With lashings of orange bronzer, a frozen face and gleaming white teeth, Joe Biden is doing his best ostrich impression by insisting he can win the US election and serve as president until he is 86. Senior Democrats are quietly knifing him in off-the-record briefings, but are queuing up to profess their loyalty in public. It is a wretched affair, reminiscent of the way cowardly Republicans kow-towed for years to Donald Trump while privately claiming to despise him.
Aiding his staying power, Biden was in his element in Washington last night as host of the 75th anniversary Nato summit and boasting about how the alliance is stronger than it has ever been. At least, God forbid, he hasn’t had to endure the G7 jet lag that supposedly did him in at the CNN debate. Soon, attention will switch 24/7 to the looming Trump circus — the Republican convention which opens in Wisconsin on Monday. No wonder Biden thinks the revolt of the “elites” (as, pace Trump, he now calls his critics) is over and that he will be the Democratic nominee for president, come what may.
Yet a few clumsy gaffes could send his campaign into a death spiral. Arguably, it is already beyond recovery. In Wisconsin, Trump has pulled ahead of Biden by 44 to 38 points (with Robert F Kennedy Jr on nine) and is significantly ahead in all the important swing states. We know Biden feels relaxed about giving the election his best shot and losing — as he told his MSNBC pals, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, at the start of this week — but 50 per cent of American voters remain opposed to Trump and have no interest in appeasing Biden’s monumental vanity.
Kamala Harris has the power to energise the parts of the Democratic coalition that Biden can’t reach
There is a better choice, if Democrats have the courage to seize the moment. Vice-president Kamala Harris has the power to energise the parts of the Democratic coalition that Biden can’t reach. Last night, she was in Nevada, drumming up support with the Asian American community and dropping in on the US Olympic basketball team in Las Vegas. She has spent months courting young people at universities (“I love Gen Z”), chiding Israel as tactfully as possible (“Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed”) and standing up for abortion rights. Trump is “proud of the fact that our daughters will have fewer rights than their grandmothers”, she told an audience of black women in New Orleans last week.
Republicans will try to label the vice-president as the candidate of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) identity politics, but Trump would be far happier to face the fading Biden than a fresh, insurgent Harris. If Trump picks Marco Rubio, the Cuban American senator for Florida, as his running mate over two trad white guys, Doug Bergum or J D Vance, in the coming days, it will be in deference to the breadth of Harris’s appeal.
Like many people, I have been on a “journey” regarding Harris — one that wobbles all over the place. I was thrilled to see her take office as the first woman vice-president in suffragette purple on inauguration day in January 2021. But I was dismayed by her sullen resistance to taking responsibility for the immigration crisis at the Mexican border, as tasked by Biden, her incoherent “word salads” and the ill-concealed “s***show” unfolding with staff in her office. Biden aides, by the way, were happy to see her knocked down a peg or two in the hope of shoring up his second-term prospects, but she ought to have been able to cope with the job better.
“Laffin’ Harris,” Trump called her recently. But look more closely and you will find that a lot of the Republican criticism is not only pale and male, but stale. In January this year, I asked in the New Statesman: “Could Harris be on the verge of a Kamalaissance?” She had just turned in a successful performance on The View, a popular morning television show. It led Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s former White House press spokeswoman, to observe on Fox News: “What Kamala Harris is doing, right or wrong, is enormously powerful among young women.”
Trump tried to zing Harris a few days ago with a sarcastic reference to her “mentor, the Great Willie Brown of San Francisco” on Truth Social. It was a warning that things could get dirty. Harris, 59, had a relationship in the Nineties with the much older Brown, which helped her political rise in California. But she would be able to hit back at Trump’s execrable record with women. As a former prosecutor, she would be able to lay into him as a convicted fraudster and criminal.
Harris showed last night in Las Vegas she can also take the fight to Trump on policy, framing the contest as one between “freedom, compassion and the rule of law” and “chaos, fear and hate”. She tore into the radical conservative Project 2025, sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, with its plans to roll back welfare provisions, and LGBTQ and women’s rights (which Trump is now hastily trying to disown).
“Someone who vilifies immigrants, who promotes xenophobia, someone who stokes hate, should never again have the chance to stand behind a microphone and seal of the President of the United States,” she said, with a forcefulness that eluded Biden in debate.
Should Biden falter, there is an emerging consensus that Harris is the only tried and tested candidate
Admittedly, the polls vary as to whether Harris is a stronger candidate than Biden. Three years of harsh attacks have taken their toll, but Republicans have set the bar low for her reappraisal. One of the reasons why Biden is hanging on as nominee is the uncertainty over the manner of selecting a successor. A floor fight at the Democratic convention in August could damage the party on election day. Some big names are also lining up behind Biden for the selfish reason that they hope to succeed him in 2028. Nominating Harris would put paid to their own ambitions.
However, should Biden falter, there is an emerging consensus that Harris is the only tried and tested candidate (and the only one with the unfettered right to spend Biden’s campaign war chest). The most likely scenario is that she would either be given the chance to show off her debating chops at four geographically dispersed town hall meetings with other contenders — or be the candidate by acclamation, with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton cheering her on at the Democratic convention in August.
So far Harris has been playing it cool, seeking to be an effective surrogate rather than a rival to Biden. Turning up the heat on Trump would not only help her own White House prospects, but would also bolster the existing Biden-Harris ticket. Who dares wins.
