President Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 Presidential race last Sunday was cataclysmic, but if you think it’s the last cataclysm, I believe you’re mistaken. I’m convinced there are more twists and turns yet to come, and although we can hypothesize about what might happen, no one really knows.
What impact on the race will Kamala Harris’ selection of a running mate have? If it’s Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, or Arizonan Mark Kelly, or Kentuckian Andy Beshear, will that tip their home state into the Democrat column?
Will Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate energize a mass of young and low-propensity voters to support him? He’s super-smart, self-made and articulate in a way that will appeal to the disaffected voter, not just the politically active. He may be able to reach a large cohort of young adults who have soured on politics and become low-propensity voters. Or will he show his inexperience and stumble in a way that ignores the value of his youth and underscores his inexperience? Here’s what pollical commentator Bryan Tyler Cohen opined on MSNBC:
“Republican nominee Donald Trump’s choice of Sen. JD Vance exposed not just his confidence, but his cockiness. He picked someone … who offered nothing that Trump himself didn’t offer; he didn’t hail from a swing state, isn’t a moderate and doesn’t add any diversity to the ticket.
“He is a carbon copy of his running mate, chosen precisely because he’s willing to espouse the exact same brand of Trumpism that Trump espouses… While that strategy might have proven successful against President Joe Biden … it may prove catastrophic against frontrunner Kamala Harris.”
Could that be right?
Or will Kamala Harris prove to be the awkward, giggly, rambling cipher that is the subject of so many memes on social media, but now on a much larger stage? Or will her experience as a prosecutor show itself and exceed many voters’ low expectations?
After having heard Trump relentlessly argue that Joe Biden was too old, frail and mentally diminished, how will the voters who bought that argument come to grips with the fact that Donald Trump is now the oldest Presidential candidate in history? How likely is it that he could suffer an incapacitating health problem between now and the election?
Many of those hypothesized twists and turns could materially upset the race by pure happenstance, and most of them are beyond anyone’s control, but there’s another scenario that is fully within the power of Joe Biden that could produce an October surprise of truly cataclysmic impact. If Joe Biden were to resign before the election, now-Vice President Harris would immediately become President Harris. Without having been elected to the office, she would immediately become the first woman President, the first Asian-American President and the second Black President. President Biden could and would claim credit for making these firsts happen, and appeal to him as an item for his legacy. She’d sail into the election with many if not all the benefits of incumbency. People who might have had misgivings about her competence would see her actually in the role, and if she performed the most rudimentary ceremonial duties of the office without any major gaffes, she’d enhance her electability.
There’s almost no downside to this tactic for Biden, Harris or the Democrats. It is both plausible and frightening. That is, unless it can be shown that voters would rebel against being manipulated in this fashion. That may be the only viable defense, so here’s a call to action for all listeners to American Radio Journal: if you hear of anything like this tactic being considered, call any talk radio station you can reach, email every cable news channel or cable news host whose address you can find, write Letters to the Editor of your local and metropolitan newspapers and generally express your outrage against such a cynical act. There must be a groundswell of objection to being manipulated by the party that selected its Presidential candidate in the least democratic process since Presidential primaries began over 100 years ago. If they want to protect democracy as much as they say they do, they ought to give it a try.
(Colin Hanna is President of Let Freedom Ring, USA.)