She got votes in 2020 as the VP and in the primaries on the same basis. She was elected as the VP to an elderly President and Biden won the 2024 nomination with her as the known VP candidate. No other contender had that level of support, and there is no way to do more voting before the convention on that scale.
With regards to the current race I am pretty sure that the only reason Trump lost in 2020 was Covid. That needs to be factored into any discussion about how good Harris is as an actual candidate.
It’s impossible to say. The pandemic so totally and drastically altered 2020 — from the situation of the incumbent to the Democratic primary to the issues of the election, the state of the economy, the financial situations of ordinary Americans, the manner of voting, even the composition of the electorate itself — that it’s impossible to know what more “normal” summer and fall 2020 campaign season would have looked like, much less who would have voted in November or for whom. Given that Biden won in 2020 whereas in this alternative reality Biden hasn’t proven with 100% certainty that he wins in the end, I suppose it’s “more likely” Trump would have been re-elected.
Trump won by about 56k votes out of 127 million cast in 2016. In 2020 he lost by about 44k votes out of 155 million. The margin of victory was razor thin, even more so than in 2016.
In addition when times are bad voters tend to blame the incumbent. Ask Joe Biden: inflation and illegal immigration are probably the two big factors behind so-called "Trump nostalgia". In 2020 there was a pandemic plus a pandemic induced recession. I just have a hard time imagining that that didn't shift 22k votes in a country of 330 million people.
Finally, Trump is leading in the polls now. The fact that he's the frontrunner currently suggests to me that in an alternate universe where he didn't have to deal with Covid that he probably would have coasted to victory.
I think it suggests that it would be difficult to predict the outcome of an election held under radically different circumstances, but not Trump—who could easily have won!—would have “coasted” to victory. Again, I think a counterfactual here is going to wind up being whatever just so story anyone wants to tell.
Given the advantages of a) incumbency and b) the electoral college I have a hard time believing that Trump would have lost absent some crisis that turned incumbent effects on their head. It's the same problem Biden is facing now--when times are bad voters blame the incumbent.
Also given that it's widely accepted that incumbency is normally a major advantage in political contests I don't see how it makes sense to discount those crises that reverse an advantage into a liability.
“The incumbent usually wins” is an argument for why the incumbent might win, but given that the incumbent also loses a fair amount of the time, it is again not giving me your utter confidence that the incumbent would have won under circumstances so different from the ones we experienced that we can’t really account for them.
The irony being that COVID gave Trump a golden opportunity to look presidential, and in an election year, no less - a natural disaster that had the citizens clamoring to be led to safety, and he could even blame China while doing so.
No amount of spin would have explained away massive job losses, social unrest, business bankruptcies, etc. The long arm of Covid, it could be argued, is responsible for massive anti-incumbent fervor in Europe and around the world.
IIRC, there was anti-incumbent fervor before COVID, and the job losses, etc. were covered by the US basically temporarily turning into a social welfare state.
I have this memory from a year or two ago that "well, if Biden steps aside, he'll have to name Kamala as his successor, or else" with the or-else being stuff about blacks and women in the party. And everyone remembered how bad Harris was.
So, yeah, the party wanted to avoid the pain. There's probably some Shakespeare play here.
I assume it's a response to your claim that she received no votes outside of California, when she clearly has as Biden's running-mate. This could not have plausibly factored into decisions around the 2024 primary (which technically did exist), because Harris was not the nominee at that point. If your post is *solely* to prove that the party should have facilitated a more competitive primary, it's still pretty contentious given the liabilities - but I think people are taking issue with your repeated insinuations that the *current* process, *conditional on* the hand that's been dealt, is somehow a subversion of democracy. It calls to mind some of the uglier, more conspiratorial elements of the Bernie Sanders movement, which poisoned the minds of millions of young people. Just as no one should be saying "it's her turn", no one should be saying "it's rigged", that's just lazy.
One last note: I know you say "it's not really about Kamala", but I actually think that makes your position weaker. It would be more healthy if people just directly criticized the presumptive nominee (like, on policy, temperament, etc). All of this fixation on whether she's a DEI hire, whether she was coronated, and whether her identity makes her immune from criticism are all distractions from more interesting discussions we could be having.
How could it possibly *not* be a subversion of democracy? People voted - for as much as their vote even counts for in a two-party primary - for Biden. Then, at the last minute, Biden drops, endorses Harris, <something happens> and suddenly Harris has enough delegate votes to take the nomination?
Even if the delegates voted for whoever they wanted on the convention floor, it would not be "democratic" because the nominee is being decided by a tiny number of party members. But we didn't even get that; an even-tinier group of people decided it would be Harris, and then talked to delegates to secure their votes without any alternative being offered, and with clear implication that anyone who tried to jump into the process would face political reprisal or approbation of some kind.
This is a country where we say "the people elect the President" but every single one of these events makes that more and more laughable of an idea. How is that not a subversion of democracy? Especially from a party that calls themselves The Democrats, who are openly running on the platform of Saving Democracy?
My impression of your post is that it's casting completely innocuous events in a nefarious light. None of the things mentioned seem as outrageous as you imply, but I'm going in with an open mind here. Some questions and observations:
0. What, specifically, do you wish was done instead? I feel like a lot of my questions can be answered just by knowing this.
1. Is a nominee selecting their running mate a subversion of democracy? This is a decision ultimately left to one person; the people only get to vote on it during the general election.
2. Is a president stepping down, and being replaced by the vice president who is their constitutionally-mandated successor, a subversion of democracy? We allow for emergency safeguards when immediately holding an election isn't practical. Again, you could characterize this decision as some dictatorial fiat, but most wouldn't intuitively see it that way.
3. Is Biden's decision to drop out of the race a subversion of democracy? The people similarly didn't get to vote on it, except in the primary, in which the Biden/Harris ticket was endorsed by 14 million voters.
4. The primary was held before voters rendered a more damning verdict on his cognitive ability. But consider how we even know what voters feel now. By which I mean, all of these events occur in a context where parties and individuals are responsive to changes in polling. Biden's decision was influenced by polls showing he could not win. There is an understanding that polls are a real-time democratic "update" that can, for the sake of expediency, reduce the need for a literal referendum on a candidate - they aren't just just randomly generated charts and tables, a sample of real human beings is surveyed. I wouldn't endorse polling as the foundation for *every* decision, but when the result is so extreme and widely replicated (so the polls aren't really in doubt), and when there's so little time to make a decision, it's the best available proxy for popular opinion.
