Election 2024: Kamala Harris Is the Democratic Presidential Nominee

What a difference a week makes.

Just seven days ago, Republicans were coming off a successful party convention thinking that the 2024 race was turning into a rout. Meanwhile, Democrats feared that the Republicans were right. Some Democrats worried that President Joe Biden would stay in a race he had little chance of winning. Other Democrats feared that Biden’s exit would trigger intra-party fighting that would guarantee Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

As it happened, everyone was wrong. Biden acknowledged on Sunday afternoon that his campaign was hemorrhaging support and ended his campaign. Democrats quickly coalesced around Vice President Kamala Harris as their candidate. And a race that looked to be breaking for the Republicans once again tightened.

The speed with which Harris went from understudy to presumptive nominee was stunning. Within thirty-six hours of Biden’s decision she had locked up the support of a majority of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention. She and the Democratic Party also raised more than $100 million from more than 1.1 million donors, most of whom were new donors. Her candidacy energized a Democratic base that was lukewarm about Biden’s candidacy even before his disastrous debate performance.

Harris’s coronation benefited from the fact that no other prominent Democrat threw their hat into the ring even as powerbrokers like Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi indicated that they favored an open nominating process. One reason for the absence of challengers was the fear of being blamed for trying to keep Harris from ascending to the top of the ticket. Another reason was that the campaign war chest that the Biden-Harris campaign compiled likely could go only to Harris. It’s hard to run a winning campaign without deep pockets, especially when Election Day is just over three months away.

Harris used her first campaign event to lay out her electoral message. Speaking at a high school in a Milwaukee suburb not far from where the Republicans convened last week, she stressed that she will, like the district attorney she once was, prosecute the case against Trump as a threat to America’s democracy. She also made clear that defending abortion rights and improving the economy top her to-do list.

Harris said nothing of note about foreign policy while on the campaign trail, which reflects both political calculation and personal preference. China, Gaza, Ukraine, and other issues overseas fall far down their list of priorities. At the same time, Harris made her career as a district attorney and attorney general, not as a diplomat or military strategist. She certainly has foreign policy experience—both from her time as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and as vice president for the past three-plus years. But that is not the same thing as having a passion for it.

The fact that Harris does not have an extensive foreign policy record independent of her work as vice president has prompted speculation about what her foreign policy might be. Her general approach to foreign will almost certainly be in the same area code as Biden’s—and most other Democrats—if not the same zip code. Indeed, some 350 foreign policy luminaries signed a letter vouching for her foreign policy bona fides. What no one knows, however, is what her priorities and red lines will be. The world looks different when one moves from adviser to decider.

Republicans made much of Harris’s refusal to preside over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress on Wednesday. That critique loses whatever force it is supposed to have had once one considers that Republican Vice-Presidential Candidate J.D. Vance also skipped the speech.

The Trump campaign will also seek to hang the Biden administration policy failures at the U.S. southern border on Harris. House Republicans yesterday passed a resolution “strongly condemning” Harris by name as the “Border Czar” for her “failure to secure the United States border.” Six Democrats supported the resolution. Harris’s obvious retort is that Trump pressured congressional Republicans into walking away from a bipartisan deal to address the border crisis because a continued crisis helped him politically.

As historic as Harris’s first week was, her road to the White House remains challenging. Only one sitting vice president, George H.W. Bush, has ascended to the presidency via the ballot box in the last 188 years. Harris is also serving a president whose public approval rating just hit a new low of 36 percent. And unlike many other established democracies, the United States has never elected a woman to be head of government.

The lesson to keep in mind, as Harris should know firsthand from her failed 2020 presidential race, is that strong starts don’t guarantee winning finishes.

Campaign Update

Trump seems conflicted about whether to debate Harris. After Biden bowed out of the race on Sunday, Trump took to Truth Social to argue that the scheduled September 10 debate “should be held on FoxNews, rather than very biased ABC.” On Tuesday, he told reporters that he was game to square off against Harris, even on ABC, which he called “a joke.” He went on to say that presidential nominees have “an obligation to debate” and that he “would be willing to do more than one debate actually.” Then yesterday, the Trump campaign tweeted that it would be “inappropriate to schedule things with Harris because Democrats very well could still change their minds.” In response, Harris tweeted: “What happened to ‘any time, any place?’” While all this was happening, Fox News invited Harris and Trump to debate on September 17. The network suggested that the debate be held in Pennsylvania with a format to be determined. No word yet on whether the candidates will accept the offer.

Democrats plan to hold a virtual roll call by August 7 to determine their nominee. The move reflects uncertainty over whether the change that a special session of the Ohio state legislature recently made to the state’s electoral laws would allow a candidate selected at the Democratic National Convention later in August to make the state’s ballot in 2024. One practical consequence of the virtual roll call vote is that any Democrat seeking to challenge Harris for the nomination has until this weekend to file the necessary paperwork to be considered.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been absent from the campaign trail in recent weeks. The Washington Post reported that he met with Trump last week in Milwaukee. Kennedy reportedly offered to quit the race if Trump promised him a job in his administration should he return to the White House. Trump declined the offer.

What the Candidates Are Saying

Trump made clear on social media and on the campaign trail that he’s not a fan of Harris, although he contributed $6,000 to Harris’s reelection campaign for California’s attorney general back in 2012 and 2013. On Truth Social, Trump called Harris “Lyin’ Kamala Harris.”

