The presidency is his to lose. After half a century in public life and more than three decades of chasing the Oval Office, Joe Biden is finally dominating presidential election polling, crucially because the election has become a referendum against President Trump. Biden just bet big on his lead, throwing caution to the wind and tapping Kamala Harris as his running mate and thus making her the most likely person on the planet to become the 47th president.
Biden leads Trump by double digits in most national polls, and more importantly, he’s maintained a sizable lead in crucial states and among seniors. As it turns out, bunkering down in a Delaware basement and issuing milquetoast policy drafts while Trump tweets his way out of the presidency is a pretty decent strategy when you’re not nearly as despised as Hillary Clinton.
But Biden might just have botched the most vital decision of his entire career.
Biden will be older on Inauguration Day than Ronald Reagan, our oldest president ever, was on his last day in office. His running mate choice is the most consequential in the nation’s history given the reality of his age and health, and at every turn, he made it harder on himself. He boxed himself into choosing a woman after functionally besting Bernie Sanders, and then the killing of George Floyd spurred the push that he specifically pick a woman of color, and ideally, a black woman. The only people still standing on Biden’s short list were Kamala Harris, Susan Rice, Karen Bass, Keisha Lance Bottoms, and Val Demings.
Of those women, only Harris won a statewide office, and she did so multiple times. Bass was obviously too old (only 66, but Biden needed youth) and too far to the left. Rice came with the baggage of Benghazi and zero proof of electoral appeal. Bottoms is just a mayor, even if it is Atlanta. Biden could have chosen Demings, the shrewd, churchgoing, and Harley-toting House impeachment manager who could deliver a crucial swing district in a crucial swing state (Florida), but instead, he chose Harris’s celebrity over Demings’s competency. Harris may have run her own presidential campaign into the ground, but the media melted over her, and she sure brings a big fundraising machine and telegenic face to the ticket.
Thus far, Trump has defined the race, often to his detriment. Two in 3 Biden supporters said they’d vote for him not out of support for Biden but to vote against Trump, a record level of negative partisanship, even for an incumbent. But in choosing such a divisive running mate in Harris, Biden may have just thrown Trump a lifeline.
Harris alienates both the uber-Left and libertarians thanks to her ham-handed, tinpot authoritarianism as a California prosecutor. It’s hard to imagine Trump-skeptical independents now aching to pull the trigger for Biden with Kamala on the ticket, just as it seems unlikely that the 10% or so of Sanders supporters who sat out voting for Clinton are now persuaded to go back to the blue.
But the press acts more like paparazzi around Harris, and apparently, Biden thinks that media goodwill is enough to justify giving a woman who tried to smear him as a racist the keys to the White House. It’s a risky bargain to make, and we’re about to find out if the greatest gamble of his life was worth it.