5. Polls also showed Harris as the overwhelming favorite to replace Biden. It's unfortunate that she can't be thoroughly vetted in a primary, but there's no feasible alternative given the time constraints. If the favored candidate was someone else, I might have more reservations about this process, but this seems like the best balance of expediency and legitimacy.
6. Delegates are also human beings who can make volitional decisions. Chances are, if the primary electorate backs Harris as Biden's successor, then so do the delegates, genuinely.
7. As to your other post, I think the focus on democracy supposedly being subverted is a distraction, because (a) the case for it isn't very strong on the merits, (b) no one has proposed a viable alternative conditional on current assumptions, including the fact that it's July, (c) Harris likely would have prevailed in any formal process, and (d) the people most vocally complaining *dislike Harris as a candidate*, so why not just focus on that? Maybe this analogy is a bit of a stretch, but it's sort of like singularly focusing on Trump being a felon or Ted Cruz being born in Canada - isn't it more important to focus on their flaws as candidates?
1. No; our system is set up (and has long since been) such that the nominee selects their VP. And people do get to vote on it, as you note, in the general election, as well as by supporting or opposing candidates who might want to change that system. I don't see anything inherently anti-democratic about the nominee selecting their own VP, esp given that the Prez appoints dozens and dozens of other roles, but if people had proposals to make those processes *more* democratic, I might support them.
2. No, because as you said, it is in the Constitution. I am all for amending the constitution to make it less dumb, but the VP succeeding the President is well inside the process outlined by the Constitution, and if it were broadly unpopular, people can support or oppose candidates who propose constitutional amendments as part of the regular democratic process.
3. No, and that's pretty silly. How would we *stop* someone from quitting their job, without violating the 14th amendment?
The rest of your points are still numbered but aren't asking any questions. But to respond to your question 0, which also responds to many of those random points: we already have a perfectly good process for doing this, as I mentioned previously: the Convention. Harris (and others) can run between now and the Convention, and then delegates can vote in the standard, already-agreed-to process for determining the nominee. You don't have to try to do a full popular vote of the country, because we already prepared for situations where a different nominee can be chosen than the ones on the ballot. Harris could have easily won a vote on the convention floor - if she is as popular as you suggest - so the fact that they didn't even TRY to PRETEND like there was a choice is a bit of a slap in the face.
"Harris (and others) can run between now and the Convention, and then delegates can vote in the standard, already-agreed-to process for determining the nominee."
This is literally the current process. Are you suggesting that the rules were changed? The only reason there's no contest is because nobody is throwing their hat in the ring. They are not doing that because they don't have the popular support, which is a proxy for democracy.
Another reason we know the outcome already is because delegates tend to pledge their votes beforehand. There's good reason for this, since it gives an up-to-date measure of candidates' support, but also because the convention has speeches planned in advance which are meant as kind of a rallying cry for the nominee. So, on a practical level, it's helpful to know if there's going to be a clear winner in advance.
Anyway, I still don't see the problem, but I appreciated that this forced me to read up on procedure and be more informed.
PS: I also learned there's a (apparently bipartisan) "Task Force on Election Crises" and they've pushed back on much of the panic around this.
I also just have to respond to your note " All of this fixation on whether she's a DEI hire, whether she was coronated, and whether her identity makes her immune from criticism are all distractions from more interesting discussions we could be having."
"All of this" is literally the democratic process. The process is what undergirds a democracy. We can (and should) debate whether "the process" is actually democratic. We can (and should) debate when that process is truncated, avoided, or subverted, about what that means for our ostensibly democratic system. Those seem like very interesting discussions to have, during a time when Preserving Democracy Itself seems to be front of people's minds
the DNC chair literally fled in the dead of night, her successor admitted they cheated, and they embarked on like a fourth Red Scare to prevent the hard proof from having any consequences
Ooookay. I predict this is going to go as follows:
-I ask "what hard proof?"
-You provide something that is much less than hard proof.
-I point out that what you mention is either false, exaggerated, or did not tangibly affect the outcome of the primary in which Hillary Clinton won by nearly 4 million votes and hundreds of pledged delegates.
-You backtrack onto a much weaker claim, not acknowledging that you claimed there was hard proof.
At this point, I've become so well-versed in the 2016 primary conspiracy theories that I'd be surprised to see anything new, so forgive my cynicism.
It's not as if his senility didn't suddenly appear out of nowhere in the last few weeks. Caity Johnstone pointed it out in 2019 and she wasn't the only one. Biden aides have more or less admitted that they staged events so as to make his senility less obvious.
"She got votes.... that level of support" Yeah, and I'm sure she'll "get votes" in November and when exactly was the "level of support" of potential contenders actually tested? Did you even read Freddie's criticism of the detoured route that led to this unfolding debacle? You skipped over the lot of it with this pathetic cope.
This argument seems really strange to me. Have you ever withheld a vote for a presidential candidate on the basis of their vice president? Have you ever even heard of this happening?
Interesting. That's a fair point. I doubt many of those folks would have voted for Obama instead because of Palin, but I can see where a VP can be a bit of a boat anchor if you pick one who is very loud and not very diplomatic, often overshadowing the candidate themselves.
I voted for Biden because I thought he was the best candidate to beat Trump. I was disappointed in Harris. I listened to the in-depth interviews NPR did and she was the one I found least appealing. I still voted for Biden, but my vote wasn't for Harris, she just went along for the ride. The only time the VP made a difference to me was John McCain. I would have voted for him if he didn't have Sarah Palin as a running mate.
Biden/Harris were running unopposed in 2024. That was the party elite decision, not rank and file democratic voters. No other contender had that support because the party threatened any viable candidates with political suicide.
There's all the difference in the world between leading the ticket and being attached to one. Harris imploded in 2020 before even making it to the Iowa Caucus so last time voters had a chance to directly select her they decided not to.
"(It remains the case that she has never received a single vote from any voters outside of California, ever, in her political career, which some might suggest represents a wee bit of risk.) "
To be fair, most presidential candidates have never been elected to anything outside their home state. Trump couldn't even boast that on his resume.
I mean, watching the Team D cult abandon even the pretense of principle is most instructive, but I also try to call balls and strikes.