In a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday, Trump called Harris “the most incompetent and far-left vice president in American history,” insisted that she was a “radical left lunatic who will destroy our country,” and vowed that he was “not going to be nice” to her. The unity moment has passed.

Harris met with Netanyahu late yesterday afternoon. She followed up the meeting with brief remarks to the press. She stressed that “Israel has a right to defend itself,” blasted Hamas as “a brutal terrorist organization,” said she had “serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza,” called for quick action to “get a cease-fire to end the war,” and endorsed the two-state solution “as the only path that ensures that Israel remains a secure Jewish and Democratic state.”

It was a sign of the changing order in the White House that Harris rather than Biden spoke to the press.

What the Pundits Are Saying

Elliott Cohen argued in The Atlantic that Trump isn’t likely to make significant changes in U.S. foreign policy should he return to the White House. His reasoning for why “a second Trump term may not be a riot of alliance-shattering isolationism, bellicose warmongering, or catastrophically stupid diplomacy?” It’s largely that “one of the deeper truths about American foreign policy, rejected every four years by Democrats and Republicans alike, is that it has much more continuity to it than rupture.” That, of course, is an argument that is true up until the moment it isn’t. And Cohen admits that if Trump populates his administration with “some of the marginal figures in his camp, such as the disgraced and dotty Michael Flynn, or for political figures like Senator Tom Cotton and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo”—which could well happen—then “serious trouble awaits.” Perhaps the critical question, though, isn’t how different Trump’s foreign policy will be, but the effectiveness of whatever foreign policy he chooses to follow.

Foreign Policy’s Stephen Walt dismissed the foreign policy that Trump and Vance are championing as unrealistic and likely to “do enormous long-term damage to America’s global position.” Walt, who sympathizes with Trump’s distrust of Washington’s foreign policy elites, believes that “the central problem is that Trump and Vance are operating with an outdated picture of America’s place in the world and its ability to get its way unilaterally. They may reject neoconservatism, but they believe the United States can do whatever it wants and that other states will simply bend to its will. This wasn’t true during the “unipolar moment,” however, and it is even less true now that China is an economic peer and states from India to Brazil to South Africa to Turkey are charting their own courses and able to play the other major powers off against one another.”

University of Texas historian Jeremy Suri wrote in Foreign Policy that Vance isn’t likely to shape U.S. foreign policy in a second Trump administration should Trump win in November. He bases his conclusion on the fact that most vice presidents have little or no impact on foreign policy, which has been the case for more than two centuries. Along the way Suri retells one of the best descriptions ever made about the vice presidency. It was uttered by someone who should know, Thomas Marshall, who served as Woodrow Wilson’s understudy for eight years: “Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea; the other was elected vice president. And nothing was ever heard of either of them again.” Suri’s piece is worth reading just to see how many U.S. vice presidents lamented their decision to be the spare tire of government.

The New York Times’s Lisa Friedman charted Harris’s views on climate change. The topline is that “Harris has for years made the environment a top concern, from prosecuting polluters as California’s attorney general to sponsoring the Green New Deal as a senator to casting the tiebreaking vote as vice president for the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate investment in United States history.”

Aaron Mannes assessed Harris’s work in the Biden administration for Foreign Policy. He noted that she “has faced significant barriers to helping Biden. Since the expansion of the vice-presidential role in the late 1970s, most presidents have been outsiders to Washington, D.C. ….. Biden, with 36 years in the Senate (during which he focused on foreign affairs) and eight years as vice president, had little need for assistance.” He added that Harris’s “foreign-policy work does not indicate a grand strategy or worldview. Instead, her work has been about developing a skill set of policymaking and implementation, as well as learning and using the tools available to her office.”

Matt Duss, a former foreign policy advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, argued in Foreign Policy that Harris can reset U.S. policy toward Gaza. Duss acknowledged that “no one expects Harris to dramatically distance herself from Biden.” However, she “can announce that as president, she will immediately suspend the U.S.-supplied military aid being used in violation of U.S. law. She can publicly make clear that she agrees with the assessment of countless Israelis—including Israeli opposition lawmakers and top sitting security officials—that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is stalling hostage release and cease-fire efforts in order to cling to power. She can reject the baseless and inflammatory claims that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the largest and most important relief agency in Gaza, is a “Hamas front,” and state that she’ll work to see UNRWA funding resumed as soon as legally possible. In doing so, she would join U.S. partners—such as Britain, France, and Germany—that have already resumed their contributions.”

What the Polls Show

An AP-NORC poll conducted before Biden dropped out of the race found that nearly six in ten Americans want Trump to drop out of the race as well. Not surprisingly, support for an end to Trump’s candidacy was highest among Democrats, with 86 percent favoring his departure. But 51 percent of Independents and 26 percent of Republicans felt the same way.

The Campaign Schedule

The Democratic National Convention opens in Chicago in twenty-four days (August 19, 2024).

The second presidential debate is in forty-six days (September 10, 2024)

Donald Trump’s sentencing hearing on his New York felony convictions is in fifty-four days (September 18, 2024).

The first in-person absentee voting in the nation begins in Minnesota and South Dakota in fifty-six days (September 20, 2024).

Election Day is 102 days away.

Inauguration Day is 178 days away.

Shelby Sires assisted in the preparation of this post.