Not Again

As Tim Balk of The New York Times reported on Tuesday

Hillary Clinton suggested in a new interview that the Democratic Party’s loss in 2024 boiled down to a “terrible miscalculation” — President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s decision to run for re-election.

At an event in Manhattan on Monday, Mrs. Clinton told The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, that Mr. Biden had made a “terrible mistake for himself, his legacy and for the country” in trying to run again at age 81.

If Mr. Biden had decided to “pass the torch” and the Democratic Party had held a competitive presidential primary, Mrs. Clinton told Mr. Remnick, “whoever emerged from that contest — whether it was the vice president, or a governor, or a senator or anybody else — would have beaten Donald Trump.”

Chris Cillizza acknowledges that there has been a bit of a rivalry between Biden and Clinton but believes that the latter was correct to note that the President should have bowed out considerably earlier than he did. However, he argues also (at 7:20)

Now, would someone who emerged in an open primary process had Biden dropped out in the summer of 2023- would that person have definitely beaten Donald Trump in November of 2024?

No, I think there was sigificant unhappines with the state of the econnomy, with Democrats, with Joe Biden in particular, with how he had led the economy, how much he understood about the economy. So I don't think it would have- it's not just an easy fix, that they just nominate somebody else in an open primary process and that person beats Donald Trump. But the way that it played out by Biden staying too long, he should never have run for a second term, staying on for too long, the debate, the three weeks of is he going to stay on, is he going to get out- and eventually he gets out and Kamala Harris steps in without any primary or anyone voting on anything, that clearly doomed them, right?

Wrong.

Cillizza adds "I'm not sure the Democrats would have won anyway but the way that played out doomed them.

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Of course we don't know if the new candidate, assuming it was not the Vice President, would have won. And Cillizza, admittedly, reflects conventional wisdom, as does The Times' Balk, who wrote "Mr. Biden ultimately left the race in late July 2024, immediately putting his weight behind Ms. Harris, his vice president, but leaving her just three months to build her own campaign before Election Day."

Do you see what they're doing? In the case of Cillizza- a straight shooter- it is unintentional, and perhaps also in case of The Times. 

It's in the title of Harris' memoir about the general election campaign.  Whether it was the decision of the ex-candidate, the publicher or someone else, the title of the book was 107 Days, in part as an argument that the Vice President faced an uphill battle to win the election.

But she did not. Almost to the moment that Biden dropped out, the nomination of Harris was a fait accompli. In a review of her book, Vanity Fair explained that on that day

By 10 p.m. at the Naval Observatory, jigsaw pieces were still strewn across the kitchen table. But the puzzle of Harris’s nomination had been solved. She’d called more than 100 people. Not a single potential rival had challenged her. By Monday, Harris had the backing of a majority of Democrats in Congress. Within 48 hours she had the support of most delegates who would be at the convention. A senior adviser summed up Harris’s two-day marathon as a political tour de force: “A lot of people were like, ‘We need a process.’ Well, there is a process: getting the delegates to commit. We just needed to do it and we did it.”

Aside from incumbents, most candidates for a presidential nomination- especially in the Democratic Party- have to run a gauntlet before securing sufficient delegates. Not so, Kamala Harris, behind whom most prominent Democrats, including virtually any possible challenger, quickly lined up. The national convention was highly successful, Harris won her debate with Trump going away, the Party was united behind the nominee, enthusiasm was impressive, and victory seemed likely. However 

One hundred seven days later, as history will recount, Team Harris hit rock bottom. Yet it didn’t seem so as Election Day dawned. Though Harris was behind in the battleground states, her spokespeople were oddly upbeat. Appearing on MSNBC back on October 27, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon had declared, “We are very confident we’re going to win this thing.” On Friday, November 1, senior adviser David Plouffe posted on X that late-​breaking undecided voters were going for Harris by more than 10 points.

A campaign has a gravitational pull, and chief of staff Voles was feeling it. “You get sucked into the momentum,” she said. “Like you believe it. I’ve been on winning ones and losing ones, and this felt more like [Bill] Clinton’s [in 1992] than [Michael] Dukakis’s [in 1988].” Voles wasn’t talking poll numbers or analytics, but intangibles. “The rallies were so big and so enthusiastic. People were lining the streets.” But Harris’s pollsters didn’t share the kumbaya cohesion.

Although Biden should have withdrawn from the race earlier, his failure to do so did not doom his replacement on the ticket- far from it. Harris had a great opportunity to win, especially given that the GOP had less timefor opposition research about her than it would have if it had been clear for months that she would be the nominee.  It was not the brief nature of the campaign nor the quality of her campaign; it was her.

After she lost to Donald Trump in 2016, Hillary Clinton could have opted to seek a rematch. However, she realized that she might not win the 2020 nomination and if she did, couldn't be certain that she'd win the general election. She understood the limits to her popularity and electability.

Individuals in or around Joe Biden in 2023 and the first half of  2024 refused to warn the President that he was old and appeared too feeble to mount a successful campaign for re-election. Now Harris, she of  the "107 days," is reportedly eyeing a run for the 2028 presidential nomination.  Self-awarness is not her strength. The Democratic Party cannot afford another loss. For the good of the Party, someone needs to read Kamala Harris the riot act. 

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