As if there weren’t enough skewed parallels and rhymes between 1968 and 2024, Joe Biden’s decision to not seek reelection leaves Kamala Harris as the establishment Democratic candidate tasked with pulling together a fractured party to win over an intensely polarised electorate.
Unlike Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson’s hapless heir, Harris doesn’t have the burden of a deeply divisive war abroad. The war to save democracy, instead, is in the United States itself, against Donald Trump and his wholly owned subsidiary, the Republican Party — or, in 1968 parlance, it’s as if George Wallace had taken over the Republicans (and to complicate things, Robert F Kennedy Jr — the son of Bobby Kennedy, who would have been the Democrat candidate in ’68 — is running as an independent).
Biden was on the verge of splitting his party. Unlike LBJ, however, it wasn’t around any issue or policy, but rather his increasingly obvious frailty and inability to make much of a dent in Trump’s small but persistent polling lead, as well as the implications for the Senate and the House if Biden’s candidacy yielded a Republican landslide. The assassination attempt on Trump sealed the deal. Biden had to go, or the nightmare of a Republican White House, House and Senate looked likely. Any other Democrat with a pulse was viewed as a better candidate.
Who that Democrat will be now needs to be determined, with the institutional momentum behind Vice President Kamala Harris, who polls slightly better than, about the same as, or slightly worse than Biden, depending on which pollster you prefer, in until-now hypothetical match-ups at the national level. That will change if she becomes the official nominee, with the added benefit that she’s more likely to turn out African-American voters (and presumably has a lock on the South Asian vote).
But if Harris becomes the Democratic nominee, what won’t change, indeed what will be exacerbated, is the vile nature of the Republican campaign. Harris’ gender and race will become prime targets for Trump and Republicans. The “birther” narrative about Harris has been around for several years and will be dramatically amplified — Trump had no qualms about peddling the original birther myth about Barack Obama. Even non-partisan media will give such claims airtime, sucking oxygen out of a Harris campaign.
A different nominee — a white male, for instance — might not attract such opprobrium. But to view a Gavin Newsom or a JB Pritzker as more preferable Democratic candidates because they’d be less “divisive” is to misdiagnose the problem. Trump supporters will view any Democratic candidate as inherently evil, as a member of a liberal elite out to immiserate them and steal their basic liberties. They are bitterly angry at everyone unlike them. Trump is their cry of rage. They have been fed years of propaganda about the sinister conspiracy that liberal, woke elites are engaged in. They aren’t about to shift from Trump for anyone. He is, as he says, their “retribution” — not just against the Democrats but against a modern America they despise.
The only question then becomes whether a Democrat candidate can attract independent voters, and whether Republicans disgusted enough by what Trump has done to their party will move camps. Whether Harris can do that will now be the focus of Democrat leaders and, doubtless, obsessive poll watchers.
But the 1968 election didn’t fix America’s divisions; it widened them. The Vietnam War dragged on for another five years under Nixon and was expanded into Cambodia and Laos. The domestic divisions it caused only grew worse. The Kent State shootings were in 1970 — that year there were more than 400 terror attacks in the US from all kinds of perpetrators from all parts of the political spectrum, not just well-known Black nationalist groups like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. It would take Watergate and Nixon’s resignation to bring some sense of normalcy back to US politics.
It’s hard to believe that if Hubert Humphrey had somehow won in ’68 that such a return to normalcy would have happened any faster. America is in the grip of a deep malaise decades in the making and which will likely take decades to fix, if it ever can be. We can look back on the ’60s and ’70s with hindsight and see how America got through it. It doesn’t feel like it will at the moment.
What does Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race mean for the 2024 US election? Who should the Democrats nominate — and can they beat Donald Trump? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
