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President Joe Biden's abrupt Sunday announcement that he would abandon his re-election campaign instantly blew apart the dynamics of the 2024 campaign. And while the coordinated effort to unify around Vice President Kamala Harris may or may not deliver another four years of White House control in November, the renewed energy among Democrats is palpable, as is the relief. If nothing else, Democrats dispensed with a seemingly immovable obstacle to victory—a frail, elderly man who had become incapable of articulately defending his own record or offering even the outline of a second-term plan. And in the next few weeks we will find out whether the problem really was specific to Biden, or whether Democrats have some policy pivots to make.
It was clear in the hours that followed the president's announcement on the social media platform X that Harris' people had laid the groundwork for a quick strike. The roster of party heavyweights who endorsed her almost instantaneously, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the Congressional Black Caucus and others, was evidence that she and her team had been preparing for this moment for weeks and sought to seal off any openings for anyone to push for an open convention. Within hours of the president's decision to step aside, the idea of a truly open process that some had been pushing for seemed preposterous.
There was also an immediate surge of donations to her campaign, proof that both rank-and-file Democrats and big donors felt freed from the unbearable limbo of the past month since President Biden's career-ending debacle in the June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump. The president's inability to quell the gathering doubts about his candidacy led to a slow drip of defections among congressional Democrats as well as longtime allies like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (CA).
The final straw might have been the truly apocalyptic internal polling presented to Biden this weekend by campaign pollster Mike Donilon, which showed Biden not only getting dusted in every battleground state but also crumbling in must-win Democratic-leaning states like New Mexico and Virginia. For weeks, the president had clung to the delusion that his polling was better than it looked, that he still had a path to victory, and that changing candidates carried too much risk. The collapse of the campaign's fortunes even in friendly territory was proof that while a change was not going to be sufficient to turn things around on its own, there was basically zero downside risk to swapping in Harris, undercutting the last remaining possible justification for staying on.
And now we will find out exactly what voters disliked about Biden and his re-election campaign. Was it his age, his frail appearance, halting speaking patterns and strange inability to marshal any argument for re-election other than Trump's threat to democracy? Or have voters simply had enough of Democratic rule, the consequence of missteps on immigration policy and the failure to convince voters that they were doing everything that they could about inflation?
If nothing else, Democrats now have a vigorous, capable candidate on the right side of 60, who has a clear opportunity to hit the reset button on this campaign with her own vision, voice and plans. Is Kamala Harris the candidate who would have emerged from a normal primary process that started in earnest in 2023? I think a lot of people have legitimate doubts about that. But the reality is that Biden's decision to run for re-election short-circuited a real competition, and the party's leading decision-makers clearly think it is far too late to compress what might have been a lightning-round "mini-primary" or any other process that would lead anywhere but straight to Harris.
Harris will need to quickly differentiate herself from Biden by criticizing the parts of his term that can't be laid directly at her feet. She will need to relentlessly highlight the rapid drop in crime rates, the return of inflation to pre-pandemic levels and recent successes in bringing a more orderly process to the border. Unlike Biden, she will be able to pointedly remind voters that it is Trump and the Republicans who walked away from a border compromise, that the hyper-protectionist Trump-Vance economic plan will result in even worse inflation than we've already seen, and that Trump has selected possibly one of the most anti-choice, anti-family hardliners in the GOP as his running mate and heir apparent of the MAGA movement. With the focus now off Biden's age, she will have an opportunity to define herself and Donald Trump however she chooses—but only until a new media narrative sets in. And she will need to come up with ways to blunt the issues that are still working for Trump no matter who the Democratic nominee is.
The polls might not immediately turn around, but no mistake: this is a whole new ballgame. Democrats can get genuinely excited about hearing their new party leader lay out her vision for the first time in a generation—since now-middle-aged Millennials packed parks and arenas to hear a young political phenom named Barack Obama campaign in the spring and summer of 2008, when they were all in their teens and twenties. Most loyal Democrats have probably forgotten what it is like to have their political fortunes in the hands of someone in the prime of their life and their career, rather than an aging figure whose best days are clearly behind them, to turn on their TVs to watch that person talk or debate not with trepidation and fear about whatever stumbles might follow, but with hope and excitement about the future.
Donald Trump and his allies were clearly hoping Biden would stick it out. He didn't, and now the momentum—and the pressure—is back on the other side of the aisle.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
