For Biden, a Decision to Step Aside Would Raise Another Question
"As President Biden grapples with the possibility of dropping his bid for re-election, a secondary question looms: Should he endorse his own vice president as the nominee?
President Biden has been saying some awfully nice things about Vice President Kamala Harris lately. “She’s not only a great vice president,” he told the audience at an N.A.A.C.P. convention last week. “She could be president of the United States.”
That, of course, is the point. She could. But will she? And most critically, perhaps, would Mr. Biden want her to be?
Even as the president confronts the agonizing decision of whether to drop his bid for a second term, he faces a second momentous choice if he does: Should he endorse his own vice president, effectively anointing her as the party’s nominee, or open the door to a short, intense contest to be decided weeks from now by Democratic convention delegates?
The question has absorbed Democratic politicians and strategists almost as much as the debate over whether he should step aside, a question framed largely through the lens of how they feel about Ms. Harris. Her supporters argue that she has earned the right to step in and that denying her would reek of sexism and racism. Her skeptics worry that she could not win in November and hope that a competition would surface a nominee with broader appeal.
The issue was infused with new urgency by reports that Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker who has been privately warning that Mr. Biden cannot beat former President Donald J. Trump, had told fellow members of her California delegation that she favored an open competition if the president did not run. While she considers herself a friend of Ms. Harris, Ms. Pelosi argued that the vice president would be strengthened by a contest.
“Most Democrats think it should be an open process,” former Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Democrat of North Dakota, said on Saturday. “What I would say is the best thing is for Kamala Harris is to win a contested convention fight because it would legitimize her candidacy. If it’s a backroom deal, you haven’t earned it and people want you to earn it. And once you earn it you get a huge bounce.”
But Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis of California, a Democratic ally of Ms. Harris, said the vice president had already gone through an open process as Mr. Biden’s running mate.
“During the Democratic primaries, voters across the country voted overwhelmingly for a Biden-Harris ticket,” she said. “So if Biden steps down, it is very hard to imagine a justification for delegates to choose anyone other than Vice President Harris.”
Historically, it has not been a given that a president automatically endorses his vice president to succeed him. Harry S. Truman recruited another candidate to supplant his own vice president. Dwight D. Eisenhower said he needed a week to even think of any important contribution Richard M. Nixon had made as his No. 2. Lyndon B. Johnson did not endorse Hubert Humphrey until weeks before the general election.
Ronald Reagan stayed officially neutral during the primaries, endorsing George H.W. Bush only once he had secured the nomination, while Bill Clinton supported Al Gore even though his vice president kept a distance because of the scandal involving Monica Lewinsky. Perhaps most relevant, Barack Obama threw his support to Hillary Clinton to succeed him, discouraging Mr. Biden, his onetime running mate, from entering the race. Mr. Biden has not forgotten that, but whether that searing experience makes him more or less willing to endorse his own vice president is unclear.
Either way, this situation is different from any of those past moments. The primaries are over and the convention is just around the corner, scheduled for Aug. 19 to Aug. 22 in Chicago. The party is planning to formally nominate its candidate even earlier than that, through a virtual roll call to be completed by Aug. 7 because of concerns about access to the November ballot in Ohio. There are only about 10 days until the convention ballots are sent out.
If Mr. Biden does pull out, the question of a nominee could still be pushed to the convention itself, but the various Democratic governors who are seen as possible rivals to Ms. Harris would have precious little time to organize and secure enough signatures to even be considered.
People close to the president have said they assume that he would endorse her if it came down to it, if for no other reason than it would be the simplest way to manage an otherwise messy last-minute transition to a new nominee. Because her name is on the Biden-Harris campaign organization, she has a better claim to inheriting the apparatus and war chest.
But that is not guaranteed, and the uncertainty speaks to the complicated relationship between Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris. Aides to both insist that they genuinely admire and respect each other, but like most presidents and vice presidents, they are not close and they sometimes have divergent interests.
Mr. Biden for a time was not convinced that she could win if he did drop out, and his allies cited doubts about her electability to other Democrats to rally support for him to stay on the ticket, an argument she found denigrating and irritating — perhaps one reason he has been saying those nice things about her in public lately.
In recent days, according to people close to him, Mr. Biden has been increasingly asking if Ms. Harris could win after all, seeming more open to the possibility. Several public polls have shown that contrary to the conventional wisdom of a month ago, she runs about as strongly against Mr. Trump as Mr. Biden does and, in some surveys, slightly stronger, all without the opportunity yet to introduce herself as a would-be nominee.
“To some degree, the vice president is auditioning now for the job and they should help her lean in and I think her leaning in could be beneficial to bolstering Biden” whether he steps aside or not, said Ashley Etienne, a former Harris aide.
While stressing that she was not calling for the president to withdraw, Ms. Etienne said that if he did, Ms. Harris would be best prepared to step in because she has been sitting next to him in the Oval Office and Situation Room, deeply immersed in the domestic and foreign issues of the last four years.
Moreover, Ms. Etienne argued, Ms. Harris partially owns the record Mr. Biden is already running on. “The question is, why would you discard that person?” she asked. “And no one has an answer for that because it’s nonsensical.”
The question of Ms. Harris’s fate could polarize the party along racial lines. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other Black leaders have strongly supported Mr. Biden staying in the race but simultaneously have warned the party not to try to displace Ms. Harris if the president were to drop out.
“The danger is the perception that many would have around the country, if she’s being held to a different standard about whether she would be ready,” the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader, said in a recent interview. “I would be adamantly against a process that disregarded the fact that he chose her to take over in case something occurred.”
Other Democrats said there would be a backlash if the nomination were simply handed to Ms. Harris. “I don’t think we can do a coronation,” Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, who has called on Mr. Biden to drop out, said on MSNBC. “Kind of a mini-primary, maybe a vetting hosted by former presidents, including Obama and Clinton, would be helpful.”
A truncated competition for the backing of the roughly 4,000 delegates who are permitted to vote on the first ballot would be the first time in more than half a century that a convention would determine a major party nominee without the results of primary elections. And it would test the party structure in a way that some leaders fear may not be manageable.
At the end of the day, Elaine C. Kamarck, a member of the Democratic National Committee and former aide to Mr. Gore, said the whole debate should be recognized as academic. It is, she said, simply too late to stage any kind of open contest. “Open would have been fine even a month ago,” she said. “But we’ve plumb run out of time.”
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More about Peter Baker"
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