The Democratic Party’s downfall is deeper than Harris or Biden

The storm on the Democratic Party’s electoral horizon was never limited to President Biden staying in the race. Biden’s mental infirmity and the concerted denial surrounding it, while governmentally dangerous, were merely amplifying the severity of the party’s imminent political reckoning.

Vice President Kamala Harris has now officially replaced Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. But this succession does little to address the underlying challenges facing the political viability of the party. 

Democrats have lost their 5-point lead in national voter identification over the last three years, which was already a smaller margin than it had been at the beginning of the Obama era. The Democratic Party dipped to lower favorability than the Republican Party even before the full revelation of Biden’s mental condition to the public. 

Although we still have a dearth of up-to-date polling since Biden suddenly withdrew, swing-state margins have only shrunk by about 1 percentage point since Harris became the nominee. As the Harris candidacy’s honeymoon phase ends, the polling will increasingly reflect that she is unlikely to defeat former President Donald Trump. 

Harris’s chances to win have little to do with her personal merits or lack thereof. The looming partisan realignment is instead primarily caused by unfavorable Democratic policies and the party’s refusal to amend or engage with dissent against those positions. 

An insecure national border, inflationary deficit spending, unaddressed homelessness, anti-Israel pandering and the funding of an intractable, existentially dangerous proxy war against Russia: These policies comprise the fundamental atmospheric instability causing the Democrats’ political storm.

Democrats are now forced to toss Harris into the eye of that storm. The likely reality that the Democratic presidential nominee will lose is not a result of any particular personal animus toward Harris or Biden. But the dynamic of the post-primary replacement presents Harris with unique challenges.  

Harris will not have the standard party stamp of approval as a presidential nominee. She was not elected by millions of primary voters, but rather by a few thousand convention delegates. Moreover, those convention delegates were left with little choice after Biden dropped out. The primary elections had already concluded. Harris will therefore enter the general election campaign as a nominee without any direct voter engagement from her party. 

Harris will therefore also be an entirely untested candidate in the general election, having skipped the primary process entirely. The lack of testing of Biden in 2024 (he was permitted to avoid any true primary competition) allowed for the not-so-shocking revelation of his true condition during the first presidential debate against Trump. 

Unlike Biden, Harris was not even fully electorally tested in the 2020 primaries. She dropped out before the first state voted and earned zero Democratic delegates. That was also before three-and-a-half years of her presiding as vice president in a historically unpopular administration.

Harris will also be unable to distinguish her own policy platform meaningfully from that of the Biden administration. If she tries to, she will be admitting that she has not been a meaningful factor in the administration.

But being vice president is Harris’s claim to the nomination. She was otherwise unequivocally rejected by Democratic voters in the 2020 primary based on her record up until that point. Moreover, Harris was prominently put in charge of the illegal immigration crisis.

Candidate Harris will therefore represent the Biden administration’s record, despite recent media attempts to walk back her informal title of “border czar.”

But the Democrats’ political dilemma is no more limited to Harris than it was to Biden. Even the strongest Democratic alternatives to Harris still lose against Trump in polling. That is better than Biden was doing, with the double-digit deficits against Trump in those same states that cropped up after his June 27 debate performance, but it is far from successful. 

Meanwhile, independent-thinking officials have begun leaving the Democratic Party in droves. The growing list includes West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, Arizona Sen. Kirsten Sinema, 2020 presidential candidate and former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson, 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

As the party has come to be solidly controlled by an Obama-era alliance of Clinton neoliberals and Bernie Sanders democratic socialists (demonstrated in the simultaneous endorsements of Harris by the New Democrat and Progressive congressional caucuses), many non-ideological pragmatists have found themselves displaced. 

The Democrats’ impending political disaster is reminiscent of that of the Republican Party in 2008. The political toxicity of then-President George W. Bush fully extended to the successive Republican nominee. Americans at that time found their country trapped in two new wars of occupation, causing the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and contractors and Iraqi and Afghan civilians, and returning to trillions in national deficit spending on those wars, all while the bubble of our domestic economy headed toward its burst. 

The fact that the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was not Bush did not save him or many down-ballot Republicans in the 2008 election. Republicans only became electorally viable again at the national level in 2016, after admitting error and changing many of their economic and foreign policy positions under Trump’s reformational leadership.

The former president has now been made the Republican nominee for the third time in a row. The Republican platform has been updated, signaling an official shift away from neoconservative leadership. 

The Democratic Party requires a reformation of its own leadership and policy positions if it wants to survive politically. Otherwise, it will go the way of the Whigs.

Jeremy Etelson was a Democratic staffer in Maryland. He received a J.D. from George Washington University in 2024 and an M.Phil. in political theory and intellectual history from the University of Cambridge in 2019.