No American political party is more in need of a reset right now than the Democratic Party.
Calls for President Joe Biden to leave office are growing louder. The quiet advice he has received from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is now resonating loud and clear in public.
It’s time to admit it: Joe Biden is history for the Democratic Party. He has had a long and illustrious career and achieved the presidency he always coveted. But he doesn’t have the power to defeat former President Donald Trump, whom he defeated in 2020.
The time for change is now, and that change must happen now, not later. Biden should step aside from the campaign trail to finish out his term and endorse the top candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris.
It’s hard to imagine Democrats betting on whether to openly hold the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in four weeks’ time, which would bode ill for chaos.
It is also difficult for black women, the Democratic Party’s only loyal constituency, who continued to support Biden even as his approval ratings plummeted, to accept the promotion of another presidential candidate over Harris, the nation’s first black, South Asian and female vice president.
Harris, 59, is a former California attorney general, a U.S. senator, and a former aide to the most powerful office on the planet for four years. Biden called her “qualified to be president” at a press conference on July 11.
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Harris needs a running mate, and the Democrats have a good one.
California Governor Gavin Newsom is poised and will certainly give it a go in four years, and people who know Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro say he’s been preparing to run for president since he was in high school.
Yet Democrats need more than experience and ambition: To halt Biden’s slide into obsolescence, they need a candidate who looks like history in the making.
They should nominate Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, 52, a popular powerhouse in key battleground states who was easily elected to a second term in 2022 and is legally barred from seeking a third.
Democrats should then tout their historic nomination of two women in their 50s and pull off an upset victory over Trump, a 78-year-old man known for slurring his words at rallies and making bizarre rhetorical asides about sharks, Hannibal Lecter and other things he clearly finds frightening.
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The Harris-Whitmer team could galvanize Democrats against Trump
Trump’s incoherent speech when he accepted the party’s nomination at the Republican National Convention again showed how defeatable he is.
We had heard Trump would promote unity, but he couldn’t hold that idea up for more than 20 minutes before launching into his usual string of hyperbole and lies, stoking division with culture war caricatures, for more than 70 minutes.
Imagine two experienced women, proven surrogates for Democratic policy who have scored major victories in Republican efforts to stifle reproductive freedom, facing off against President Trump and his newly nominated running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio.
These are the debates I will be watching.
While Harris and Whitmer will launch a full-throated attack on all the reasons why voters rejected Trump in 2020, they are also likely to go after Vance, who has transformed from a prominent writer who rejected Trumpism into a staunch accomplice of authoritarianism.
At 39, Vance could be portrayed as inexperienced, unprepared and unreliable.
Harris could bring some of the enthusiasm Biden has lost.
Biden’s dismal performance in the June debate and his ineffective attempts to bounce back, in part because he failed to counter the lies Trump told onstage in real time, sowed the seeds of his political demise.
Harris is likely to approach fact-checking Trump with prosecutorial zeal, as he is known to become agitated when challenged by women in any setting.
Vance’s stance on abortion, calling for a nationwide ban with no exceptions for rape or incest, is even tougher than Trump’s. Imagine Governor Whitmer confronting him about his claim that divorce, even in violent marriages, is a ploy by the “sexual revolution” against America.
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Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the Harris-Whitmer combination will quickly take the lead and leave Trump and Vance behind. Trump, for now, looks very likely to win a second term.
But Ms. Harris and Ms. Whitmer could reverse that, and the mere change of candidates would likely attract less-informed voters who previously hadn’t paid attention to the presidential election.
That could bring more attention to the debate and provide a platform to reach voters who think 2024 is too confusing to get into.
Potential attacks on both Democrats are easy to predict.
Biden nominated Harris to head the border security effort after Trump exploited illegal immigration, falsely portraying it as the cause of violent crime when crime rates are actually falling.
Harris would perhaps make a more persuasive argument that President Trump forced Republicans to kill a bipartisan immigration bill in the U.S. Senate that would have addressed many of the concerns of both parties.
Governor Whitmer was the target of a kidnapping plot in 2020 that resulted in the conviction of some of the men involved, spawning far-right conspiracy theories now eagerly exploited by Trump’s Republican Party.
No one is better placed to expose a conspiracy theory than the candidate who is being targeted. Actual conspiracy?
Clearly, Whitmer has caught the attention of Republicans, who specifically criticized her at their convention in Milwaukee while nominating Trump and Vance for office.
Speakers at the Republican National Convention also sharply criticized Harris.
It’s a big platform and will bring national attention to two Democrats who are not the front-runners. Republicans wouldn’t have anything bad to say about Harris and Whitmer if they didn’t see them as a threat.
Biden should leave office touting his accomplishments in the White House and his role in opening a new chapter in the history of the Democratic Party.
Follow USA TODAY elections columnist Chris Brennan on X (formerly Twitter): @ByChrisBrennan
