One of Washington’s quadrennial parlor games is well under way: Will the president (Joe Biden) bolster his re-election prospects by dumping his vice president (Kamala Harris)?
The answer, as usual, is almost certainly NO.
In recent months, Harris has become a more public spokesman for key administration policies. Last weekend, she delivered a strong statement condemning Russian “war crimes” in Ukraine. And she has been the lead advocate for its campaign to block further abortion curbs after last June’s Supreme Court decision.
That indicates she may be making progress toward the more comfortable role that earlier eluded her, though, like her boss, she remains uncommonly wary of media interactions.
Still, many Democrats are uncomfortable with a 2024 ticket of an octogenarian president and a running mate burdened with strong public doubts about her presidential readiness. Polls show her standing even weaker than Biden’s.
Nevertheless, the political reasons for keeping her on the ticket far outweigh the reasons for dropping her, as is generally the case in such situations. That’s why, in the end, most presidents don’t make a change.
Selecting a running mate is any presidential nominee’s first major decision. Dropping your chosen partner would admit a massive misjudgment that no modern president wants to make.
That is especially so in this case. Biden pledged to pick a Black woman running mate and chose the first vice president who is not only a Back woman but of Asian descent.
Dropping her would cause a major uproar in the Democratic Party, where the electorate is 40% non-white, and one-fourth Black. Unlike most past situations, ethnic background was more important than ideological balance in Biden’s choice.
For example, there were reports four years ago that the mercurial President Donald Trump was considering dropping Vice President Mike Pence. But the former Indiana governor’s strong support among religious conservatives who are a key GOP constituency was a major reason it was never seriously considered.
Similarly, when even some top advisers urged President George H.W. Bush in 1992 to replace lackluster Vice President Dan Quayle, fear of a serious rift with the GOP’s Reaganite wing was crucial in keeping him.
There have been three instances in modern American political history in which presidents changed vice presidential running mates, two by the same president.
In 1940, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt was undertaking an unprecedented third term, one opponent was his vice president, Texas conservative John Nance Garner. That made it easy for Roosevelt to replace Garner, who had little influence after helping FDR get nominated in 1932. Instead, Roosevelt picked one of the party’s most prominent liberals, Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace.
But four years later, with Roosevelt in ill health, party bosses were concerned about the prospect that Wallace might become president. The president chose the more moderate but little-known Missouri senator, Harry Truman, who succeeded to the presidency when Roosevelt died 82 days into his fourth term.
The other recent example had extenuating circumstances. When Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973 over a bribery scandal, President Richard Nixon picked House Republican Leader Gerald Ford to succeed him. When Nixon resigned the next year in the face of probable impeachment because of the Watergate scandal, Ford picked New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller as vice president, giving the country two non-elected leaders from the GOP’s more moderate wing.
Facing Ronald Reagan’s conservative primary challenge, Ford dropped Rockefeller. Once nominated, he picked Kanas Sen. Bob Dole as his running mate, but they narrowly lost the 1976 election.
In another modern instance, the vice presidential nominee never made it to the general election. In 1972, Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton was forced to resign from the Democratic ticket after the post-convention disclosure that he had been treated for depression including electric shock treatment. Presidential nominee George McGovern picked Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver to replace him, but the ticket lost badly.
Concerns about Harris stem from her failure to develop a clear vice presidential role and polls showing that she would be a weak candidate if something happened to Biden.
She is not regarded as personally close to the president, who relies mainly on a coterie of mainly white male longtime advisers.
Democratic officials generally believe that, if Biden decided not to run, she would have difficulty in being nominated or elected, though those things are hard to predict.
But it’s all almost certainly moot. Biden has made clear she will again be his running mate. And despite widespread concern that the president could face difficulty against a younger Republican nominee not named Donald Trump, no prominent Democrat is so far challenging him for the party’s nomination.
At Munich’s annual Security Conference on Saturday, Harris delivered a strongly worded speech in her soft-spoken manner, telling an audience of U.S. allies and national security experts, “The United States will support Ukraine for as long as it takes.”
She said the administration has concluded the Russians have committed “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine and “will be held to account.” She also warned other authoritarian nations like China against feeling emboldened to make attacks like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The words came from the vice president, and Biden echoed them Monday in Kiev, a one-two combo from a team likely to persist into next year’s campaign, whatever the recurrent rumors in Washington.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News and a frequent contributor. Email: carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com
