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Representative Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey did not mince words when The Independent asked about if Vice President Kamala Harris’s debate performance confirmed that she and other Democrats were right in calling for President Joe Biden to step aside.
“Yes,” she told The Independent. “I think we're seeing people come out, especially young people. I'm hearing a lot of reports from parents who said their kids weren't going to vote, and now they are voting.”
“We're having busloads of people going to Pennsylvania to knock on doors right now,” Sherrill added, saying that there had been a “great response” to Harris’s performance in the debate.
Sherrill, a who flipped a seat held for decades by Republicans in 2018, is the exact type of Democrat who knew that Biden could be a drag on Democrats in November after his disastrous debate performance.
Now, Harris’s debate triumph and Republicans’ inability to defend Donald Trump’s shambolic performance has many of the Democrats who told Biden to go saying “told you so.”
Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts offered a withering criticism when he claimed Biden did not even recognize him during an event to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
“Oh, my God, absolutely,” he said, when asked if the debate showed it was right for Harris to ascend to the top of the ticket. He did, however, quickly then pivot to giving the president credit: “The enthusiasm that you see among Democrats and many independents who wanted another choice throughout the country is because President Biden was willing to step aside. It was the greatest turnaround in American political history.”
Some were more careful in their words.
Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, the first Democratic Senator to warn that Biden might lose, seemed giddy that Harris mentioned the expanded Child Tax Credit during the debate. The two are friends, and crafted the Child Tax Credit bill together when Harris was a senator.
“She mentioned it right off the bat, and she was the first co-sponsor when Sherrod Brown and I introduced that bill,” he told The Independent.
Senator Peter Welch, the first Democrat to say Biden should step aside, said simply that Harris was doing great.
The day after Biden’s meltdown, Representative Angie Craig of Minnesota famously said, “I'm still processing what happened last night,” before adding that it was clear Biden needed to step aside. But this week, she refrained from gloating.
“I think the vice president showed last night that she was ready to be commander-in-chief,” she told The Independent.
Craig’s fellow Minnesotan Dean Phillips ran a quixotic primary challenge against Biden, during which he mainly argued that Biden was too old and out-of-touch. But Craig was mum about if they spoke at all.
“I talk with Dean Phillips all the time,” she said. “We didn't talk about the debate today.”
During the agonizing month before Biden stepped aside, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries met privately with the president but stopped short of endorsing him. As the shepherd of the Democrats in the House, he needed to protect his flock and likely articulated his concerns to Biden.
But, as is usually the case, he chose his words carefully when talking about the switchout.
“President Biden will go down in history as one of the most consequential presidents of all time, and made the selfless decision to pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris, who's doing a tremendous job,” he told The Independent.
Even John Fetterman, a Biden diehard, said that Harris did a great job and immediately leaped to her defense when her flip-flopping on fracking was brought up.
“Was she talking about eating dogs?” he said. “Well then, she had a great night. So please do not ask me about fracking and other obscure things when the other side are talking about eating dogs and that kind of s**t.”
Of course, Jeffries, and any other serious political operator, knows that they still have to give Biden his due and cannot openly admit the president was weak. They also know that they cannot prematurely celebrate an election that remains a dead heat.
Next month Governor Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, will square off against Senator JD Vance at another debate. The near-universal praise of Walz is another sign of how Harris has gotten a fractured party excited.
“Tim Walz is great because he's not going to be doing any fancy-schmancy s**t,” Moulton, who bonded with Walz over their shared military service when Walz was a congressman, said. “He's just going to show America that Democrats are for the people and Republicans under Trump are just weirdos.”
