With their president out of the race and their party in crisis, can Democrats beat the clock – and Trump?

It has been said that everything in life is timing. A solid or spectacular body of work can be deflated by a single moment or single decision. Noteworthy or even legendary careers can crash and burn in the blink of an eye. Donald Trump found that out on a warm night in Butler, PA, when a perfectly timed turn of the head saved his life. And now Joe Biden hopes that his own timing – his decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race at almost the last possible moment, which he might well have reached months ago – will spare his place in history and the country a second Trump presidency. You can be certain that the career politician from Delaware must have been presented with overwhelming evidence of impending defeat in order to agree to this excruciating decision. What sort of deal he might have cut with party leaders in exchange for bowing out is anyone’s guess.

It is easy to predict what will and won’t happen in the days ahead as the Democrats scramble to put their presumably orchestrated succession plan into action. Party regulars from coast to coast will offer maudlin tributes to their compromised commander-in-chief, call him one of America’s greatest presidents, a man of honor who, unlike Donald Trump, put his country ahead of his ambition. Of course, that’s a tough sell when Trump just took a bullet to the head, but as elsewhere in life, you have to work with what you’ve got. The selfless, heroic party elder giving way to the younger, dynamic, forward-looking, multi-racial candidate is a concocted narrative Democrats will push to the hilt as they undertake (no pun intended) to unite a divided party, explain to angry voters why they offered no alternative to Biden in their primaries, and salvage a campaign far off the rails.

But make no mistake, if Donald Trump wins the election, Joe Biden will go down alongside Hillary Clinton on the Democrats’ historic blacklist. He will be viewed in the simplest terms by Democrats everywhere as the man who failed to stop Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Everything else in his 50-year career will fade into the background. Unless Kamala Harris can pull off a come-from-behind victory – and who knows the odds given the late hour and truly unprecedented circumstances – the question that will be asked from here to eternity is why Joe Biden refused to admit what everyone else could see until it was too late.

Biden Withdrawal: Dream or Nightmare for the GOP?

It is hardly news that Republicans have long written off, even laughed off, the concept of Kamala Harris as president. They believe she was picked for one reason and one reason only: She fulfilled Biden’s pledge to name a woman of color as his running mate. From her inscrutable public presence to her responsibilities as number two in the Biden administration, most prominently as border czar at a time when millions have crossed illegally specifically because of her administration’s cancelation of Trump policies, she will be subjected to countless attacks both similar and different from those employed against Biden.

In fact, she could possibly stack up as the worst of both worlds for anxious Democrats. She will be held every bit as responsible for the record of her administration as Biden, while not possessing anywhere near the political skills of the man who plucked her from the depths after her own campaign stalled before even hitting the starting line – after she famously implied Biden is a racist.

She was mostly unwilling to take a stand on either side of key issues, often responding to tough questions or controversial proposals by saying “we need to have a conversation about it.” She had a serious image crisis, stuck between claiming to be a tough-on-crime prosecutor who tossed marijuana users in prison to appeal to centrists, or the progressive who reversed course and fought the very forces she represented as California’s attorney general. She famously helped bail out rioters during the 2020 BLM-inspired summer from hell.

Kamala Harris has been the face of a collapsing border and consequent crime, issues of utmost importance to voters. If she thinks the temperature will lower on illegal immigration with Biden gone, she will learn quickly that she is just as vulnerable on the issue, perhaps even more so since it has been her chief responsibility. The “root causes” she was empowered to investigate and help to reverse have become a running joke.

The Vice President’s inappropriate and hysterical laughter in public is often and famously cringe-worthy. Her infamous word salads invite constant ridicule. Her evident lack of substance on anything beyond slam-dunk issues like abortion and racism has drawn dismal approval ratings, which, until Biden’s nationally televised meltdown, were even lower than those of the enfeebled soon-to-be-former president. Her relationship with legendary California politician Willie Brown, which launched her career as the state’s attorney general, a senator, and eventually vice president, will be open for wide discussion.

However, the symbolism of the first woman of color – she is not African-American, but rather Jamaican/Asian-American – with an opportunity to reach the Oval Office would have undeniable symbolic value for a party desperate to put the best face on its brand of identity politics. And while Harris has not attracted overwhelming support from minority voters, one would expect that the Democrats’ well-documented decline among its key constituencies – minorities and women – should at least theoretically start to reverse with her atop the ticket.

As for the matter of a new vice presidential nominee, many names have been floated, including Governors Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, both offering bipartisan appeal, along with – you guessed it – California’s Gavin Newsom. But the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama, all of whom led the effort to kick Biden to the curb, might well have a hard time convincing popular or famous officeholders to give up their safe positions for a riverboat gamble. All three of these governors could reasonably harbor ambitions for the presidency, and joining as the number two on a ticket facing a huge uphill climb hardly seems like a good career move.

At the same time, it is no secret that not all Democrats are sold on Harris. If they were, there wouldn’t have been all the discussion in recent weeks about a so-called mini-primary to anoint a candidate in a severely truncated process. We will never know, but it is certainly possible that Biden’s realization of his vice president’s liabilities factored into his original decision to seek a second term.

To reverse the red tide heading its way, the Democratic Party will need to pull its voters and members quickly into line, and hastily organize a process that could easily fly off the rails will be crucial. Will Rogers once famously said, “I am not a member of any organized party. I am a Democrat.” The left had better hope against hope that is no longer true.