Since Joe Biden confirmed that he will run for re-election, the odds of Kamala Harris becoming the first female president of the United States have shrunk – and significantly so.
For Harris to take over from Biden, several things would have to happen. Biden would have to keep her as his vice-president for the 2024 campaign. Let’s assume, not with total confidence, that the 80-year-old Biden is still alive and well enough to lead by the start of 2025. If not, his vice-president would anyway take over as commander-in-chief, possibly only for a matter of days. But if Biden won in 2024 and didn’t complete his second-term, it would be all hail Kamala, the lady chief, possibly for several years or more. Brace yourself.
Let’s consider these possibilities in order. Team Biden has shown no willingness to drop Harris from his ticket, despite plenty of speculation in Washington. Reports suggest that the president’s advisers are more eager to fix Harris’s negative image than shuffle her out for a more popular alternative.
Very few people want Kamala Harris to be president
Ditching a sitting vice president would, according to Washington insiders, reveal nervousness, and that is something winning candidates are not meant to show. The last time a president changed ‘veep’ for a presidential election was 1976, when Gerald Ford replaced Nelson Rockefeller with Bob Dole, only to lose to Jimmy Carter. It seems unlikely Biden will do the same.
Would Biden-Harris then hold on to power in 2024? It’s foolish to make electoral predictions this early; the polls are still too raw. Nevertheless, incumbents have tended to win presidential elections in recent decades. Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama — four of the last six US presidents have won a second term. If Biden can avoid a steep recession, he could make that five of the last seven.
At present, it looks highly likely that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee in 2024, a prospect Democrats are pleased about, given that means Biden-Harris will face the man they beat in 2020. Such confidence may well turn out to be hubristic. For now, however, Biden-Harris are rightly considered marginal favourites to win next November.
Then it’s down to the Grim Reaper – and, when it comes to men in their eighties, the odds are in death’s favour. One doesn’t want to be too morbid but Biden, who has already surpassed the (diminishing) average American life expectancy of 78, may well not see out his second term. He is a teetotaller who still exercises regularly, but he has had two brain aneurysms and has become visibly more frail in recent years. It’s hard to imagine him still functioning in the White House at the age of 86.
Enter Kamala, then, the woman Biden said this weekend ‘hasn’t gotten the credit she deserves’. But a President Kamala Harris before 2028 would not, in fact, have smashed her way through that invisible glass ceiling. She would instead have ascended to the summit of global power via an invisible elevator. Her record as a prosecutor and attorney general is debatable at best. And failed miserably as a presidential candidate in 2020
As we saw with the ascent of Rishi Sunak in Britain, and with Kamala’s nomination for the vice presidency in 2020, identity politicking demands that people celebrate the collapse of old racial and sex boundaries, even if it isn’t strictly speaking the will of the people that is breaking the boundaries down.
The first woman president. The second mixed-race president. The first president who didn’t have a white parent. The arc of history bends always towards progress etc. But does it?
Very few people want Kamala Harris to lead the free world – she’s considerably less popular than even Biden, whose job approval rating is fast sinking. She has won over some Democrats with her feverish support for abortion rights. But she has failed to make a good impression on the international stage — her real gift, arguably, is to make the gaffe-prone Joe Biden look statesmanlike. She has largely botched the various policy areas she has put in charge of, especially the immigration crisis at the southern US border — a failure which Democrats know will hurt them in 2024. Polls suggest that Trump would destroy Harris in an election match-up.
She has under-performed dramatically as a politician – and America knows it. Yet there she is, one failing heartbeat away from the Oval Office.
If that’s progress, perhaps America needs to try going backwards instead. ‘Vote Biden, get Harris’ might be a bit too tasteless as an attack line even for Republicans in 2024. But it might also be true.
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