Kamala Harris will likely be the next president of the United States – and that’s overall good news if you care about democracy, justice and equality. Joe Biden’s decision on Sunday to bow out of the presidential race clears the path for the country to elect its first woman and first woman of color as president.
Even though the electoral fundamentals for this year’s election have always favored the Democrats – despite what numerous misleading polls have been showing (and with most of the news media reacting purely off those polls) – Harris’s selection will largely shore up the weaknesses that were dragging down Biden’s poll numbers.
All of the drama and dissatisfaction over Biden’s June debate performance completely obscured the underlying factors that made it more likely than not that the Democrats, even with Biden as nominee, were in a strong position to win in November. Here are the facts.
First, most people in this country typically choose the Democratic nominee for president over the Republican nominee time and time again. With the sole exception of 2004, in every presidential election since 1992, the Democratic nominee has won the popular vote (Biden bested Donald Trump by 7m votes in 2020).
Those trends have only continued during the four years since the 2020 election. Since 2020, 16 million young people have become eligible to vote, and 12 million people, most of them older, have died. Biden beat Trump by 30 points among young people, according to the exit polls, and he lost among the oldest voters (52% for Trump, 47% for Biden). So the fundamental composition of our nation’s electorate is more progressive, more diverse and more favorable to Democrats right now than it was in 2020.
Second, although far too many in the media proceed from the premise that large swaths of the electorate are up for grabs each election cycle and susceptible to switching their political allegiances from one party to the other, the actual data starkly contradicts that belief.
The gold standard measure of voter behavior is the American National Election Studies (Anes), “a joint collaboration between the University of Michigan and Stanford University” that analyzes voter behavior over several decades. The Anes has found a clear and undeniable trend of swing voters virtually disappearing from the populace. In 2020, just 5.6% of voters fell into that category – down from 13% in 2008.
Lastly, a reality that historians will certainly puzzle over in future years when they try to understand why Biden was forced out less than three and a half months before election day is that the economy is actually going like gangbusters. Fifteen million jobs have been created under the Biden administration and the stock market is at an all-time high, swelling 401k retirement coffers by an average of $10,000 according to Fidelity investments.
Despite all that, Biden’s position as nominee became untenable when support within his own party crumbled as people worried about his poor debate performance and weak polling numbers. Looking under the hood at those polls, however, we see that Harris should be able to quickly consolidate the support that was slow to coalesce around Biden. The instructive and completely overlooked data point in the latest polls is that Biden was doing just fine with white voters (that is, the percentage he needed in order to win), and the softness in his numbers mostly stemmed from tepid support among some people of color.
An 18 July CBS poll showed Trump leading Biden by 51% to 47%. Breaking down the numbers reveals that Biden was backed by 42% of white voters – a higher percentage than he received in 2020 when he defeated Trump. The top line weakness came from the results for voters of color, which showed just 52% of Latinos and 73% percent of African Americans currently supporting the president (with drop-off primarily among men from these groups).
First of all, those figures are so historically aberrant that they call into question the polling methodology. Biden received 65% of the Latino vote in 2020, and 87% of the Black vote (no Democratic nominee has ever received less than 83% of the Black vote since the advent of race-specific exit polling in 1976). Either there has been a cataclysmic decline of support for Biden among voters of color, or the pollsters just aren’t that good at surveying people of color, or people of color are expressing their current lack of enthusiasm, which is a very different thing than how they will ultimately vote in November.
If, in fact, support for Democrats among people of color is the principal problem, then putting Harris at the top of the ticket is a master stroke. The enthusiasm for electing the first woman of color as president will likely be a thunderclap across the country that consolidates the support of voters of color, and, equally important, motivates them to turn out in large numbers at the polls, much as they did for Barack Obama in 2008.
The challenge the party will face in November is holding the support of Democratic-leaning and other “gettable” whites, especially given the electorate’s tortured history in embracing supremely qualified female candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams. (The primary difference between Abrams, who lost in Georgia, and Senator Raphael Warnock, who won, is gender.) Sexism, misogyny and sexist attitudes about who should be the leader of the free world are real and Democrats will have to work hard to address that challenge.
One critical step to solidifying the Democratic base is for all political leaders to quickly and forcefully endorse and embrace Harris’s candidacy.
Mathematically, it is likely – and certainly possible, if massive investments are made in getting out the vote of people of color and young people as soon as possible – that the gains for Democrats will offset any losses among whites worried about a woman (and one of color, no less) occupying the Oval Office and becoming our nation’s commander in chief.
All of this adds up to the likelihood that the 47th president of the United States will be Kamala Devi Harris.
Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color, and author of Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority and How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good
