yakov_a_jerkov | Jun. 30th, 2024

После впечатляющего выступления Байдена на дебатах, очень многие писали, что единственной реальной заменой Байдену является Харрис. В частности, тот же Маршалл, которого я цитировал вчера, говорил, что поскольку черные и женщины являются фундаментальными составляющими (это я по памяти своими словами, так как статья мне больше недоступна), то невозможно заменить Байдена ни на кого, кроме вице-президента, черную женщину.

Мне однако кажется, что Chait в своей сегодняшней статье, Biden and Harris’s Absurd Case for Complacency, довольно убедительно этому возражает. Цитирую с большими сокращениями.

Now, while I think Harris is probably a better option than Biden, she is not the Democrats’ best option. If you undertake a change as radical as swapping out your presidential candidate because he’s losing to a sociopathic criminal, then you should really go ahead and pick a candidate whose political and governing skills have the confidence of the party elite. As Napoleon said, if you start to take Vienna, take Vienna.

This brings me to the next problem with the Biden-Harris argument for staying the course. If Harris is passed over, the threat is that Black voters won’t give Democrats the necessary landslide margins they need. That is happening already. Almost every poll shows the Biden-Harris ticket is garnering the lowest levels of Black support for any Democratic ticket in decades. The danger of a depressed Black electorate is being used to maintain a ticket that is losing in part because of a depressed Black electorate.

What evidence is there that having Harris as vice president and heir apparent has any positive effect on a constituency outside of political elites and professional activists who whisper to reporters? What reason is there to believe a different ticket, which could easily feature a different Black vice-presidential candidate on it, would fare any worse?

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Identity politics in American elections is not some modern Democratic Party innovation. For most of our history, campaigns were bound by an unstated but extremely firm requirement that the candidate pool be limited to white men. Parties have always deliberately chosen candidates with backgrounds tailored to appeal to identity blocs — Protestant, Catholic, German, Irish, etc. It was long standard practice for presidential tickets to balance a Southern presidential nominee with a Northerner, or vice-versa. None of this was seen as fatally compromising qualifications for the sake of identity politics.

Still, even when parties employed hard regional or ethnic quotas for picking candidates, they still applied some test of candidate skill. The bosses in the smoke-filled room would try to assess whether the candidate could garner votes. That was the candidate’s job, garnering votes. And there has never been any reason to believe Harris possesses this talent at the level required to win a presidential election.

She won a Senate race in California, but that is a state where winning the nomination is tantamount to winning the general election. It does not require appealing to any voters who are not reliable Democrats. (For this same reason, I would absolutely not consider Gavin Newsom to replace Biden).

Harris is telegenic, and appears forceful in prepared settings when she can use her prosecutorial background. I was an early supporter of her 2020 presidential campaign. But that campaign was utterly shambolic. Despite having the benefit of the media treating her as a top-tier candidate, she committed a series of blunders, including changing her position on Medicare for All — at the time the most important issue in the campaign — three times, without ever being able to discuss the issue coherently.

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Again, even with all her limitations, Harris is probably a stronger candidate now than Biden. I also think there are better options than Harris. My choice would be Gretchen Whitmer, who’s displayed a repeated talent at appealing to swing voters, and who could be paired with a Black running mate like Cory Booker. There are other promising options, but I won’t pretend I can offer any single solution with any confidence that it’s the best way to go. I do believe that almost any change, including a Harris nomination, makes more sense than keeping a nominee who has so deeply forfeited public confidence.