Photo: Mark Makela/Getty Images
On Sunday, President Joe Biden announced that he would be ending his run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. The decision came after a weekslong battle following Biden’s disastrous showing at a debate against Republican nominee Donald Trump, a press conference that only slightly assuaged anxieties about his faculties, and a bout of Covid.
For a major political party to change tack this late in the game reeks of a crisis. By its nature, the move is a gambit, a major risk. The shift sets up a candidate who was never overwhelmingly popular — Harris — as a political savior. As a savvy politician whose candidacy has already spurred Democratic enthusiasm, Harris has a real shot at pulling it all off, but the fact of the matter is the situation she has been handed is ripe with the potential for failure.
It’s a familiar story: a quick fix job, a woman of color tasked to clean up the mess made by a bunch of white men. Welcome to the “glass cliff.”
A now 20-year-old term, the notion of the glass cliff is a nod to the “glass ceiling” — that unseen but impenetrable barrier to the upward advancement of women. The “cliff” refers to the phenomenon of women being promoted or hired when an organization is on the brink of failure.
Coining the term in a 2005 research paper, British organizational psychologists Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam studied businesses in the London Stock Exchange and found that “companies who appointed women to their boards were more likely to have experienced consistently bad performance in the preceding five months than those who appointed men.”
The pressures of that moment are often insurmountable. A woman in this position is tasked with saving the organization: doing the cleanup job, cutting budgets, laying people off, and reorganizing. She’s heralded as a first of her kind, a historic moment, an opportunity to change directions, the dawn of a new day — but she’s also often paid less than the failed (male) leader who came before her. The “cliff” is the invisible ledge; one misstep, and you go barreling down the side.
It’s not difficult to see how this all applies to Harris.
Harris is an exceedingly qualified candidate who has the skills to do the job of being president. Why wasn’t she called in earlier? The party had months, if not years, to change course as the evidence of Biden’s decline became clear. Instead, Democrats waited until their hand was forced. Now Harris is being called upon to save the day.
Whether Harris can, in fact, save the day is another question. Her history as a prosecutor haunted her last presidential run, dampening enthusiasm among the party’s progressive base. Or will the country be haunted by the question of whether voters are ready to accept a mixed race Black and South Asian woman? (Many observers said the country simply wasn’t ready for a white one after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss, though a number of factors were clearly at work.) Harris’s perceived weaknesses — particularly alleged missteps on immigration — make her exactly the sort of foil the Trump campaign is looking to exploit.
At the same time, as Prem Thakker wrote, she doesn’t carry the same baggage as Biden when it comes to Israel’s war on Gaza and holds the potential to change direction. She was also one of the most solid liberals in the Senate, setting her up to unite the party around issues like abortion rights, something 85 percent of Democratic voters support. There is also early evidence that she is waking up the political machine, motivating both funders and door-knockers to get involved.
Whatever one personally thinks of Harris, given the current slate of candidates and the growing threat of another Trump term, Democrats appear to have made the most solid choice they could have at this moment to help win the election. Because of her past run, Harris has already been vetted. The governors and senators named as other likely candidates would have left sometimes vulnerable empty seats in gubernatorial mansions and Congress. And an open convention could descend into chaos, resulting in Democratic disarray as the clock winds down on the race.
The potential for failure, however, remains. The polls have been daunting, and a total reverse is unlikely. It will require a feat of organizing to harness excitement about the change of candidate into a formidable ground operation. And Republicans will keep trying to tie Harris to Biden, attempting to weigh her down with his flagging popularity.
The bigger challenges she will face have less to do with her qualifications or ability to do the job and more to do with vast disinformation, a party plagued with infighting and — should she win — a host of intractable problems ranging from the climate crisis to a revanchist Supreme Court.
Harris isn’t solely responsible for her circumstances or the larger mess Democrats find themselves in, but she is now being tasked to lean in and fix it in the final hours.
Harris has also recently been attacked as a “DEI” candidate — a token of Democrats’ diversity. (Lydia Polgreen has argued that, if we label Harris as a diversity candidate, we should do the same for Trump’s vice presidential pick, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio.) The suggestion itself is racist: This diminishes Harris’s qualifications and longtime record as a Democratic power player.
There is, however, a lens through which the idea of Harris as a “DEI” candidate is not totally off. After all, when women and people of color are promoted amid a failing state of affairs, they are often heralded as wins for diversity. And though neoliberals may disingenuously tout the accomplishment of a victory for diversity, these sorts of wins can be genuinely positive developments for our politics — positive, that is, except for when things collapse.
That’s when the cynics come in. Instead of assessing how the system set Harris up to fail, the national conversation is overrun by handwringing over how she probably shouldn’t have gotten the nomination in the first place.
It’s a potential pitfall so great, so hard to see coming, that you might even call it a glass cliff.