What the Biden/Harris switch has taught us (or me anyway)

Some humbling lessons about candidates, parties, and campaigns

The week since Joe Biden announced he wasn’t going to stand for reelection and he was endorsing Kamala Harris to succeed him has been a fascinating and educational one. And quite honestly, I was wrong in some of my guesses as to how this would go. (This is my main area of professional expertise, so hey no big deal I guess.) I want to run through some of the big lessons that those of us who study and follow campaigns and parties can learn from this.

Switching nominees can help - Yes, this is kind of a Duh observation, but there’s a fair amount of evidence that voters are highly polarized in presidential contests and that the actual choice of candidate, outside some very extreme options, just doesn’t matter very much. At least so far, switching candidates is looking like a very smart choice by Democrats. We don’t really have the whole story yet, but Harris seems to be polling around three to five points better against Trump than Biden was, and Trump’s slight advantage in the contest has been all but erased. Young voters, in particular, who were strong supporters of Biden in 2020, have been cool to him this year, but so far have jumped energetically to support Harris. We don’t yet know what the election itself will look like, and we can’t ever know what Biden’s vote share would have been. But for now, this is taking what looked like a probable Democratic loss and made it competitive. Arguably, this is putting the election closer in tune with the fundamentals.

The party didn’t fracture - One concern I and others had about a Biden withdrawal was that he had pretty painstakingly put together a functional and effective coalition that included progressives and people of color, and that it wasn’t obvious a successor would be able to inherit that. And indeed that was part of the reason that advocacy groups for progressives and people of color were among Biden’s staunchest defenders while so many others were urging him to step down. It was additionally not clear that everyone would jump on board the Harris train, and there was at least some chance of a contested and very messy convention in Chicago. Instead, we saw a very rapid convergence behind Harris and all her would-be rivals for the presidency backing her. If anything the party is looking far more united now, and there were clearly quite a few Democrats extremely eager to root for something.

Don’t judge a candidate by their vice presidency - I can’t find links now, but I have definitely told people over the past few years that I thought Harris was underrated as a candidate. And that is due, in large part, to the weirdness of the office of the vice presidency. That job has almost no defined duties, making it hard to judge how good a job one is doing, and they are usually handed the crappiest issues of an administration. There’s a reason the vast majority of vice presidents in US history have been judged to be pinheads. Most weren’t pinheads! But it’s easy to just apply silly caricatures to them (Quayle as a dunce, Gore as a nerd, Cheney as a cyborg, Biden as a creepy uncle with a Trans Am, etc.) rather than figure out how well they’re doing a job that makes little sense. Additionally, as Jonathan Bernstein points out, criticisms of her 2020 presidential campaign focusing on her early withdrawal tend to understate the shrewdness of that decision; unlike some of her rivals, she didn’t go on to get humiliated in the primaries and caucuses and ended up Biden’s heir.

Parties are strong, or can be - Regardless of whether it was motivated by the media or celebrities or just regular voters freaking out over a bad debate night, the Democratic Party pushed a sitting president, who very much wanted a second term and was objectively good at the job, into retirement. That is a lot of strength. It’s notable to contrast the major parties — one pushed out a president because it looked like he might lose the next election, while the other has declined numerous opportunities to push out one after multiple impeachments, felony convictions, and a coup attempt. It’s possible the two parties are just different, and also that Biden, a Democratic officeholder for more than half a century, is far more likely to take orders from his party than Trump is from his.

Race and sex are important but aren’t everything - As I’ve written numerous times here, the Democratic Party is particularly obsessed with the idea of electability, and many people rely on certain stock beliefs about just what an electable candidate looks like. It is nonetheless astounding that Democrats dumped a relatively moderate older white guy from Scranton in favor of a liberal Black woman from San Francisco, and at least for now, it looks like a very smart decision. Yes, there can be vote penalties for candidates of color, but none of this is automatic. And we tend to overlook that Hillary Clinton won more votes than any other candidate in 2016 and that Barack Hussein Obama won popular vote majorities twice.

Here’s something important that we have yet to learn, but might:

How much of the grumpiness is about Biden, the economy, or neither? - One remarkable feature of this election cycle is that an incumbent was running for reelection during a time of solid economic growth, historically low unemployment, and relative peace, and appeared to be losing. Incumbents basically never lose — and are never this unpopular — in these kinds of conditions. Relatedly, people were convinced, wrongly, that the economy was in terrible shape. So what was behind this? Was it:

• people were really bothered by Biden’s age, and that made them think less about the economy and the condition of the country?

• people were really bothered by their perceptions of the economy (memories of inflation from two years ago, high interest rates, etc.) and that made them upset with Biden?

• something else?

It is possible that, over the coming weeks and months, we will start to see economic perceptions improve. If so, it could just be the result of economic growth and low unemployment lasting long enough that people begin to believe it. But it could also be a result of the Democratic Party having a new face and an energetic campaign, and that’s reshaped the way people view everything else.