Yeah, but CA is pretty far outside the mainstream. Shapiro hasn't won anything outside of PA either but I think the median voter in PA/WI/MI is going to be a lot more important than the median voter in CA/TX/NY.
yeah, even the numerous younger candidates showed how hard the DNC had managed to clear the bench: Ben from Parks & Rec, a MA Senator, a MN Senator, and Yang; and this year was just Williamson and Phillips
If a candidate has a health or mental issue that makes it impossible to actually win a campaign than an *intra-party* popularity contest would be quite useful to weed the ineffective candidate out. Like, as you mentioned, it weeded Harris out in 2020. I think she dropped out before voting occurred (I think FdB mentioned), the polling was so bad.
Yeah, that’s true. I’m not a political junkie, I’m more interested in human nature and am fascinated how we are fooled into not seeing the obvious. Dammit, he would have won.
Freddie clearly meant that fact that she also's never gotten a vote in a primary, but I think she was on some ballots even though she dropped out. Every major party candidate of my lifetime (and most of the non-major party candidates) did get primary votes.
It seems like the majority of the Democratic rank and file are quite happy with this decision, which suggests that this isn’t much of an abdication of principle at all.
To be fair, these are the same people who were insisting that Biden was a little under the weather until the very end. Team D could nominate Adolf Eichmann or Pol Pot and they'd be singing hosannas.
You think so? Near as I can tell, most of my Democratic friends—the true rank and file—were gritting their teeth thinking about voting for Biden. Like, actual voters were often far less deluded, and they’re content-to-happy with Harris.
Yep. Pretty much every Dem voter I know, to my left or my right, is elated now that it’s Kamala instead of Biden. Surprisingly to me, tbh. I get where Freddie seems to be coming from is his legitimate grievances about the coronation of Hillary in 2016 and the way Bernie was shoved out. I was pissed about that too. But I think that what happened this year made sense pragmatically.
Yes. Let's have federal financing all the way. Cutting the donor-class off at the pocketbook sounds like the best prescription, yet, for restoring democracy to full health.
I have a very specific dream of campaign finance reform where if you get on the ballot, you get a specific amount of money to campaign, with which you can do whatever you like. TV ads. A Macy's float. Embezzle it. I don't care. But you get no other funding at all, no PACs, not even spending your own personal fortune. Let all American politics be utterly subsidized by the taxpayer and by no one else, so that the taxpayer is the only special interest group.
Of course this will never happen and also it's unconstitutional but I can still dream.
Coronating Kamala as part of the Dem establishment coup was a bad look. They should have at least pretended to be "open", at least for a week. Stupid oligarchs and their midwit minions.
I think they were afraid of being open and it going out of control. However, I don't think it needed to be that way. A mini-primary with strict ground rules (thou shalt not speak ill of other candidates) would have galvanized the country. It would have been reality tv! Entertainment. Celebrity. People would have tuned it. Trump would loose it big time if the Dems got better ratings. Coronating Kamala is a huge opportunity lost. Hey! If she can win against competition, go for it.
I think there are two reasons they didn’t do this. 1) Just not enough time to get it to work; 2) it could put some small flank of the party (presumably the left) in a role as kingmakers, extracting concessions that would hurt their chances in the general election.
But I concur it would have been awesome for all the reasons you name.
In my state the NHDP held a "nominating event" for Biden where they just said that he won, no voters needed. The Trump team/his allies in state parties cleared the deck for him as well to the best of their ability. We haven't had a real competitive primary for anyone since 2016, which may help explain why it feels like we've been crystallized in a glistening coprolite of time since then.
And yeah, the "you guys are racist" thing really, really isn't going to work. In fact I'm guessing this will be the cycle that Republicans start calling Ds who obsess over identity categories racist - and not the tongue in cheek "the real racists" thing, they'll actually mean it. Progressives put a lot of sharp instruments on the torture table over the past eight years and conservatives are starting to get the hang of them.
The President of the United States, who was democratically elected in 2020 with Harris as his VP, is no longer able to perform his duties, therefore his Vice President - who, again, was also elected in 2020, will take over. This makes perfect sense to me, and clearly a plurality of Democratic voters agree, as demonstrated by the obvious groundswell of enthusiasm and donations that have occurred since making her nomination official. I would have of course preferred a "real" primary before we got to this point (not that I believe anything different would have resulted from it), but trying to force another quick one now would only lead to more chaos and in-fighting. I greatly enjoy your writing - I even bought your latest book - but feel like you've really missed the mark on this one.
Yes, Biden should step down immediately. Let's see Kamala perform the duties of the office that she's been nominated to run for in the general election.
That is not how presidential elections work! Winning the VP position in 2020 doesn't hand you the presidential nod in 2024! That has never been a thing!
If the president is unable to perform his duties then the VP takes over the job of president … NOW. That doesn’t dictate where the nomination goes for a future election.
Also, no one voted for Biden because of Kamala. Just that he wasn’t trump
IMO, it has every bearing on the upcoming election. If Biden cannot serve, the 25th should have been invoked, but nobody had the balls for that. Pelosi had not given her approval to that procedure. That way, we could see whether Harris had any executive skills at all and then, according to theory, the Democrats could have run a real primary! Didn't happen, did it? That primary was exclusionary to the extreme. I voted as a Young Democrat. I never will vote Dem again. I feel that I have learned a lesson.
"the 25th should have been invoked, but nobody had the balls for that"
It’s not really about balls. If Biden were removed or he resigned, the new VP would have to be confirmed by Congress, and Republicans have shown zero willingness to cooperate on that sort of vote. They literally stole a SC justice that way. It would put a member of the opposition party a heartbeat away from the presidency. Not ideal! And without a VP, the results of the election literally can’t be certified. Not having a VP would be a massive clusterfuck for the whole country, so we should all cross our fingers that Biden hangs on until Jan 20.
To me it isn't an issue of whether he can serve out his presidency, but whether he can win the election and go another four years. It was clear that 4 more years was too much.
Agree here. It seems to me that there is a risk that some states might not allow Kamala to replace Joe on the general election ballot due to their state rules for this democratic process. I think this is going to be a SCOTUS decision, and I think the court is going to side with the states... something the court did to help the Democrats in the challenges to the 2020 election.
> It seems to me that there is a risk that some states might not allow Kamala to replace Joe on the general election ballot due to their state rules for this democratic process
No. There were some keep-Joe people trying this scare-tactic, but that's all it was.
Deadlines for getting on ballots don't happen until after the convention.
There may be some extremely bad-faith lawsuits from Republicans, but they'll get the same treatment the Kraken lawsuits got.
