The 2024 veep show has already started

Vice presidents are meant to be dependable – and in a funny way Kamala Harris is exactly that. Joe Biden knows that, no matter how bad his poll numbers, hers will be worse: she’s the most unpopular vice president since polling began, according to one recent survey. Biden can afford to be pitifully vague in public partly because she is so painfully annoying. He loses his thread; she loses the plot. 

That’s one of the reasons why, for all the alarm in Washington circles about the Commander-in-Chief’s ‘job performance’ and the distinct possibility that he might lose to Donald Trump next year, the Biden-Harris ticket seems locked in place for 2024. Why would Biden nominate someone else when Harris is so reliably unthreatening? Why would he move aside when she would be even more terrible? 

In recent weeks, there’s been another media-led, insiderish effort to shuffle Biden off his presidential coil – after a CNN poll showed him losing to Trump by significant margins in four key swing states. On 5 November, David Axelrod, formerly Barack Obama’s chief strategist, broke the strict rules of Washington etiquette by saying something that is glaringly obvious to absolutely everyone outside politics: ‘The greatest concern is that [Biden’s] biggest liability is the one thing he can’t change. Among all the unpredictables there is one thing that is sure: the age arrow only points in one direction.’

In other words, Biden is old and human beings can’t reverse the ageing process. Nate Silver, the Nostradoughnut of progressive psephology, weighed in too, pointing out that if Biden is too old to govern effectively, he may also be too old to be president and run a re-election campaign. ‘If Biden can’t keep up with the schedule of a typical sitting president running for re-election or is prone to making errors when he does, voters and the media are going to notice,’ he said.