What Kamala Harris has done is remarkable
By Michael Jones
I’d barely had a chance to catch my breath that Sunday in July when President Biden announced—in an X post, no less!—his intention to end his candidacy for reelection. But it was what happened 27 minutes later that upended the presidential campaign, the American political landscape, and what I planned to be a relaxing day off: He endorsed Vice President Harris as his successor.
We’ll return to the endorsement’s significance in a moment. But as we enter the campaign’s final weekend, when anxieties are high, donation requests are exhausting, and early-voting windows are closing, it felt appropriate to look back on how far Harris has come in a little over 100 days.
The catalyst of Biden’s torch-passing was the first presidential debate between him and former President Trump. Throughout the event, Biden spoke so incoherently and appeared to lose his train of thought so frequently that Democratic operatives were texting me calls for him to step down before the first break. The president’s campaign chalked Biden’s poor performance up to a bad night induced by a bad cold. But on Capitol Hill, the glee from congressional Republicans contrasted with the dread from their Democratic counterparts told you everything you needed to know about where this was headed.
Over the course of the next three weeks, dozens of Dump-Biden Democrats went public with their calls for him to step down, with many more planning to do so if he refused. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi worked behind the scenes to convince him that he risked his legacy—and Democrats’ chances of retaking the House next week—by remaining in the race, an act that’s caused such a fissure in their 40-year friendship that the two haven’t spoken since. The top two Hill Democrats—Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)—held separate private meetings with Biden to explain how untenable the situation had become within their caucuses. In the end, Biden decided to put the country above his personal ambitions.
This brings us back to Harris.
As I reported at the time, many Dump-Biden Democrats were caught off guard not only by the timing of Biden’s Sunday afternoon announcement to withdraw but also by his decision to boost Harris immediately. The hope was that the party would hold an “open primary” to select a nominee from a deep bench of less-known up-and-comers before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in late August, an idea that remains as silly to me now as it did when I was reporting on it. Harris spent the intervening hours from when Biden called to endorse her (after she prayed with her pastor), consolidating support on Capitol Hill and throughout the Democratic establishment to virtually lock up the nomination by sunrise the next morning—before any of the party’s rising stars had a chance to challenge her even if they’d wanted to.
Harris inherited Biden’s fundraising and political operation, a monumental advantage no other candidate would’ve had due to campaign finance rules. She also benefitted from Zoom calls inspired by the 44,000 who mobilized for Harris the night she announced her candidacy. There were those viral moments—from “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” to “Big sister general” to “what can be, unburdened by what has been”—that endeared her to the online left and internet culture obsessives in ways that money couldn’t buy.
But she also entered the race as an underdog, according to her campaign. Weeks earlier, Trump and his allies thought they were cruising to a landslide. Besides Biden’s bad debate, Trump had just survived an assassination attempt and received the Republican nomination for the third time in as many cycles with more popularity from his base than the previous two. Republicans immediately tied her candidacy to President Biden, especially on inflation and immigration, claiming a Harris presidency would be four more years of the current administration. Behind the scenes, Harris skeptics wondered if she could execute a winning campaign after her 2020 bid flopped due to reported staff infighting and a mishmash of policy positions that failed to help her stand out in a crowded field.
This time around, Harris immediately made joy the prevailing ethos of her campaign. She christened “opportunity” as the buzzword of an economic agenda that promised to address the high costs of housing, health care, child care, and senior care. She refused to let Trump off the hook for appointing the three Supreme Court justices who represented half of the supermajority that overturned Roe v. Wade and led to one in three women of reproductive age living in a state with an abortion ban. She demonstrated fierce loyalty to Biden while framing herself as the new-generation leader who could inspire the country to turn the page on a decade of Trump and chart a new way forward. And with her prosecutorial background, she cast her opponent as the type of crook she used to eat for lunch in San Francisco courtrooms dating two decades back. She exuded a stately confidence that only someone who traveled the globe representing the country on the world stage could. She attracted support from hundreds of Republicans, including former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and her dad, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who see Harris’s victory as the nail in Trump’s political coffin. And she has beat Trump at his own game with rallies that surpass his in crowd size, one of the only metrics that matter to the vanity-obsessed former reality TV star.
To be clear, no one on or close to the Harris team is satisfied with simply running a remarkable campaign. The goal, of course, is to win to preserve American democracy, maintain the global world order, and make progress on the urgent issues of our time.
But the fact that Harris enters the final weekend of the campaign with each of the seven battleground states in play and multiple paths to victory in the Blue Wall and through the Sun Belt proves she has done her part so far.
Now, it’s up to her supporters to do theirs.
“The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised, a nation big enough to encompass all our dreams, strong enough to withstand any fracture or fissure between us, and fearless enough to imagine a future of possibilities,” she said on Tuesday night before 75,000 people at the Ellipse on the National Mall. “So, America, let us reach for that future. Let us fight for this beautiful country we love. And in 7 days, we have the power to turn the page and start writing the next chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.”
Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.