I don’t understand what process you’re imagining could have happened, in these circumstances. The only thing that would fulfill your conditions is to throw away the results of the primary and run a new one in which every democrat in the country got a chance to vote. Literally no way that could happen. So it was going to be decided in back rooms by delegates and bosses at a contested convention even if they had one, which would have been essentially the same process that actually happened, just delayed.
I didn't hear Freddie call for a new primary. He was lamenting the lack of any meaningful primary and the sorry results that have followed. And yes, the Democratic Party could have held a meaningful primary process. But they didn't. Oh well...
No, he was pretty clearly saying that they should have had a "more democratic" process now. I think the idea that the original primary should have been "real" is moot. No one really disagrees with that. Given the current circumstances, I don't really see how they could.
"Pretty clearly." Really? Where did he "pretty clearly" state that there should be a new primary? Or are you suggesting some other "more democratic" process? If so, what exactly are you proposing?
Freddie wrote, "The major problem is that I think the Democrats have essentially abandoned any pretense that the voters get to choose their candidates, which is part of a larger bad dynamic where the party is increasingly ruled by an utterly unaccountable aristocracy of cutthroat neoliberals."
This is a description of a problem that is not moot because it has resulted in an unfolding debacle for the party that claims it is "Defending Democracy" and that this is "The Most Important Election Ever."
Shrugging and saying "too late, so sorry it doesn't really matter" is indeed sorry: a sorry, sorry cope. Reality bites.
"Something could have happened at the convention. Was any outcome going to be ideal, after Biden’s withdrawal? No. Should there have been some process through which Harris had to be chosen over real rivals at the convention? Yes! I can’t tell you what the right kind of contested or brokered convention would have been."
That seems unequivocal. Yes, there was a lot in his piece lamenting the lack of a primary worthy of the word. But he is pretty clearly and directly arguing for a more democratic process in the way Biden's replacement was selected, *even though it should have been a competitive primary months ago.*
Okay, but hasn't that door been closed--or at least deeply damaged--by party elites wrapping their arms around Harris? Who exactly is going to step up and run against her? Again, Freddie was using the Past Tense, not prescribing what should happen now.
I'm not sure why it's moot to point out that the Democratic Party and its handmaidens have behaved in a most Undemocratic fashion and to lament the results of the election fixing. This supposedly "moot" point is certain to bite in November.
I can speak for myself in saying that I won't vote for Harris, damn what may come.
It (the door I mean) has closed, as far as I can tell. If you look at my post, you'd see that I put the claim about "now" in the past tense as well (not my most clear writing ever). My point is that Freddie wasn't merely lamenting the primary, which a whole LOT of people have been doing and doesn't really require a lot of thinking at this point; he was actively criticizing the most recent seeming method through which Kamala Harris was selected, suggesting it could have been handled some other way.
> but hasn't that door been closed--or at least deeply damaged--by party elites wrapping their arms around Harris?
Yes! And that's precisely Freddie's complaint!
I think the bigger problem may be that *no one else genuinely wanted to run*. They may have thought running a 3-month campaign and losing would damage their brand. Right or wrong, if they all think that, you can't force them to run.
There were still longshots, I guess. Manchin, Dean Phillips. Maybe Williamson since it's silly season.
Obama apparently *really* wanted an open process at the convention and not an instant coronation, but he spent all his political capital with Biden getting Biden to quit.
Biden’s senility has been a punchline in standup comedy for three years now. Youtube compilations of this clearly incapacitated man have collectively hundreds of millions, if not billions of views.
His inability to do the job was obvious for at least two years now. The fact he was ever the nominee is absolutely fucking insane. It’s shameful this was forced to happen.
I don’t think you’re accurately assessing the situation. I’m not making a normative argument about elitist cliques; I just don’t think you have a rational sense of how difficult it is to get a coalition together.
1) It would have absolutely been great to have a real primary before. The problem is that, once Biden chose to run, it felt like having a firmly contested primary was going to do more harm than good to the party’s chances to win. No one wanted to throw their hat in the ring, spend a ton of time trashing a sitting President, then lose and have all your sound bites replayed by Republicans. The history of sitting presidents undergoing serious primary challenges is _terrible._ If you are super-concerned about taking out Trump, then you might not want to take the risk. This was a major mistake, but it was rational with the information they had and the difficulty of collective decision-making.
2) Again, now, people are making the rational decision: since there is a pretty fair record of contested conventions going badly, AND that there is again a situation where people are operating in the dark, the risk of coalescing around a suboptimal but OK candidate is less than having a convention that doesn’t _really_ help the process seem more democratic and might do more harm than good if things get vitriolic. It’s not at all stupid to decide that keeping a united front provides a better likelihood of success than having to hammer out a candidate in a short time.
It’s easy and fun to say that these groups with all kinds of different interests and goals should do things _your way,_ but I don’t think that’s how large groups like this work.
For point 1: yes, but look who did get in. Dean Phillips ran because Biden's age related issues were an open secret around DC. If Biden had been forced to debate there's every possibility that what happened in June would instead have taken place a few months earlier, in the context of a Democratic primary.
Instead Biden had to drop out anyway and instead of Phillips, RFK Jr., etc. at the top of the ticket you've got Harris.
Yeah, I think that’s right. The party was too risk-averse and is paying for it, but only outsiders with nothing to lose were willing to call out the facts us normies already knew. (Phillips was my own rep, btw!)
She got votes in 2020 as the VP and in the primaries on the same basis. She was elected as the VP to an elderly President and Biden won the 2024 nomination with her as the known VP candidate. No other contender had that level of support, and there is no way to do more voting before the convention on that scale.
With regards to the current race I am pretty sure that the only reason Trump lost in 2020 was Covid. That needs to be factored into any discussion about how good Harris is as an actual candidate.
It’s impossible to say. The pandemic so totally and drastically altered 2020 — from the situation of the incumbent to the Democratic primary to the issues of the election, the state of the economy, the financial situations of ordinary Americans, the manner of voting, even the composition of the electorate itself — that it’s impossible to know what more “normal” summer and fall 2020 campaign season would have looked like, much less who would have voted in November or for whom. Given that Biden won in 2020 whereas in this alternative reality Biden hasn’t proven with 100% certainty that he wins in the end, I suppose it’s “more likely” Trump would have been re-elected.
Trump won by about 56k votes out of 127 million cast in 2016. In 2020 he lost by about 44k votes out of 155 million. The margin of victory was razor thin, even more so than in 2016.
