What the Democrats should do next

President Joe Biden — who has announced that he will not run for re-election — has served the United States honorably for five decades, as a senator, as Barack Obama’s vice president and finally in the highest office in the land. Biden has endorsed Kamala Harris, his vice president, to be the new Democratic nominee. The best thing for Democrats to do now is to stage a genuinely open competition for who should oppose Donald Trump in the presidential race. Voters deserve a say in who represents them — and Harris was not on primary ballots in either 2020 or 2024. And the competition, even if messy, is likely to strengthen Democrats: either they find a candidate whom voters prefer to Harris; or Harris will go into November strengthened by a democratic show of support for her.

But that course of action may not be likely. The Democrats — and the wider pundit class — ignored Biden’s failing health for months and years. Once it became impossible to ignore, they (and he) wasted additional weeks on hemming and hawing about what to do. Now, next month’s Democratic National Convention and November’s elections are perilously close.

If Democrats do crown Harris, the upcoming election will be very close-run. Like her boss, Harris is and has long been deeply unpopular. And she is unpopular both because she has in the past taken some very unpopular decisions (such as endorsing a bail fund supportive of violent protesters) and because her flip-flopping on major issues has left her without strong supporters in either the progressive or the moderate camp within the Democratic Party.

These are serious liabilities but — especially when faced with an opponent who, for good and deep reason, himself remains deeply unpopular — they can be overcome. Harris needs to prosecute the case against Trump with force and clarity, qualities which she proved to be in her possession back when she was on the Senate Judiciary Committee. But she needs to do so without seeming like she is sitting in judgment of those Americans who are genuinely torn about who to support come November. Even though some left-leaning pundits like to disclaim the existence of swing voters, it is the millions of people who changed their mind between 2012 and 2016, or between 2016 and 2020, who will make the difference again this year.

If Democrats do crown Harris, the upcoming election will be very close-run

One way to appeal to these voters is to move fully into the political center. Trump has many personal and political vulnerabilities. But he has also proven to be willing to triangulate, for example by excising any pro-life messaging from the platform of the Republican National Convention and claiming that he didn’t support Project 2025, a radical and controversial set of policies put forward by the Heritage Foundation. If Harris wants to beat Trump, she must prove similarly willing to sacrifice the least popular positions Democrats hold on issues like the southern border or the participation of trans women in top female sporting competitions.

The election was starting to look like a foregone conclusion, with Trump comfortably in the lead. The party who is on track to lose has an interest in rolling the dice. The Democrats just did. That is a good sign: after weeks in which it looked paralyzed, the party which claims that the future of American democracy will turn on this election has shown that it actually wants to win.

A version of this article originally appeared on Yascha Mounk’s Substack.