Harris is the clear choice of Democratic voters

The coconut memes worked. 🥥🌴

Kamala Harris is very likely to be the Democratic nominee for president. Just how likely? Traders at Polymarket say the chances are 88 percent. But even that is probably too low. An overwhelming majority of Democratic members of Congress have endorsed her. So have all 50 Democratic state party chairs. And so has President Biden, whose campaign was responsible for choosing the large majority of convention delegates.

The scenarios where Harris doesn’t get nominated involve some sort of other shoe dropping. Maybe she gets cold feet at the prospect of running for president. Maybe there’s some scandal we’re unaware of — but a vice president ought to be pretty thoroughly vetted. I don’t know what happens if her polling winds up being very poor against Donald Trump — but it’s probably too late, with many of the people who would have run against her having endorsed her instead. So are the chances 100 percent? No. But they’re probably higher than 88 percent. Maybe 95 percent or something on that order. I suppose you shouldn’t technically call her the “presumptive nominee”, but I wouldn’t blame you too much if you did.

The mood on Democratic Twitter today was giddy, maybe too much so given that Harris faces an uphill battle against Trump.  But that giddiness has paid dividends, as Harris and Democrats have raised over $250 million since Biden announced yesterday that he’d drop out. Some of this undoubtedly reflects the pent-up demand for a candidate who could do the basic blocking-and-tackling of running a campaign. Biden’s campaign had been demoralizing to Democrats, a never-ending string of bad polls and dubious public appearances or equally dubious excuses. Suddenly having a chance when you thought you were drawing dead can produce a euphoric feeling.

Do I think Harris gives Democrats the best chance against Trump? Probably not, and betting markets don’t think so either. But I don’t think Democrats really had much choice in the matter. Their options were probably these:

Option A: Rallying behind Harris and giving her a running start, as they have.

Option B: Having some sort of open process where Harris was very likely to be selected anyway, but there might be a lot of hurt feelings.

I’m not sure that Option B would have been quite so bad — but I think we need to be realistic about what the outcome of the process would have been, which is Harris being chosen anyway, in which case Option A is the dominant strategy.

Take a look at this list of polls I compiled of Democratic voters testing Harris against an open field. (Meaning, multiple candidates, none of whom are Joe Biden.) On average since Biden’s disastrous debate, she’s received 39 percent of the vote in these polls versus 17 percent for the second-placed candidate — who in some cases was the unrealistic option of Michelle Obama. That included a 65-7 lead over Gavin Newsom in a Morning Consult poll conducted yesterday and today after Biden’s announcement.

Note that something changed in these polls since the last time that Biden’s status as the nominee was in question, when pollsters asked Democrats about a series of hypothetical primary matchups back in the winter and early spring. Harris only led 23-17 in those polls, and there was much more appetite for some sort of open contest. What has changed since then? Maybe it’s a sort of flight to safety among Democratic voters — or a realistic assessment about who would be fit to take over on short notice. If you’re a Democrat who isn’t happy with Harris as the nominee, you should probably be mad at Biden for not stepping aside earlier and giving other candidates more of a choice to make the case for themselves.

But I think Democrats like Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy are right that there’s been something of an organic groundswell of support for Harris: she began polling better in polls of Democratic primary voters as soon as June 28, just one day after the debate. It hasn’t quite been a “mini primary”, but she’s pretty clearly the preferred choice of her party’s voters.