In addition when times are bad voters tend to blame the incumbent. Ask Joe Biden: inflation and illegal immigration are probably the two big factors behind so-called "Trump nostalgia". In 2020 there was a pandemic plus a pandemic induced recession. I just have a hard time imagining that that didn't shift 22k votes in a country of 330 million people.
Finally, Trump is leading in the polls now. The fact that he's the frontrunner currently suggests to me that in an alternate universe where he didn't have to deal with Covid that he probably would have coasted to victory.
I think it suggests that it would be difficult to predict the outcome of an election held under radically different circumstances, but not Trump—who could easily have won!—would have “coasted” to victory. Again, I think a counterfactual here is going to wind up being whatever just so story anyone wants to tell.
Given the advantages of a) incumbency and b) the electoral college I have a hard time believing that Trump would have lost absent some crisis that turned incumbent effects on their head. It's the same problem Biden is facing now--when times are bad voters blame the incumbent.
Also given that it's widely accepted that incumbency is normally a major advantage in political contests I don't see how it makes sense to discount those crises that reverse an advantage into a liability.
“The incumbent usually wins” is an argument for why the incumbent might win, but given that the incumbent also loses a fair amount of the time, it is again not giving me your utter confidence that the incumbent would have won under circumstances so different from the ones we experienced that we can’t really account for them.
The irony being that COVID gave Trump a golden opportunity to look presidential, and in an election year, no less - a natural disaster that had the citizens clamoring to be led to safety, and he could even blame China while doing so.
No amount of spin would have explained away massive job losses, social unrest, business bankruptcies, etc. The long arm of Covid, it could be argued, is responsible for massive anti-incumbent fervor in Europe and around the world.
IIRC, there was anti-incumbent fervor before COVID, and the job losses, etc. were covered by the US basically temporarily turning into a social welfare state.
How is that a defense of not holding a primary for this upcoming election?
They probably held off on pushing Biden out to avoid the messy ickiness of a primary
I have this memory from a year or two ago that "well, if Biden steps aside, he'll have to name Kamala as his successor, or else" with the or-else being stuff about blacks and women in the party. And everyone remembered how bad Harris was.
So, yeah, the party wanted to avoid the pain. There's probably some Shakespeare play here.
I assume it's a response to your claim that she received no votes outside of California, when she clearly has as Biden's running-mate. This could not have plausibly factored into decisions around the 2024 primary (which technically did exist), because Harris was not the nominee at that point. If your post is *solely* to prove that the party should have facilitated a more competitive primary, it's still pretty contentious given the liabilities - but I think people are taking issue with your repeated insinuations that the *current* process, *conditional on* the hand that's been dealt, is somehow a subversion of democracy. It calls to mind some of the uglier, more conspiratorial elements of the Bernie Sanders movement, which poisoned the minds of millions of young people. Just as no one should be saying "it's her turn", no one should be saying "it's rigged", that's just lazy.
One last note: I know you say "it's not really about Kamala", but I actually think that makes your position weaker. It would be more healthy if people just directly criticized the presumptive nominee (like, on policy, temperament, etc). All of this fixation on whether she's a DEI hire, whether she was coronated, and whether her identity makes her immune from criticism are all distractions from more interesting discussions we could be having.
How could it possibly *not* be a subversion of democracy? People voted - for as much as their vote even counts for in a two-party primary - for Biden. Then, at the last minute, Biden drops, endorses Harris, <something happens> and suddenly Harris has enough delegate votes to take the nomination?
Even if the delegates voted for whoever they wanted on the convention floor, it would not be "democratic" because the nominee is being decided by a tiny number of party members. But we didn't even get that; an even-tinier group of people decided it would be Harris, and then talked to delegates to secure their votes without any alternative being offered, and with clear implication that anyone who tried to jump into the process would face political reprisal or approbation of some kind.
This is a country where we say "the people elect the President" but every single one of these events makes that more and more laughable of an idea. How is that not a subversion of democracy? Especially from a party that calls themselves The Democrats, who are openly running on the platform of Saving Democracy?
My impression of your post is that it's casting completely innocuous events in a nefarious light. None of the things mentioned seem as outrageous as you imply, but I'm going in with an open mind here. Some questions and observations:
0. What, specifically, do you wish was done instead? I feel like a lot of my questions can be answered just by knowing this.
1. Is a nominee selecting their running mate a subversion of democracy? This is a decision ultimately left to one person; the people only get to vote on it during the general election.
2. Is a president stepping down, and being replaced by the vice president who is their constitutionally-mandated successor, a subversion of democracy? We allow for emergency safeguards when immediately holding an election isn't practical. Again, you could characterize this decision as some dictatorial fiat, but most wouldn't intuitively see it that way.
3. Is Biden's decision to drop out of the race a subversion of democracy? The people similarly didn't get to vote on it, except in the primary, in which the Biden/Harris ticket was endorsed by 14 million voters.
4. The primary was held before voters rendered a more damning verdict on his cognitive ability. But consider how we even know what voters feel now. By which I mean, all of these events occur in a context where parties and individuals are responsive to changes in polling. Biden's decision was influenced by polls showing he could not win. There is an understanding that polls are a real-time democratic "update" that can, for the sake of expediency, reduce the need for a literal referendum on a candidate - they aren't just just randomly generated charts and tables, a sample of real human beings is surveyed. I wouldn't endorse polling as the foundation for *every* decision, but when the result is so extreme and widely replicated (so the polls aren't really in doubt), and when there's so little time to make a decision, it's the best available proxy for popular opinion.
5. Polls also showed Harris as the overwhelming favorite to replace Biden. It's unfortunate that she can't be thoroughly vetted in a primary, but there's no feasible alternative given the time constraints. If the favored candidate was someone else, I might have more reservations about this process, but this seems like the best balance of expediency and legitimacy.
6. Delegates are also human beings who can make volitional decisions. Chances are, if the primary electorate backs Harris as Biden's successor, then so do the delegates, genuinely.
7. As to your other post, I think the focus on democracy supposedly being subverted is a distraction, because (a) the case for it isn't very strong on the merits, (b) no one has proposed a viable alternative conditional on current assumptions, including the fact that it's July, (c) Harris likely would have prevailed in any formal process, and (d) the people most vocally complaining *dislike Harris as a candidate*, so why not just focus on that? Maybe this analogy is a bit of a stretch, but it's sort of like singularly focusing on Trump being a felon or Ted Cruz being born in Canada - isn't it more important to focus on their flaws as candidates?
