know yet. I had been saying over the last several days that there would be some period between when the decision was made and it was rolled out in order to arrange for stage managing things, and that we might well be in that interval at any moment without knowing it. At the very least that’s consistent with what happened.
What I really think it came down to was that Biden is at the end of the day has spent his entire career finding the center of the Democratic Party and then moving there. And I think this was the ultimate example of it.
Q: Anything else?
Yeah. The evidence is that vice-presidents are normally unpopular and disrespected right up to the moment when they become the nominee. More later on Harris as a candidate, but don’t assume that past polling — and her VP media image — will tell us much going forward.
There’s plenty more, but I’ll stop there for now. In case you missed it, here at GP/BP Julia wrote on Sunday’s events yesterday, and before that all three of us taped an audio item (paid subscribers only). I’d also recommend a blog post by John Sides and Michael Tesler and one from Seth Masket and another from David Hopkins.
That’s the short anwer. The longer answer would get to the same place, but start with a big It’s Complicatated and talk about whether parties are permeable or not. To contribute to overall democracy, my position (and others disagree!) is that parties must offer a gateway to meaningful political participation, so that currently uninvolved voters can join and have an opportunity to influence the party. I don’t see any violation of that principle here.
Indeed there’s plenty of evidence that most of Biden’s “old” problems were mainly superficial in his first three years in office, and that he declined a fair amount in the last 3-6 months. As with many things, we’ll get more reporting later.
The polls were surely a factor, but no one tried to replace Biden until the debate changed the evidence about his competence. And of course there are thousands of party actors, and they surely had a variety of motives, but it seems very unlikely to me that attempts to change the party were important in all of this.
Most likley to be freelancing? Party-aligned pundits, for one. And “formers”, including former presidents, although they at least probably have still-strong ties to less visible party actors, even if they no longer have to listen to them. But I suspect that the more they are acting only for themselves, the less likely they will be to have broad influence within the party.