Biden’s exit changes the game. But here’s why Trump’s still on track to win

The leaders of the US Democratic Party have pulled off quite a feat. After publicly assailing their leader for three weeks, they’ve coerced Joe Biden into surrendering his status as the party’s nominee for the presidential election.

By forcing Biden out, the Democrat leadership has made Vice President Kamala Harris the heir apparent. They’ve opened the way for the candidate they wanted.

She’s already the highest-ranked female elected official in the country’s history. Now she will campaign to be America’s first female president. With a Tamil Indian mother and an Afro-Jamaican father, she would be the first Asian-American and first female Afro-American presidential candidate for a major party.

She’s not yet the official nominee, but she is all but certain to clinch the title at or before the August 19 Democrat convention in Chicago. She holds strong qualifications for the title.

Yes, she’s vice president of the United States. Yes, Biden has endorsed her, and the convention delegates who will make the decision were chosen for their loyalty to Biden. But what makes her candidacy compelling is that “for the Democrats to deny that nomination to a black woman would alienate two of the pillars of the Democratic Party’s public support”, a veteran Democrat insider explains to me.

“Whether Harris is the best candidate or would make the best president is irrelevant. I don’t think anyone else has a chance of beating Trump because blacks and women would be so furious if she is denied the nomination that they would not come out in the numbers that are needed to help the Democrats win,” they say.

So she’s the candidate the Democratic Party cannot deny. But have the party elites replaced Biden with a candidate that the American voters want? Not on the evidence.

Biden’s departure does remove one serious liability – a decrepit candidate. But a switch to Kamala Harris adds new liabilities.Credit: New York Times

Biden is unpopular, but the preponderance of credible polling shows that Harris is no more popular. On some measures, she’s even less likely to win against Donald Trump. Recall that, in the US system, victory is measured not by a simple vote count but by an arcane system in which the winner is the candidate who wins 270 or more of the 538 seats in the Electoral College.

So an analysis by election data project 538 finds: “Harris has a slightly higher chance of winning the Electoral College than Biden, but it’s not a significant difference: 38-in-100 versus 35-in-100.”

Weighing a more comprehensive set of information that project 538 calls its “full forecast model”, it finds that “Harris does much worse than Biden across the board. Whereas Biden has a 48-in-100 chance to win the Electoral College, Harris has only a 31-in-100 chance.”

This is mostly because Biden carries an advantage as incumbent president. So what’s the point of forcing Biden out to be replaced by Harris? It does remove one serious liability – a decrepit candidate. But they introduce new liabilities.

The Democrats have come up with a clever line in the past 24 hours: “Who better than a former prosecutor to go after a convicted felon?” But if that’s the best they can do, they’re in trouble.

Here are three liabilities she represents. First, Harris was the administration official with special responsibility for the problem of illegal immigration. Specifically, Biden tasked her with tackling the root causes of illegal immigration.

This is one of the most radioactive political issues in any developed nation, and it is politically lethal in the US. There are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country and rising anger at the apparently unchecked flow across the border. Biden did propose a legislative crackdown but was thwarted by the Republicans in Congress at Trump’s behest. Trump’s proposed solution is to deport all of them.

Harris is tainted by this association. That’s why Trump calls her the “border tsar”, to make sure she’s stuck with this hot potato. Republican congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis, said that the switch from Biden to Harris was “going from incognisant to incompetent”.

A pro-Trump group has already launched a TV ad saying that Kamala Harris “covered up Joe Biden’s obvious mental decline”.Credit: New York Times

Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, says: “Over the last four years, she co-signed Biden’s open border and green scam [renewable energy] policies that drove up the cost of housing and groceries.”

Second, while Harris, aged 59, can’t be accused of being decrepit, a pro-Trump group launched a TV ad on Sunday (US time) saying that Harris “covered up Joe Biden’s obvious mental decline”. The ad features footage of Harris insisting that Biden is in “good health, tireless, vibrant”.

Third, if her identity as an Asian-American, Afro-American woman is a potential advantage with those constituencies, the loss of a white man from a working-class background – Joe Biden – is a disadvantage.

White, working-class men are Trump’s core constituency. He’s going hard to win more. Witness that Trump chose Vance, white man author of Hillbilly Elegy, partly because he grew up in an impoverished, hillbilly, opioid-riddled family in the Rust Belt. He promises that the Republicans are done “catering to Wall Street – we’ll commit to the working man”.

The Republican convention, in a decision described as both bold and bizarre, invited a union leader – the Teamsters’ boss – to address delegates.

So it’s not clear that Harris improves the Democrats’ chances of winning. The best that can be said is that she presents a circuit-breaker for a party that found itself trapped in hysterical regicide.

What of the history of such manoeuvres? There are two postwar precedents in the Democratic Party. Harry Truman declined to re-nominate for the presidency in 1952 and Lyndon Johnson in 1968. In both cases, their replacements went on to lose.

A New York Times review offered Democrats the consoling thought that the “circumstances are quite different”. How? Mainly because they both presided over grinding, unpopular wars – Truman over Korea and Johnson over Vietnam.

But Trump doesn’t think today is so different. Trump likes to point out that Harris “was sent to Europe to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine” and it was a “total disaster”. He promises to end the war on his first day in the White House.

The Democrats have changed their situation. There’s not yet evidence that they’ve improved it.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

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