1. No; our system is set up (and has long since been) such that the nominee selects their VP. And people do get to vote on it, as you note, in the general election, as well as by supporting or opposing candidates who might want to change that system. I don't see anything inherently anti-democratic about the nominee selecting their own VP, esp given that the Prez appoints dozens and dozens of other roles, but if people had proposals to make those processes *more* democratic, I might support them.
2. No, because as you said, it is in the Constitution. I am all for amending the constitution to make it less dumb, but the VP succeeding the President is well inside the process outlined by the Constitution, and if it were broadly unpopular, people can support or oppose candidates who propose constitutional amendments as part of the regular democratic process.
3. No, and that's pretty silly. How would we *stop* someone from quitting their job, without violating the 14th amendment?
The rest of your points are still numbered but aren't asking any questions. But to respond to your question 0, which also responds to many of those random points: we already have a perfectly good process for doing this, as I mentioned previously: the Convention. Harris (and others) can run between now and the Convention, and then delegates can vote in the standard, already-agreed-to process for determining the nominee. You don't have to try to do a full popular vote of the country, because we already prepared for situations where a different nominee can be chosen than the ones on the ballot. Harris could have easily won a vote on the convention floor - if she is as popular as you suggest - so the fact that they didn't even TRY to PRETEND like there was a choice is a bit of a slap in the face.
"Harris (and others) can run between now and the Convention, and then delegates can vote in the standard, already-agreed-to process for determining the nominee."
This is literally the current process. Are you suggesting that the rules were changed? The only reason there's no contest is because nobody is throwing their hat in the ring. They are not doing that because they don't have the popular support, which is a proxy for democracy.
Another reason we know the outcome already is because delegates tend to pledge their votes beforehand. There's good reason for this, since it gives an up-to-date measure of candidates' support, but also because the convention has speeches planned in advance which are meant as kind of a rallying cry for the nominee. So, on a practical level, it's helpful to know if there's going to be a clear winner in advance.
Anyway, I still don't see the problem, but I appreciated that this forced me to read up on procedure and be more informed.
PS: I also learned there's a (apparently bipartisan) "Task Force on Election Crises" and they've pushed back on much of the panic around this.
I also just have to respond to your note " All of this fixation on whether she's a DEI hire, whether she was coronated, and whether her identity makes her immune from criticism are all distractions from more interesting discussions we could be having."
"All of this" is literally the democratic process. The process is what undergirds a democracy. We can (and should) debate whether "the process" is actually democratic. We can (and should) debate when that process is truncated, avoided, or subverted, about what that means for our ostensibly democratic system. Those seem like very interesting discussions to have, during a time when Preserving Democracy Itself seems to be front of people's minds
the DNC chair literally fled in the dead of night, her successor admitted they cheated, and they embarked on like a fourth Red Scare to prevent the hard proof from having any consequences
Ooookay. I predict this is going to go as follows:
-I ask "what hard proof?"
-You provide something that is much less than hard proof.
-I point out that what you mention is either false, exaggerated, or did not tangibly affect the outcome of the primary in which Hillary Clinton won by nearly 4 million votes and hundreds of pledged delegates.
-You backtrack onto a much weaker claim, not acknowledging that you claimed there was hard proof.
At this point, I've become so well-versed in the 2016 primary conspiracy theories that I'd be surprised to see anything new, so forgive my cynicism.
The convention is on 3 weeks. There is no time for that.
Because Biden's senility has not been common knowledge for four years or more to everyone with as much sense as Bastet gave a kitten?
He didn’t look senile at SOTU.
It's not as if his senility didn't suddenly appear out of nowhere in the last few weeks. Caity Johnstone pointed it out in 2019 and she wasn't the only one. Biden aides have more or less admitted that they staged events so as to make his senility less obvious.
It's not.
"She got votes.... that level of support" Yeah, and I'm sure she'll "get votes" in November and when exactly was the "level of support" of potential contenders actually tested? Did you even read Freddie's criticism of the detoured route that led to this unfolding debacle? You skipped over the lot of it with this pathetic cope.
This argument seems really strange to me. Have you ever withheld a vote for a presidential candidate on the basis of their vice president? Have you ever even heard of this happening?
I heard this all the time after McCain selected Palin
Interesting. That's a fair point. I doubt many of those folks would have voted for Obama instead because of Palin, but I can see where a VP can be a bit of a boat anchor if you pick one who is very loud and not very diplomatic, often overshadowing the candidate themselves.
I could see people withholding votes for Trump based on JD Vance.
I voted for Biden because I thought he was the best candidate to beat Trump. I was disappointed in Harris. I listened to the in-depth interviews NPR did and she was the one I found least appealing. I still voted for Biden, but my vote wasn't for Harris, she just went along for the ride. The only time the VP made a difference to me was John McCain. I would have voted for him if he didn't have Sarah Palin as a running mate.
Biden/Harris were running unopposed in 2024. That was the party elite decision, not rank and file democratic voters. No other contender had that support because the party threatened any viable candidates with political suicide.
There's all the difference in the world between leading the ticket and being attached to one. Harris imploded in 2020 before even making it to the Iowa Caucus so last time voters had a chance to directly select her they decided not to.
No one votes for the VP in a primary or general.
The NPC reply.
"(It remains the case that she has never received a single vote from any voters outside of California, ever, in her political career, which some might suggest represents a wee bit of risk.) "
To be fair, most presidential candidates have never been elected to anything outside their home state. Trump couldn't even boast that on his resume.
I mean, watching the Team D cult abandon even the pretense of principle is most instructive, but I also try to call balls and strikes.
Yeah, but CA is pretty far outside the mainstream. Shapiro hasn't won anything outside of PA either but I think the median voter in PA/WI/MI is going to be a lot more important than the median voter in CA/TX/NY.
We're still feeling the aftershocks of Clinton wiping out all competitors in 2016 before they even showed up.
yeah, even the numerous younger candidates showed how hard the DNC had managed to clear the bench: Ben from Parks & Rec, a MA Senator, a MN Senator, and Yang; and this year was just Williamson and Phillips
Arguing for a real primary would force whoever wins to get votes outside their states. I think that's the point here.
A primary would be an *intra-party* popularity contest. That said, Harris did get (an underwhelming number of) votes from outside her stat in 2020.
If a candidate has a health or mental issue that makes it impossible to actually win a campaign than an *intra-party* popularity contest would be quite useful to weed the ineffective candidate out. Like, as you mentioned, it weeded Harris out in 2020. I think she dropped out before voting occurred (I think FdB mentioned), the polling was so bad.
