How Harris Wins

Jonathan Chait: “The issue of Biden’s age, in some respects, has obfuscated the danger that the Democrats find themselves in, glossing over a cascading series of poor decisions that stretches back nearly ten years. If Harris wants to put the Democrats back on a winning track, she will have to grasp the extent to which Biden explicitly abandoned the Obama model of campaigning and governing for a new one that is vastly less successful at both. This will entail moving her rhetoric in a pragmatic direction on issues such as immigration, which Harris has already begun to do, and convincing voters that she is a moderate, which her choice of Minnesota’s Tim Walz as her running mate won’t help.”

“It will not mean compromising her ambitions and settling for incremental change, however. Because the truth is that, despite the rhetoric about transformative change, Biden’s formula did not come even close to matching the accomplishments of Obama, let alone those of FDR or LBJ.”