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Since Joe Biden confirmed that he will run for re-election, the odds of Kamala Harris becoming the first female president of the United States have shrunk — and significantly so.
For Harris to take over from Biden, several things would have to take place. Biden would have to keep her as his vice president for the 2024 campaign. Let’s assume, not with total confidence, that the eighty-year-old Biden is still alive and well enough to lead by the start of 2025. If not, his vice president would anyway take over as commander-in-chief, possibly only for a matter of days. But if Biden doesn’t complete his second-term, it could be all hail Kamala, the lady chief, possibly for several years or more. Brace yourself.
Let’s consider those possibilities in order. Team Biden has shown no willingness to drop Harris from his ticket. Reports from Washington suggest the president’s advisors are more eager to fix Harris’s negative image than shuffle her out for a more popular alternative.
Very few people want Kamala Harris to be president
To drop a sitting vice president would, according to Washington insiders, reveal nervousness, something winning candidates are not meant to show. The last time a president dropped his veep for a presidential election was 1976, when Gerald Ford replaced Nelson Rockefeller with Bob Dole, only to lose to Jimmy Carter. It seems unlikely Biden will do the same.
Next, will Biden-Harris hold on to the White House in 2024? It’s foolish to make electoral predictions this early, and the polls are still too raw. Nevertheless, incumbents have tended to win presidential elections in recent decades. Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama — four of the last six US presidents have won a second term. If Biden can avoid a steep recession, he could make that five of the last seven.
At present, it looks highly likely that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee in 2024, a prospect Democrats are pleased about, given that that means Biden-Harris will face the man they beat in 2020. That confidence may turn out to be hubris. For now, however, Biden-Harris are marginal favorites to win next November.
Then it’s down to the Grim Reaper — and, when it comes to men in their eighties, the odds are in death’s favor. One doesn’t want to be too morbid but the actuarial life tables suggest that Biden, who has already surpassed the (diminishing) average American life expectancy of seventy-eight by almost three years, will not see out his second term. He is a teetotaler who still exercises regularly, but he has become visibly more frail in recent years and it’s hard to imagine him in the White House at eighty-six.
A President Kamala Harris before 2028 would not, in fact, have smashed her way through that famous “invisible glass ceiling.” She would instead have ascended to the summit of global power via an invisible elevator.
Identity politicking will demand that people celebrate the collapse of old boundaries, even if it wasn’t strictly speaking the will of the people that broke the boundaries down.
The first woman president. The second mixed-race president. The first president who didn’t have a white parent. The arc of history bends always towards progress etc. But does it?
Very few people want Kamala Harris to be president — she’s considerably less popular than Biden. Polls suggest Trump would destroy Harris at the ballot box. She has under-performed quite dramatically as a politician — and America knows it. Yet there she is, one failing heartbeat away from the Oval Office.
If that’s progress, perhaps America needs to try going backwards instead. “Vote Biden get Harris” might be a bit too tasteless as an attack line even for Republicans in 2024. But it might also be true.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
