MSN
As President Biden continues to face questions about whether he should end his bid to seek a second
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is signaling to members that Harris would be the best option to lead the ticket if Biden chooses to step aside, said two people familiar with this thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations.
Rep. James E. Clyburn (S.C.), a high-ranking member of the House and a longtime Biden friend, has publicly said he would support Harris if Biden steps aside, adding that his fellow Democrats “should do everything to bolster her, whether she’s in second place or at the top of the ticket.
On a call Wednesday night with House Democratic leadership led by Jeffries, there was a lot of talk about if not Biden, then who. Many names were discussed but there was no real consensus.
“But there was general awareness that it would be difficult for it to be anyone but Harris,” according to a member who participated in the virtual meeting.
Tim Ryan, a former Ohio congressman and presidential candidate, said in an op-ed that while he loves Biden, Harris should be the Democratic nominee for president after Biden stumbled in a high-profile debate performance last week. Some other possible contenders — including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and California Gov. Gavin Newsom — probably wouldn’t jump in the race this year and would support Harris if Biden were to remove himself from the ticket, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Democrats’ growing move to rally around Harris as a potential nominee — almost always with the caveat that Biden remains the choice for now — is a sign that they are gaming out a world without Biden as the party’s standard-bearer, even as they try to blunt years of hand-wringing about Harris’s ability to win the White House on her own.
That could remove one of the major obstacles Democrats have long seen to the notion of replacing Biden: the fear that it would result in a damaging political free-for-all as the party’s most promising stars battle it out for the nomination.
Many Democrats were also worried that Harris would be a weak candidate, based in part on her ill-fated presidential run in 2020, when she was forced to drop out before a single vote was cast. But choosing someone instead of Harris, the first woman of color to serve as vice president, seemed politically untenable.
Now some in the party are rethinking the idea that Harris would flounder as the Democratic nominee, especially compared with Biden, given his struggles.
A CNN poll released Tuesday found that voters favor former president Donald Trump over Biden by six percentage points, 49 percent to 43 percent, similar to results from before the debate. But Harris performs better, trailing Trump 47 percent to 45 percent, a gap that falls within the margin of error.
And, some say, Harris could energize Democratic-leaning groups whose enthusiasm for Biden has faded — Black voters, young people and women. Some progressives say she could win back some voters who are disenchanted with Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza war.
Some of the shift in thinking is practical: With four months before Election Day on Nov. 5 — and early voting beginning weeks before that — picking anyone but Harris would represent a legal, political and financial minefield, according to interviews with more than a dozen political strategists and people close to the decisions of White House aspirants.
Choosing a new nominee outside the current ticket would raise questions about the status of the delegates whom Biden and Harris have won — and the nearly quarter-billion dollars in their campaign coffers, money that cannot easily or perhaps even legally be handed to someone else.
Then there are the optics: Harris is the first Black woman to win a nationally elected office. Shunting her aside for someone White and possibly male could alienate the Black voters who the campaign says are key to winning the White House in 2024, and it could subject a party that prides itself on diversity to charges of hypocrisy.
Harris supporters also argue that many of the people often discussed as alternatives to Harris — Whitmer and Newsom, along with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.), Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore — are popular in their home states and in Democratic circles but remain untested on the national stage.
“People want the president to be successful, but it’s unclear where we’re headed,” said Jamal Simmons, Harris’s former communications director. “And so as people begin to ponder if we had to do something else, what that something else would look like, who that someone else would be, the math leads you to Kamala Harris.”
While Harris has been singed by criticism, supporters say, she is a known quantity, both from her own presidential race and from her experience as the running mate on a 2020 Democratic ticket that faced withering attacks.
“I don’t know that Gretchen Whitmer going into Philadelphia is going to help turnout. I think Kamala Harris does,” said Mike Trujillo, a Democratic strategist and former aide to Hillary Clinton. “I don’t know if Gavin Newsom goes into Raleigh, North Carolina, or Charlotte, North Carolina, that he’s going to be able to turn out African Americans that are the base of the party. I think Kamala Harris can do that.”