2024: The Pre-Mortem

We're about to find out whether the Democrats made the right call in unifying behind Harris instead of taking the risk of a contested convention

I’ve made most of these points many times over the last few months in comments across Substack, but I wanted to officially summarize and post them here for the record before the results come in.

Kamala Harris in the coming hours or days (or God forbid weeks) will either be elected President of the United States or will join Hillary Clinton as a Democratic nominee who fell short against Donald Trump.

If she wins, it will fully vindicate those who advocated for immediately rallying behind her as the presumptive Democratic nominee once Joe Biden stepped aside. While some people, including me, wanted to see a process where Kamala would have had to compete against other potential Democrats to win the nomination in an abbreviated primary process and contested convention, most Democrats wanted to immediately unify the party behind a candidate and Kamala was the only viable choice to fill that role. If she wins, that choice, which was primarily driven by a desire to avoid all the unknowns and potential pitfalls of a contested convention in the interest of unity, will clearly have proven to be correct.

On the other hand, if she loses, that choice will have proven to be wrong. Kamala was known to be a flawed candidate. She had run a terrible candidate for president in 2019. She had adopted a number of positions in that campaign that it was clear would hurt her in the general election. And the fact that she was Vice President was always going to make it harder for her to distance herself from unpopular positions of the Biden administration, especially since one of the two worst issues for Biden was the border and that had been one of the issues that Kamala was most associated with. All those flaws have been clear in the last few months. 

On the positive side, Kamala has run a better campaign than many people expected: she gave both a universally praised convention speech and had a great debate; she effectively raised an unprecedented amount of money; and she has managed to keep the Democratic party unified. At the same time, her refusal for months to give interviews, her ineffectiveness as a communicator when she did, her inability to effectively explain or distance herself from her rhetoric in 2019/2020, her inability to pivot effectively from unpopular Biden administration issues, and her inability to clearly articulate her vision for America’s future have all hurt her campaign. 

So we are about to find out whether the trade off of immediately unifying but behind a flawed candidate was the right choice.

Now to be fair, we can’t know for certain that the road not taken would have been better or worse. It’s certainly possible that if Kamala wins, a candidate that emerged from a contested convention would also have won. And it’s certainly possible that if Kamala loses, another candidate would also have lost. Despite the awfulness of Donald Trump as a candidate, the Democrats were facing an environment that has been universally difficult for incumbent parties globally.

But that last argument cuts both ways. Just as a team that is behind needs to be prepared to take more risks to win a game, a party that is behind needs to be willing to take more risks as well. The Democratic Party over the last year—from allowing Joe Biden to run essentially unopposed in primaries to immediately unifying behind Kamala when Biden finally stepped aside—has been risk averse. We’re about to see whether that was the right strategy.

I have never wanted to be proven wrong more fervently in my life.