It was obvious that Biden's brain was tapioca in 2020. Caity Johnstone wrote articles on this in 2019. Didn't seem to weed out Biden.
Yeah, that’s true. I’m not a political junkie, I’m more interested in human nature and am fascinated how we are fooled into not seeing the obvious. Dammit, he would have won.
TWENTY-FIFTH PLACE
Freddie clearly meant that fact that she also's never gotten a vote in a primary, but I think she was on some ballots even though she dropped out. Every major party candidate of my lifetime (and most of the non-major party candidates) did get primary votes.
It seems like the majority of the Democratic rank and file are quite happy with this decision, which suggests that this isn’t much of an abdication of principle at all.
To be fair, these are the same people who were insisting that Biden was a little under the weather until the very end. Team D could nominate Adolf Eichmann or Pol Pot and they'd be singing hosannas.
You think so? Near as I can tell, most of my Democratic friends—the true rank and file—were gritting their teeth thinking about voting for Biden. Like, actual voters were often far less deluded, and they’re content-to-happy with Harris.
Maybe gritting their teeth, but are they going to vote Harris anyway? Then who cares about the teeth gritting.
I think some woulda stayed home
Yep. Pretty much every Dem voter I know, to my left or my right, is elated now that it’s Kamala instead of Biden. Surprisingly to me, tbh. I get where Freddie seems to be coming from is his legitimate grievances about the coronation of Hillary in 2016 and the way Bernie was shoved out. I was pissed about that too. But I think that what happened this year made sense pragmatically.
Which reminds me that some wit called Trump "Pol Pork" and I'm very sad it didn't stick.
Well, the much-hyped Trump Economy Best Evah was basically the result of federal deficit spending. Budget deficits were ballooning, even before COVID.
For that matter, the same could be said for The Biden Boom and, for that matter, The Obama Economic Miracle.
I have a Flamepoint Siamese who yells a lot. Are you telling me this kind of shit is what she's saying?!?
Might be. Or she might be asking where is dinner? I'd have to talk with her.
I have a bigger issue with the government subsidizing elections for political parties.
Yes. Let's have federal financing all the way. Cutting the donor-class off at the pocketbook sounds like the best prescription, yet, for restoring democracy to full health.
The donors would NOT be happy.
Cry me a river over their loss and the people's gain. If only we could make it happen.
I have a very specific dream of campaign finance reform where if you get on the ballot, you get a specific amount of money to campaign, with which you can do whatever you like. TV ads. A Macy's float. Embezzle it. I don't care. But you get no other funding at all, no PACs, not even spending your own personal fortune. Let all American politics be utterly subsidized by the taxpayer and by no one else, so that the taxpayer is the only special interest group.
Of course this will never happen and also it's unconstitutional but I can still dream.
We can dream. At least for now.
Coronating Kamala as part of the Dem establishment coup was a bad look. They should have at least pretended to be "open", at least for a week. Stupid oligarchs and their midwit minions.
Too hard to coordinate “pretending to be open,” though, because that leads to actually being open and then the chaos they didn’t want.
I think they were afraid of being open and it going out of control. However, I don't think it needed to be that way. A mini-primary with strict ground rules (thou shalt not speak ill of other candidates) would have galvanized the country. It would have been reality tv! Entertainment. Celebrity. People would have tuned it. Trump would loose it big time if the Dems got better ratings. Coronating Kamala is a huge opportunity lost. Hey! If she can win against competition, go for it.
I think there are two reasons they didn’t do this. 1) Just not enough time to get it to work; 2) it could put some small flank of the party (presumably the left) in a role as kingmakers, extracting concessions that would hurt their chances in the general election.
But I concur it would have been awesome for all the reasons you name.
In my state the NHDP held a "nominating event" for Biden where they just said that he won, no voters needed. The Trump team/his allies in state parties cleared the deck for him as well to the best of their ability. We haven't had a real competitive primary for anyone since 2016, which may help explain why it feels like we've been crystallized in a glistening coprolite of time since then.
And yeah, the "you guys are racist" thing really, really isn't going to work. In fact I'm guessing this will be the cycle that Republicans start calling Ds who obsess over identity categories racist - and not the tongue in cheek "the real racists" thing, they'll actually mean it. Progressives put a lot of sharp instruments on the torture table over the past eight years and conservatives are starting to get the hang of them.
The President of the United States, who was democratically elected in 2020 with Harris as his VP, is no longer able to perform his duties, therefore his Vice President - who, again, was also elected in 2020, will take over. This makes perfect sense to me, and clearly a plurality of Democratic voters agree, as demonstrated by the obvious groundswell of enthusiasm and donations that have occurred since making her nomination official. I would have of course preferred a "real" primary before we got to this point (not that I believe anything different would have resulted from it), but trying to force another quick one now would only lead to more chaos and in-fighting. I greatly enjoy your writing - I even bought your latest book - but feel like you've really missed the mark on this one.
Succession from VP to President applies to the office of the President--not whoever is the current Democratic nominee.
Do you think Biden would have won a real primary?
Yes, Biden should step down immediately. Let's see Kamala perform the duties of the office that she's been nominated to run for in the general election.
That is not how presidential elections work! Winning the VP position in 2020 doesn't hand you the presidential nod in 2024! That has never been a thing!
If the president is unable to perform his duties then the VP takes over the job of president … NOW. That doesn’t dictate where the nomination goes for a future election.
Also, no one voted for Biden because of Kamala. Just that he wasn’t trump
IMO, it has every bearing on the upcoming election. If Biden cannot serve, the 25th should have been invoked, but nobody had the balls for that. Pelosi had not given her approval to that procedure. That way, we could see whether Harris had any executive skills at all and then, according to theory, the Democrats could have run a real primary! Didn't happen, did it? That primary was exclusionary to the extreme. I voted as a Young Democrat. I never will vote Dem again. I feel that I have learned a lesson.
I guess I meant “it shouldn’t dictate the nomination for the upcoming election”
"the 25th should have been invoked, but nobody had the balls for that"
It’s not really about balls. If Biden were removed or he resigned, the new VP would have to be confirmed by Congress, and Republicans have shown zero willingness to cooperate on that sort of vote. They literally stole a SC justice that way. It would put a member of the opposition party a heartbeat away from the presidency. Not ideal! And without a VP, the results of the election literally can’t be certified. Not having a VP would be a massive clusterfuck for the whole country, so we should all cross our fingers that Biden hangs on until Jan 20.
