Kamala Now

Making the case for the ultimate pivot.

Just under one year ago, Joe Biden was gearing up to officially announce his re-election campaign. Even back then, I had major doubts. While the afterglow of the midterms convinced me that 2024 would be a race to lose for any Democrat, I was worried that Biden was a uniquely inadequate vessel for the anti-Trump, anti-Republican feelings sweeping the country. So on April 23rd, 2023, two days before his 2024 campaign was announced, I published a piece making the case that he should step aside. My argument back then—that Biden’s weakness stems from negative perceptions of his leadership ability, not specific issues like “wokeness” or even the economy—is one I still stand by to this day. I believe it’s been vindicated repeatedly by events over the past year, and it’s why I still strongly believe that he should drop out of the race. 

But no matter how much I criticized Biden, no matter how deeply I believed that he was risking blowing a race that could otherwise be a Democratic landslide, there had always been one line that I was unwilling to cross. This line was supporting the nomination of one Kamala Devi Harris for President of the United States in his place.

At the time, this wasn’t a close call. If a Biden nomination was an unacceptable risk, then a Harris nomination was nothing less than an act of political suicide. This seemed so overwhelmingly obvious to me that just taking time to spell out why felt redundant. Her first presidential campaign ended before anyone had cast a single vote. Her electoral record from before that is near-nonexistent, with her few contested races yielding results ranging from simply poor to downright catastrophic. She’s failed to impress on both the campaign trail and in office since she was selected as Biden’s running mate in 2020. And the polls. Don’t even talk about the polls. Ever since the two have appeared in the same surveys together, Kamala has always underrun Joe Biden against Trump by a substantial margin. If he was up decisively, she was barely managing a lead; if he was holding on narrowly, she was down; if he was facing a deficit, she was on track for a landslide defeat.

Back then, this seemed to close the book. For as many issues as a Biden 2024 campaign may have presented, he appeared unquestionably stronger than his most likely replacement, giving his effort a (very contorted and confused) electability argument. It solved at least one problem, even if it was a problem entirely of Biden’s own making.

But things change. Over the past year, the president’s position has deteriorated substantially. His disapproval numbers have gone up. His standing in the polls against Trump has gone down. He himself looks far worse, sounds far worse, and is far less active on the campaign trail than he was in 2020. Worst of all, nothing from the Biden team suggests that they’re capable of even recognizing these problems, much less solving them. It feels like watching a car crash in slow motion while the driver is mocking you for suggesting anything might be going wrong. In the face of this, Kamala Harris has found herself in an interesting position. With each passing day, the idea of her at the top of the ticket feels less like a worst-case scenario and more like a real idea worthy of consideration.

This isn’t because she has somehow engineered a miraculous comeback or improved her style over the last year. Her approval rating remains poor, she’s just as awkward as ever, and she still underruns Biden in most polls. But with that said, it’s important to remember that politics isn’t about polling and polling alone. For as weak as her standing may be now, Kamala has consistently stood out as one of the few people within this administration to have a reasonably clear understanding of the election. This may not be impressive in and of itself, but it has caused me to look at her in a new light. Now, with Biden’s troubles mounting by the day, I’m finally ready to make a case I thought I would never make.

As of today, March 7, 2024, and for as long as the president and his team are unwilling to break free from complacency, Kamala Harris is a better option than Joe Biden in the general election against Trump. In this article, I will seek to prove it.

To begin, we must first understand the context in which we live and everything that came before us.