How the Democrats Got Their Shit Together
“We are the party that is not a cult of personality.”
FORMER REP. JOHN YARMUTH (D-Ky.) was at an event one week ago with several Democratic members of Congress, including a handful from the Congressional Black Caucus, when the topic turned to President Joe Biden’s then-uncertain political future.
The whole group, Yarmuth recalled, was “adamantly opposed to Biden withdrawing” from the campaign. But when he had a private conversation with one of the members, “she basically agreed with me that there was not a viable campaign.”
It was, Yarmuth recalled, befuddling. Why insist a candidate who can’t win stay in the contest?
Over the next week, Yarmuth kept talking to his former colleagues. And he kept getting the same types of responses. Only this time, they were inverted. Members were telling him they believed Biden should withdraw, but they were too timid to publicly demand it.
It was a form of political paralysis that he feared would doom the party—until eventually it ended. A few dozen congressional Democrats chose to say publicly what so many others were saying privately. Leadership applied pressure to Biden and his own aides acquiesced to political reality. On Sunday, the president announced he was taking himself out of the race.
Looking back, Yarmuth called it “a fascinating process” from which he drew a rather utilitarian conclusion: “Democrats,” he said, “aren’t as coldhearted as they need to be.”
Seconds later, he added a qualifier: “Sometimes.”
Depending on one’s vantage point, the Democratic party’s actions over the past month could be described as coldhearted or practical, rash or prudent. In spectacular fashion, top officials went from rallying around a beleaguered president to facilitating his historic decision not to seek a second term. The process exposed major fault lines and psychodramas within the ranks. It tested both the political acumen of leadership and the loyalty of voters. It was, to borrow a crude analogy, the political equivalent of applying shock therapy to oneself. All the more remarkable, the party may come out of it not just intact, but stronger.
“I feel so much pain for the man,” said the head of a top Democratic-allied outside group. “But this needed to happen.”
At a minimum, the president’s departure from the race and his subsequent decision to endorse his vice president, Kamala Harris, has dramatically altered the electoral landscape. The rush of online donations into Harris’s campaign coffers was so immense that at one point on Sunday a top re-election official told me the money was coming in too quickly to get a read on the total.
On a psychic level, party members admitted feeling relief for the first time in months. Some expressed a sense of not just purpose, but of organization, which in turn led to optimism that the campaign against Donald Trump is not actually lost.
“We demonstrate that we are the party that is not a cult of personality,” said one member. “We are the party that can course-correct. They had a deeply flawed candidate, and they decapitated anyone who said so. We had one with a politically fatal flaw—age—and we took care of it.”
It’s easy, of course, to feel good when you’ve seemingly put an end to a self-destructive, highly toxic discussion about the shambolic performance of your candidate.
The next few weeks may not bring such comfort. It could even be a path back to despair. Harris may be hampered by the same political shortcomings that doomed her 2020 primary bid. Trump may still prove to be on track for the White House. More immediately, the sense of collective purpose that ballooned among Democrats on Sunday could pop.
But for now, Democrats are feeling optimistic.
White House aides, while disheartened by the treatment of their boss over the past few weeks, took solace in the fact that it had come to an end. “I hope this injects the energy our side needs,” one said.
Many potential challengers to Harris for the Democratic nomination announced they’d back Harris instead. All the Democratic state party chairs did as well. So too did a number of state delegations. And Joe Manchin, having leaked that he was potentially re-registering as a Democrat in order to challenge Harris, had abandoned that vanity project by Monday morning.
The party, in short, got its shit together. On that, most Democrats can agree.
The more pressing question some were grappling with after Biden’s announcement was whether they had done so too late.
The regret wasn’t so much that the paralysis Yarmuth witnessed and the shock therapy the party endured may have done irreparable harm. It was that it all could have been avoided had the party taken the difficult steps that to many had been self-evident long ago.
“At long last,” said Kenneth Baer, a longtime Democratic speechwriter and operative, “the party that prides itself in believing in science succumbed to the data staring us in the face: the president’s age, consistent surveys showing that the voters—including Democrats—wanted someone new, and the swing state polling of the past few weeks.”