To me it isn't an issue of whether he can serve out his presidency, but whether he can win the election and go another four years. It was clear that 4 more years was too much.
This is a deeply stupid take on things.
It seems that the Democrats believe you have to destroy a democracy in order to save it.
Agree here. It seems to me that there is a risk that some states might not allow Kamala to replace Joe on the general election ballot due to their state rules for this democratic process. I think this is going to be a SCOTUS decision, and I think the court is going to side with the states... something the court did to help the Democrats in the challenges to the 2020 election.
> It seems to me that there is a risk that some states might not allow Kamala to replace Joe on the general election ballot due to their state rules for this democratic process
No. There were some keep-Joe people trying this scare-tactic, but that's all it was.
Deadlines for getting on ballots don't happen until after the convention.
There may be some extremely bad-faith lawsuits from Republicans, but they'll get the same treatment the Kraken lawsuits got.
I don’t understand what process you’re imagining could have happened, in these circumstances. The only thing that would fulfill your conditions is to throw away the results of the primary and run a new one in which every democrat in the country got a chance to vote. Literally no way that could happen. So it was going to be decided in back rooms by delegates and bosses at a contested convention even if they had one, which would have been essentially the same process that actually happened, just delayed.
I didn't hear Freddie call for a new primary. He was lamenting the lack of any meaningful primary and the sorry results that have followed. And yes, the Democratic Party could have held a meaningful primary process. But they didn't. Oh well...
No, he was pretty clearly saying that they should have had a "more democratic" process now. I think the idea that the original primary should have been "real" is moot. No one really disagrees with that. Given the current circumstances, I don't really see how they could.
"Pretty clearly." Really? Where did he "pretty clearly" state that there should be a new primary? Or are you suggesting some other "more democratic" process? If so, what exactly are you proposing?
Freddie wrote, "The major problem is that I think the Democrats have essentially abandoned any pretense that the voters get to choose their candidates, which is part of a larger bad dynamic where the party is increasingly ruled by an utterly unaccountable aristocracy of cutthroat neoliberals."
This is a description of a problem that is not moot because it has resulted in an unfolding debacle for the party that claims it is "Defending Democracy" and that this is "The Most Important Election Ever."
Shrugging and saying "too late, so sorry it doesn't really matter" is indeed sorry: a sorry, sorry cope. Reality bites.
"Something could have happened at the convention. Was any outcome going to be ideal, after Biden’s withdrawal? No. Should there have been some process through which Harris had to be chosen over real rivals at the convention? Yes! I can’t tell you what the right kind of contested or brokered convention would have been."
That seems unequivocal. Yes, there was a lot in his piece lamenting the lack of a primary worthy of the word. But he is pretty clearly and directly arguing for a more democratic process in the way Biden's replacement was selected, *even though it should have been a competitive primary months ago.*
Okay, but hasn't that door been closed--or at least deeply damaged--by party elites wrapping their arms around Harris? Who exactly is going to step up and run against her? Again, Freddie was using the Past Tense, not prescribing what should happen now.
I'm not sure why it's moot to point out that the Democratic Party and its handmaidens have behaved in a most Undemocratic fashion and to lament the results of the election fixing. This supposedly "moot" point is certain to bite in November.
I can speak for myself in saying that I won't vote for Harris, damn what may come.
It (the door I mean) has closed, as far as I can tell. If you look at my post, you'd see that I put the claim about "now" in the past tense as well (not my most clear writing ever). My point is that Freddie wasn't merely lamenting the primary, which a whole LOT of people have been doing and doesn't really require a lot of thinking at this point; he was actively criticizing the most recent seeming method through which Kamala Harris was selected, suggesting it could have been handled some other way.
> but hasn't that door been closed--or at least deeply damaged--by party elites wrapping their arms around Harris?
Yes! And that's precisely Freddie's complaint!
I think the bigger problem may be that *no one else genuinely wanted to run*. They may have thought running a 3-month campaign and losing would damage their brand. Right or wrong, if they all think that, you can't force them to run.
There were still longshots, I guess. Manchin, Dean Phillips. Maybe Williamson since it's silly season.
Obama apparently *really* wanted an open process at the convention and not an instant coronation, but he spent all his political capital with Biden getting Biden to quit.
Biden’s senility has been a punchline in standup comedy for three years now. Youtube compilations of this clearly incapacitated man have collectively hundreds of millions, if not billions of views.
His inability to do the job was obvious for at least two years now. The fact he was ever the nominee is absolutely fucking insane. It’s shameful this was forced to happen.
It's all a huge frustrating bummer. I think I'm going to sit this one out.
I don’t think you’re accurately assessing the situation. I’m not making a normative argument about elitist cliques; I just don’t think you have a rational sense of how difficult it is to get a coalition together.
1) It would have absolutely been great to have a real primary before. The problem is that, once Biden chose to run, it felt like having a firmly contested primary was going to do more harm than good to the party’s chances to win. No one wanted to throw their hat in the ring, spend a ton of time trashing a sitting President, then lose and have all your sound bites replayed by Republicans. The history of sitting presidents undergoing serious primary challenges is _terrible._ If you are super-concerned about taking out Trump, then you might not want to take the risk. This was a major mistake, but it was rational with the information they had and the difficulty of collective decision-making.
2) Again, now, people are making the rational decision: since there is a pretty fair record of contested conventions going badly, AND that there is again a situation where people are operating in the dark, the risk of coalescing around a suboptimal but OK candidate is less than having a convention that doesn’t _really_ help the process seem more democratic and might do more harm than good if things get vitriolic. It’s not at all stupid to decide that keeping a united front provides a better likelihood of success than having to hammer out a candidate in a short time.
It’s easy and fun to say that these groups with all kinds of different interests and goals should do things _your way,_ but I don’t think that’s how large groups like this work.
For point 1: yes, but look who did get in. Dean Phillips ran because Biden's age related issues were an open secret around DC. If Biden had been forced to debate there's every possibility that what happened in June would instead have taken place a few months earlier, in the context of a Democratic primary.
Instead Biden had to drop out anyway and instead of Phillips, RFK Jr., etc. at the top of the ticket you've got Harris.
Yeah, I think that’s right. The party was too risk-averse and is paying for it, but only outsiders with nothing to lose were willing to call out the facts us normies already knew. (Phillips was my own rep, btw!)