With Vice President Kamala Harris‘s place on the 2024 Democratic ticket all but secured, some Democrats are eager to mollify her critics, fearing that a pile-on could hurt the party.
The concerns revolve around President Joe Biden turning 82 in the weeks after Election Day, with the possibility of leaving office at 86 if he serves the whole second term. The worry grows larger if the Republican nominee is someone other than former President Donald Trump, particularly as the case for a generational shift gains steam. Biden is expected to formalize his reelection plans in the coming months with Harris at his side.
“We know they’re not going to nominate Trump; age is going to be a real thing,” one swing state Democratic Party chairperson told the Washington Examiner. “Given the opportunity for [Biden] to go out on top or get taken apart by somebody 30 years younger, I don’t want to see it happen to a guy that I respect as much as I do.”
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In an op-ed earlier this month, Donna Brazile, a longtime Democratic strategist who was Al Gore’s campaign manager when he ran for president after serving as vice president, argued that critics continue to hold Harris to unreasonable standards and credited her with holding “more experience in elected office than several past presidents and vice presidents.”
Brazile also discussed the possibility of Harris as Biden’s successor, saying, “Questions have been raised about the fitness of just about every vice president to move into the Oval Office should the president die or is unable to continue serving for another reason.”
Brazile was among a group of Harris confidants and Democratic strategists who met less than a year after the vice president took office to discuss how to defend her from a torrent of unflattering headlines.
Questions around Harris’s ability to martial a winning campaign are not new. During the Democratic nominating contest in 2020, her presidential campaign ran aground as infighting broke out between top advisers.
Prominent Democrats who doubt Harris’s abilities have begun to agitate privately. The party wants to win, and some question whether a standard-bearer who ended her 2020 campaign before reaching the first nominating state can achieve that.
Citing Harris’s poll numbers, one state party chair described the vice president as “an albatross” in the upcoming race but conceded there were no alternatives on the horizon and the party is better off embracing her.
“She’s either going to be a liability or a help. And you better embrace her because it’s not like she’s going to be off the ticket,” the state party chair said, according to CNN.
The tensions swept into public in recent weeks after Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) withheld a full endorsement when asked whether Harris should remain Biden’s 2024 running mate. While the Massachusetts senator later clarified her remarks, the incident hinted at uncertainties coursing through the party over the identity of Biden’s successor.
Twice Warren phoned Harris to apologize but was unable to reach her. Instead, the vice president’s chief of staff, Lorraine Voles, reportedly returned the call.
Harris has dismissed criticism against her as “political chatter.”
There are signs of improvement.
After a slew of departures that saw Harris’s top communications aides run for the exits during her first year in office, turnover has slowed.
The vice president used campaign travel in the lead-up to the midterm elections and time over the holidays last year to rekindle ties to old donors and advisers, CNN reported.
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And as president of the Senate, Harris was afforded some breathing room during the first two months of the year, bolstered by Democrats’ one-vote buffer in the Senate.
The responsibility has limited Harris’s ability to travel, placing her on call to break ties in the evenly split chamber more than two dozen times. Illnesses and other absences have at times pressed her back into service in the Senate.
