Convention Wisdom

The Biden-Harris Switch Worked

One of the consequences of Democrats swapping out a poorly-polling Joe Biden for Kamala Harris has been an amount of discourse that’s started with “If the switch works…”. It’s a fair point, in so far as the future of the long and (as an outsider) insane Presidential primary system goes, but in a broader sense, it’s a false premise. The honest truth is, the switch did work, even if Kamala loses the election.

Saturday night I messed with a relatively simple trends-based Presidential model I built last year at some point, and the results are pretty much a tossup. The polls are slightly more favourable for Harris than a tossup rating if the election was today, but between the chance of future polling movement and the chance of a polling error, it’s basically a tossup. Subjectively, I like a lot of Kamala’s campaign so far and think she can stretch her lead, but I’m not convinced of that. It’s a tight race; that’s the nature of the beast. She has probably at minimum double Joe Biden’s chance of victory, and that is enough on its own to justify that the switch worked. But even beyond the uncertainty of the Presidential race, the switch worked.

What I do know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that Harris has saved the bacon of Democrats down the ballot. When Ryan Jakubowski joined me on the Scrimshaw Show (subscribe to both of our channels) to do the Q3 Draft the Monday night after Trump was shot, it was nihilistic for Democrats. We were talking about them losing net seats from 2022, and potentially a lot of them. The Senate map is mostly not impacted by this (Democrats are still massive underdogs to win the chamber even with the switch), but the chances that Biden would have dragged down a Senate candidate we think is favoured could have been real. And obviously Sherrod Brown’s chances of giving Democrats a 49th seat go from pretty bad to something closer to 50/50. (I still think Brown loses, because Ohio polls are dogshit, but he’s in a much better spot.)

And then there’s the state legislative power. Democrats had a shockingly good 2022 for a party in power, in large part by creating unified Democratic control in Michigan, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Maryland, and breaking unified GOP control in Arizona. Winning the Pennsylvania State House also gave Democrats leverage, which has led to many radical, transformative actions. Tim Walz is the VP nominee today in large part because of what he got done after the Minnesota Senate flipped from a 1 seat GOP majority to a 1 seat Democratic one. It’s entirely probable that a Biden candidacy could have swept away all the gains of 2022. Harris is no lock to hold some of the chambers that Democrats flipped, but again, it gives the party a leg to stand on.

There’s no way of accurately knowing what the election will look like in November. The honest truth is that this is one of the most volatile elections in modern memory, not just in America but anywhere. Very few people can honestly claim to have thought Kamala was knowably a better choice than Biden. There’s a reason so many people wanted a Newsom or a Whitmer or whoever. When I went on Politics Politics Politics in February to talk about the Biden of it all, the conversation we had was essentially “Biden sucks, but Kamala doesn’t poll better, and if she doesn’t poll better it doesn’t make sense to ditch him for her but you also can’t get rid of her from the ticket so fuck it, Joe stays.” Turns out Kamala as an actual candidate was substantially better than as a theoretical.

The optimistic case for Democrats is that this is something like the 2019 British election, where Boris Johnson takes over the Conservatives in the summer in a bad polling position and ends up winning by double digits nationally. It’s a nifty comparison, to a point. Both Trump and Corbyn beat their polls last time around and the case for optimism for their parties relies on that fact. Neither of their parties put up nearly as credible performances at midterm as an opposition knocking on the door of government would suggest (Labour only gaining 79 councilors in 2018 was pathetic, let alone the 2019 Locals and Euros debacles). Throw in the presence of a well hyped third party threat that fizzled out predictably (Change UK, step on down and meet RFK Jr.), and a pressure group on the incumbents that moved the party before eventually understanding political gravity (Brexit Party/the pro-Palestinian movement), it works. But it’s also only a theory.

The other side of the coin is this is Australia 2013, where the Opposition are stuck with a leader who’s kinda crap and everyone knows there’s more electable options because he nearly won the last time around. The government’s a shambles and while the legislative record of the incumbent is strong, the polls are bad and getting worse. An abortive coup attempt was made in the first three months of the year that failed, before a middle of the year pressure campaign worked. In that case, Kevin Rudd was able to stabilize the polls and stop a complete collapse, but he still lost and lost pretty badly.

There is, unfortunately, no real way of knowing what will happen from here. The lesson from 2020 is that no matter what you think will happen, you’re probably wrong. So much of the information that came out in 2020 just turned out to be flatly wrong, the theories created from that data wholly irrelevant. It’s hard for me not to remember the various pseudo-intellectual culs-de-sac I took people on in 2020 based on what seemed to be actionable intelligence. The honest truth is that I have almost no idea how much of any of this polling will actually be actionable.

But I do know the Biden-Kamala switch worked. Democrats were going to lose and lose badly with Biden. They’re in with a solid chance now of potentially holding 2 levers of power. As a Canadian Liberal, I can only dream of a political party so clearly responding to its electoral incentives.