Honest Graft has been on a long hiatus since last year—for good reasons that will be further discussed soon!—and it’s great to be back. Before the last few weeks, it seemed like 2024 might wind up being one of the least eventful national campaigns in recent memory. But now…well, here we are once again in “making history” mode.
Joe Biden’s abrupt decision to leave the presidential race and the imminent choice of a replacement nominee are big topics that will undoubtedly hold our attention for the next few weeks. Unprecedented developments like these aren’t just important because they liven up a long campaign season and provide fascination for easily bored journalists and scholars. By giving us brand new case studies and data, they help us better understand how politics works. So here are a few initial lessons we students of American parties can draw so far from these events. There are surely many more to come.
1. Presidents don’t just exercise power over parties; parties also exercise power over presidents. This is a familiar view among political scientists, but it doesn’t always receive enough acknowledgment by journalists and citizens who often view the president as the center of gravity around which the rest of the political system orbits. We have just witnessed a coalition of congressional party leaders, financial donors, professional strategists, media figures, and party-aligned voters convince a sitting president to abandon a re-election bid in the midst of the campaign season. That’s a very impressive show of influence, and exactly how that influence was brought to bear on Biden will deserve extensive examination for what it tells us about who holds internal power within the party and how they use it. (We’ll discover, I suspect, that Nancy Pelosi continues to be a tremendously important figure in Democratic Party politics; she’ll almsot certainly go down in history as the most important single Democratic figure of the past 25 years—and possibly the last 50 years—who never served as president.)
2. Joe Biden was the first president we’ve had since George H. W. Bush who wasn’t a dominant, charismatic personality. At times, that quality served him well. He didn’t inspire the personal attention—and divisiveness—that each of the last four presidents did, which allowed Americans’ focus in the 2020 and 2022 elections to linger on the vulnerabilities of his Republican opponents. But it also meant that he couldn’t count on a large reservoir of sentimental devotion among Democrats that could protect him once he looked politically vulnerable. Democrats never fell in love with Biden, but they hired him in 2020 because they thought he could do the important job of defeating Trump. Once it looked like he wouldn’t be able to accomplish the same task again this year, it was time to find somebody else who might have a better shot. Joe Biden, as it turned out, would not given the chance to go down in romantically doomed defeat.
3. The perennial number-one fantasy of political media members is to have a contested national convention with genuine uncertainty about the choice of nominee. Coincidentally, that’s also most party leaders’ number-one nightmare. The rapid consolidation of multiple party officials’ and delegates’ support for Kamala Harris as Biden’s replacement over the course of the day, including key members of all major Democratic subgroups from progressives to labor champions to suburban moderates to the Black and Hispanic caucuses, doesn’t mean that these leaders have all suddenly decided that Harris is an amazingly strong candidate—however generous their public praise of her might be. Instead, it reflects the view that the party can’t afford more delay or infighting and that she’s the obvious, broadly acceptable heir apparent. It’s likely that most Democratic insiders privately concede that Harris begins as the underdog in the fight against Trump. But they had begun to worry that renominating Biden might lead to a thoroughly disastrous election in November that would not only cost them the White House but a slew of House and Senate seats as well. If Harris can at least motivate Democratic voters to turn out at high rates and keep the margin close at the top of the ticket, congressional Democrats will feel justified in their decision to push Biden aside in favor of her.