After a history-making and often rocky political ascent, Vice President Harris is on the verge of a more momentous test: Reviving the Democratic Party’s hopes.
Throughout her history-making and often rocky ascent to the summit of American public life, Kamala D. Harris has shown an uncanny ability to revive her political fortunes.
Now she is on the verge of a more momentous test: With just over 100 days before the presidential election, can she revive the fortunes of the Democratic Party?
If Democrats choose Harris to replace President Biden atop the ticket, as Biden asked them to do when he announced his withdrawal from the race on Sunday, she would become the first Black woman, and first person of South Asian descent, to be nominated for the presidency by a major party. It would represent a remarkable comeback for a politician who not long ago seemed destined to join the long list of promising state elected officials who flame out on the national stage.
Harris stands to become the leader of a party in crisis. Democrats are scrambling after Biden’s unprecedented decision to decline the nomination only 15 weeks before the general election, with polls showing former president Donald Trump leading in key battleground states. Harris, like Biden, has an approval rating that has not cracked 40 percent this year — a worrisome sign that she may still be carrying the administration’s electoral baggage.
On Sunday night, it was still unclear whether the party would coalesce around her as smoothly — or quickly — as she or Biden hope. In recent days, as Biden’s position became less tenable, some Democrats have urged an open nomination process rather than a coronation of the vice president. After Biden’s announcement, Harris said in a statement that she was “honored to have the President’s endorsement” and that “my intention is to earn and win this nomination.”
Time is short: Democrats convene in Chicago next month for their convention, but plan to formally nominate their ticket by virtual roll call in early August.
If Democrats do elevate Harris as their nominee, they will be placing an extraordinary bet that she is finally ready to deliver on her promise and overcome her uneven history as a campaigner. She has less than four months to win what could be one of the most consequential elections in American history, and must do so against an opponent willing to stoke sexism and racism to win votes — and who is riding a new wave of adulation within his party after surviving an assassination attempt this month.
However events unfold, Harris and the Democrats are in uncharted territory, said Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. Former president Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision not to seek reelection in 1968 — a precedent some have cited in urging Biden to drop out — was announced just over seven months before the general election, setting up a timeline that was languid by comparison.
“There is no direct historical analogy that I’m aware of,” Riley said.
Historically unprecedented battles are not new to Harris, who has defied expectations, for good and ill, since her earliest days in politics.
A former prosecutor who emerged from the ruthless world of San Francisco politics, Harris was once compared to former president Barack Obama. She was written off after her disastrous 2019 presidential bid but got a reprieve with her selection — and largely successful performance — as Biden’s running mate. After the election came a string of unflattering headlines about her alleged mismanagement of the vice president’s office and her sometimes maladroit communication of the president’s agenda, most notably on immigration.
Yet in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v.
