Several weeks ago, it seemed as though Democrats were going to have to resign themselves to being ousted from the White House. President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance exposed his clear cognitive decline to the whole world, resulting in a growing uneasiness among Democrats about keeping the 81-year-old at the top of the ballot. Then former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt at one of his campaign rallies, and there seemed to be no conceivable way that the geriatric who struggles to climb a flight of stairs could possibly stand a chance against the man who took a bullet to the head and still pushed his security detail aside to urge his countrymen to fight for their nation. It was only a matter of time before Biden would drop out.
Sure enough, one week and one day after the Trump assassination attempt, Biden announced that he was ending his presidential campaign and “passing the torch,” so to speak. The question was “To whom?” Well-sourced reports suggested that Democratic Party elites like former President Barack Obama wanted former astronaut and current Senator Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a true-blue Democrat who could possibly appeal to moderate or undecided voters. In a fit of pique, and as a sort of middle-finger to the Party elites who pressured him out of the race, Biden quickly endorsed his vice president, the incompetent Kamala Harris, and top Democrats began lining up to add their endorsements to the list.
It seemed — to me, at least — that the Democrats might be quietly conceding the White House to Trump. There were two possible paths forward that I could see. One would be to commandeer the new Harris campaign, which presented the best legal chance of keeping the substantial campaign war chest accumulated by Biden and covertly funnel money down-ballot in an effort to keep or retake as much of the House and Senate as possible.
After all, one of the top concerns for Democratic Party elites was that the feeble Biden would dampen voter enthusiasm and impact down-ballot Democrats. With Harris atop the ticket, the Democratic Party would no longer need to justify the leadership (or lack thereof) of an octogenarian who regularly struggled to remember names and often invented his own indecipherable vocabulary. For all his errors and failures, Biden himself was worried that Harris may not have the chops to beat Trump at the ballot box, a concern reportedly shared by Obama, which is why the former president’s eventual endorsement came so much later than other Democrats’. It appeared then that top Democrats held little genuine hope for a Harris victory, angling instead perhaps to bolster their down-ballot candidates to hamper a future Trump presidency.
The second way forward that I could have foreseen would have been to keep Harris as quiet as possible, hush up her radically far-left record, and pair her with a running mate who could appeal to moderate voters and perhaps carry a swing state or two, without departing from the Democratic Party’s core policy positions. The hope in this case would have been to actually win the White House — or at least get close that there would be plausible deniability for attempted cheating — by presenting a united and reasonable ticket to voters as an alternative to Trump, whom Democrats would continue to paint as “extreme.”
Harris has, indeed, managed to both keep a high profile and keep her mouth shut thus far, doing no press interviews, appearing at no unscripted events, and even dodging debates against Trump. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (D) would have been an ideal running mate for Harris: a Democratic Party loyalist who can still present himself as a moderate, with enough energy and charisma to carry the Keystone State and maybe even several other battlegrounds. As a prominent Jewish politician, he could have also helped balance out the Hamas fever taking over the Democratic Party, furthering the “moderate” claim Harris would need to make, dogged as she is by her own extremist record.
Had Harris instantly pivoted to a moderate (or at least more moderate) policy position, openly repudiated (whether sincerely or not) her past endorsements of divisive radicalism, and armed herself with a running mate who could at least look moderate, she just might have managed to “shoot the moon” and land in the Oval Office come January 2025. Instead, she has so far run a veritable Biden-basement campaign, refused to distance herself from her extremist record, and chose as her running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D), who is arguably even to Harris’s left on nearly every single issue of consequence. Could it be that the Democrats really have just given up on winning the White House this November?
Every hole in Harris’s proverbial armor, Walz only widens. He brings nothing profitable to the table. Like Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), he’s a proud socialist. But where Sanders at least has the charm of Stadler and Waldorf, the two grouchy old Muppets who heckle Kermit and Fozzie from the balcony, Walz is more comparable to the angry atheist “comedian” Lewis Black, with his drooping, scowling brow and thin veneer of folksy attitude being broken by inexplicable elitist rage.
Walz boasts of being to the left of even former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on abortion. In addition to legalizing abortion up to the moment of birth in Minnesota, the governor also allowed children who survived abortion attempts to simply be left to die and even discarded reporting requirements so that no one could find out exactly how many babies his extreme policies killed. Walz is just as extreme on the subject of transgenderism, allowing minors in his state to undergo horrific genital mutilation surgeries and even removing children from their parents’ custody if mom and dad decide that a battery of hormone drugs and crotch surgeries aren’t in their kid’s best interests.
Perhaps most damningly, Walz presided over the destruction of his state’s major cities in 2020, allowing Black Lives Matter rioters to loot and deface and burn everything to the ground. For three days, Walz fiddled while Minneapolis burned, before finally calling the National Guard. In a bizarre video, Walz’s wife even bragged about opening her window to enjoy the fragrant scent of burning tires. On everything from open borders and illegal immigration to health care and the economy, Walz is even more radical than Harris, who is already facing criticism for her far-left extremism.
So with Harris and Walz at the helm, have the Democrats really just thrown in the towel on the fight for the White House? A pair of extremists certainly may invigorate the party’s ultra-progressive base, but it isn’t likely to encourage independent, moderate, and undecided voters to go blue in November — and in a race against Trump, who Democrats still label a critical “threat to democracy,” every vote counts.
It may be that the Democrats have done the math and determined that if enough progressives vote in enough key states, they may come close enough to an electoral win that they can break out the fake ballots and hope to get away with it. It may be that the Democrats are relying too heavily on their years-long smear campaign against Trump and the “MAGA” wing of the Republican Party and hope that their candidates’ naked extremism will pale in comparison to the “chaos” and “hate” that they so vigorously attribute to the 45th president. Or it may just be that the leaders, strategists, and architects of the Democratic Party have just given up hope on the White House this time around and don’t much mind having two radicals head the ticket, so long as the party can salvage competition for the House and Senate.
But whatever the case, the Democrats still have to recognize that Biden may have dampened voter enthusiasm because he was weak and incompetent — but a pair of knowingly, willfully extreme radicals may not fare much better, and might even do worse.
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
