One day after President Biden dropped out of the 2024 race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to be the Democratic nominee, large segments of the party have lined up behind the former senator, who if elected would become the country’s first female, Indian-American and Caribbean-American president.
Harris now counts on the endorsement of every Democratic governor, almost all Democratic members of Congress, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi and more. There are some holdouts, most notably the Obamas, but not many and perhaps not for long.
There will be an open process in name only; Harris is the anointed successor and no one else has stepped up. If there are any other candidates who believe they can make a better case and want to challenge the presumptive nominee, now is the time to do so. It’ll be a tall order to make the argument, and we don’t expect there will be any takers.
Very soon, that door will close definitively as Harris locks up the delegates she needs to formally receive the nomination. The second that becomes clear — and it’s becoming clearer by the minute — the party would do well to leave no room for doubt and present a fully unified front behind the candidate.
Besides improving the Democrats’ prospects over Donald Trump, Biden’s withdrawal turns what was to be the longest general election campaign in history (since Trump demolished Nikki Haley on March 5, Super Tuesday) into the shortest, just a shade more than 100 days to go until Election Day.
While not as speedy as our friends in Western Europe, where elections are called and conducted in the course of a few weeks, the compressed campaign will be a relief to Americans weary of the endless Biden-Trump showdown that began in 2020.
Then Harris has to make her own vice presidential pick, who needs to be a Democrat with demonstrable swing-state appeal who can both make a case to a good president if the need arises and help Harris win an Electoral College majority.
Such a duo could draw a clear contrast with the Donald Trump/J.D. Vance set, where the top of the ticket is a liar who not four years ago tried to overthrow our nation’s electoral system and the No. 2 is an untested pol with less than two years in public office, much different than the seasoned Mike Pence.
A Harris-Trump contest is obviously not what Americans expected going into this year, or even this summer, as all anticipated the Biden-Trump rematch. This leaves a frenzied three-months-and-change campaign until the election, or rather frenzied by U.S. standards, where presidential elections stretch interminably, dominating years of news cycles, even when it’s not the same two contenders.
2024 will be different in terms of tempo. It was less than four weeks since Biden’s terrible debate performance to his being off the ticket (with a near miss assassination attempt against Trump in the meantime).
Americans have had eight years to get a pretty good sense of what Donald Trump is about (Donald Trump is the main answer). Now we’ll have a few months to learn more about Kamala Harris, whose own 2016 campaign collapsed before the first voting even started. Her first challenge was securing the party nod, which it seems she’s done. Many other tests await her.