When President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 US presidential race on July 21st, the Democratic Party came together quickly to select Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him on the ticket. Julia Azari writes that the party’s quick coalescing around Harris is in stark contrast to the 2016 and 2020 nomination cycles which were longer and less coordinated. She comments that while Harris’ emergence as the candidate shows how the politics of electability for the Democrats may have changed, party institutions like the nomination process still rely on informal practices to work and depend heavily on political circumstances.
- This article is part of ‘The 2024 Elections’ series curated by Peter Finn (Kingston University). Ahead of the 2024 election, this series is exploring US elections at the state and national level. If you are interested in contributing to the series, contact Peter Finn (p.finn@kingston.ac.uk).
After Vice President Kamala Harris announced her selection of Minnesota governor Tim Walz on Tuesday August 6th, to widespread praise from all ideological corners of the Democratic Party, iconic progressive representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York noted that the party was in “disconcerting levels of array.” This came just weeks after the party quickly coalesced around Harris as its new nominee after incumbent president Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection in 2024.
What can we learn from this unusual – and unusually unified – nomination season? In contrast with the last two Democratic nomination cycles, Democrats have unified around a nominee and come together despite geographic and ideological differences. The 2016 cycle, saw former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and Senator Bernie Sanders fight a difficult primary battle with implications for party structure and priorities. Some of these same issues came up in the crowded contest of 2020, in which vice president Harris was one of the unsuccessful contenders. Those nomination seasons, as I’ve noted before, didn’t feature an incumbent administration, and they were long. In this short season, the coordination has been much more rapid and more complete. What can we learn from this?
Parties can coordinate when they need to
One of my main arguments about party weakness in the contemporary US has been the challenge of coordination. The formal rules as written for the parties do not really lend itself to coordination, and I argued prior to Biden’s departure from the race, left to the formal rules, different delegations could go in different directions to replace the 2024 nominee. What binds a party together is informal coordination, often carried out behind the scenes and then completed through a public process of endorsements. These conversations and endorsements signal to others that the party’s energy is behind a particular candidate, and hint at the cost of defecting from that consensus. Informal power was also evident in the process of pressuring Biden to leave the race, as influential actors like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi conveyed the message that Biden should step down for the good of the party.Writing about the 2016 nomination contest on the Republican side, I noted that party leaders experienced a coordination failure. Despite interest in finding a nominee other than Trump, leaders found themselves unable to agree on an alternative, and part of the problem was that they appeared unable to establish rewards for coordinating or costs for defecting.
What we learned in the summer of 2024 is that Democrats were able to do that, possibly by holding the prospect of a second Trump victory over the heads of any holdouts. Whether there were other points of leverage – bargains over Cabinet positions or priorities for favored legislation – is what we don’t know. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of leverage – this would be an indication of a party that can bargain internally and work together to accomplish its goals.
Electability is a changing concept
A deep irony of the Biden presidency is that the main argument for his candidacy in 2020 was electability. That year, a party scarred by the backlash against Barack Obama as the country’s first Black president and convinced that Hillary Clinton had paid an electoral price for sexism nominated a well-known, older, white man as the “safe” choice.
In 2024, Biden was still a white man, and definitely older, but no longer seemed so safe. Questions about his ability to campaign and serve were closely related to his age. And Harris has emerged as a candidate who can bring the party together, pack an arena, and raise a lot of money. The real test will be in November. But what’s happened so far suggests several possibilities about the elusive politics of electability.
One explanation is that priorities have shifted: after the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, gender has become important in a new way, and Harris is significantly better at talking about reproductive rights than Biden. This was less of an issue in 2020 – it’s a huge one now. Timing also matters as far as the kind of rift that emerged as Obama’s presidency ended, with distinct progressive and establishment factions emerging. During both the Trump and Biden presidencies, the party in general – and Harris specifically, in her role as VP – have learned how to accommodate both factions and identify common policy ground.
“Kamala Harris” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Gage Skidmore
In a similar vein, the politics of race have cooled somewhat in national discourse after Obama and Trump have left office, and the 2020 reckoning moment has passed. (To be clear, this is not necessarily an entirely positive development – just something that has happened). Another possibility is that with generational replacement – as older voters die and younger voters age into the electorate, traditional ideas about gender and race have eased, and a smaller percentage of voters have reservations about a president who doesn’t look like all the others. There may also be a conversation for Americans to have about ageism and how we react to signs of aging in the public sphere.
But it’s also probably true that the electability is just an ever-changing concept, sensitive to the particulars of a given election season.
Maybe it’s easier for a Black woman to break through in an elite-driven process
This would be depressing if true but is worth exploring. In 2020, Harris ran against more than twenty of her fellow Democrats and struggled to establish herself. It’s not news that women in politics face a “double-bind,” in which they must act like strong, ambitious leaders but also conform to social norms about feminine behavior. This adds to the difficulty of distinguishing oneself in a crowded field of politicians who largely share similar policy beliefs and positions.
The importance of electability and the difficulty of coordination in the long, unwieldy US nomination process might disadvantage a less traditional candidate like Harris, leaving voters nationwide to guess whether others might be willing to support a Black and South Asian woman candidate. What is more, I’ve long suspected that the politics of the nomination process work against women in a particular way: candidates need to strategically employ ambiguity, appealing to different groups and seeming like both a moderate and an ideologue, qualified and a fresh face. When women face more challenges to their authenticity, this creates a new double-bind. Harris got to skip the public-facing part of this process. Elected officials were able to deem her broadly acceptable to different factions of the coalition. But she didn’t have to face the authenticity questions that come from an intra-party contest in which personal characteristics often take center stage.
Parties can function as representative democracies
The rapid endorsement primary also hinted at how parties could still function as representative democracies. While the primaries voters did not get to weigh in directly on Harris as the nominee, the elected representatives of various constituencies did so. This included a wide array of groups: the Congressional Black caucus; progressive figures like Pramila Jayapal (chair of the Progressive Caucus in the House), AOC, and Bernie Sanders; and the moderate New Democrats caucus all expressed their support. Outside of elected officials, labor and abortion rights leaders also publicly got on board. Americans sometimes express suspicion of this kind of process as elite driven. But we can also consider that these leaders are likely to be attuned to the preferences and interests of their constituents, and that parties can function as representative democracies rather than loose collections of individuals struggling to coordinate.
Presidents still dominate the process
Harris brings a number of important qualities to the presidential ticket that she now leads. But the one that really determined the outcome of this process is that she’s the sitting Vice President. And leading Democrats spent two weeks trying to persuade Biden to leave the race, which was a necessary step before any of this could happen. One of the ultimate lessons of this process is that parties are still heavily dependent on the presidents who lead them, even as they can exert influence and shape outcomes.
The party process functioned – this time
The Democratic Party has shown it can still perform one of the most essential functions of a party: nominating a presidential candidate who seems to unify the coalition more than they divide. But closer scrutiny shows that this process still relies on informal practices to work and depends heavily on political circumstances. Democrats may have found unexpected strength in a new and exciting ticket for the 2024 election cycle. But the weakness and vulnerability of parties as institutions should still be of long-term concern.
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