The short campaign may have been Harris’ undoing — and Biden’s fault

After President Joe Biden stepped aside and Vice President Kamala Harris entered the race in late July, I wrote about Democrats’ hopes that the short timeframe of her presidential campaign—just 15 weeks—would be a good thing. They thought it would allow a relatively inexperienced candidate to ride a burst of enthusiasm past the pitfalls of a long campaign and into the White House.

But now, it looks like that short campaign was one of the key factors behind her decisive loss to former President Donald Trump.

And you can add that to the list of things that Democrats blame Biden for during this season of second-guessing and recriminations.

Biden’s decision to run for reelection, while demanding that his party rally behind him, effectively cleared the field. That meant that Harris did not endure the rigors of a competitive primary process that might have sharpened her qualities as a candidate. And it meant that a party that once had reservations about Harris never had the option of watching her compete against other Democrats before settling on its nominee.

Harris displayed formidable skills during her rapid-fire campaign, rousing crowds at rallies and outmaneuvering Trump at their debate. But in smaller, more intimate settings during the general election campaign, she stumbled over the kinds of questions — Example No. 1: how she would be different from Biden — that she would have repeatedly faced during the gantlet of town hall meetings, living room coffees and local interviews that define a primary campaign.

In short, Harris might have been better off if she had been able to take her show on the road before heading to Broadway.

“Not even a close call,” said Howard Wolfson, a former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton, who ran for president in 2008 and 2016. Wolfson said he wished Biden had decided after the midterm elections of 2022 when Democrats had a reasonably strong performance, that he would not seek a second term.

“Multiple Dems run in the primary and one of two things happen,” Wolfson wrote in an email, sketching out how the race might have unfolded. “Harris is tested, spends time competing for blue-collar votes in the blue wall states, gets better as a candidate, and wins. Or she doesn’t, and we get a better candidate instead.”

A Biden backlash

The consideration of what might have been is feeding a Biden backlash. The president resisted pressure from Democrats to step aside, and by the time he finally did, the nominating convention was less than a month away. The party had little choice but to rally around Harris.

“I thought back in May of 2023 he should get out,” said James Carville, the Democratic political consultant. “The stuff she had to deal with in the general she would have dealt with in the primary. She would have answered that question — how will you be different from Biden — 100 times, at 100 debates, at 100 town halls, and 100 barbecues.”

“We didn’t even let the public kick the tires,” he said. “We just gave them the car.”

Harris unified the party behind her and staged a successful convention that ignited the early part of her candidacy. She succeeded, as one Democratic analyst put it, in assembling a sprawling presidential campaign airplane while flying at 600 mph.

But she never built a durable lead against the now president-elect. She not only lost, but she also fared worse than Biden, apparently losing the popular vote and all seven battleground states.

In this postelection period, this question of whether she might have been a stronger candidate had Biden stepped aside earlier seems likely to be debated by Democrats for some time to come.

The benefits of a marathon

A long primary process can be grueling and expensive. It can force candidates to take positions they might come to regret as they appeal to the most active part of the party base — as Harris herself did when she ran for president in the crowded Democratic primary of 2019.

But a primary campaign is a boot camp for candidates, a chance for them to learn their vulnerabilities, to test and refine how to answer questions about complicated issues or their political history (Plenty of time to craft answers to questions ranging from how she would be different from Biden to why she changed her position on issues like fracking.)

“I benefited enormously from long campaigns,” Tom Daschle, the South Dakota Democrat and former majority leader of the Senate, said Wednesday. “You can better define yourself. Three months is an impossible task and I think she did a phenomenal job putting that campaign together. But time is a real asset.”

(Asked whether Harris would have been better off if Biden had bowed out earlier, Daschle responded: “We can second-guess that forever.” )

David Axelrod, the consultant, said he observed this firsthand in Iowa while serving as senior political adviser to Barack Obama when Obama was just a first-term senator from Illinois.

“Barack Obama, who turned out to be a stellar candidate, wasn’t a stellar candidate at the beginning of 2007,” Axelrod said. “He benefited from the process of having time to grow and try things out and get accustomed to the freneticism of a national campaign.”

“The thing about primaries, campaigns, long campaigns, is they give you a chance to get into your groove,” he said.

Would that have made a difference for Harris? Before the election, this was an open question in Democratic circles. Now, well, not so much.

A challenge from the start

Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the center-left group Third Way, and a veteran of Democratic primary campaigns, said the short campaign did come with some benefits for Harris.

“She benefited from being spared the pressure to move to the left,” he said. “But she suffered from not having time to do everything in three months: reintroduce herself to the public, gracefully put daylight between herself and Biden, explain her 2020 positions, prosecute the case against Trump, offer new ideas of her own.”

Harris faced other obstacles that would daunt any candidate, including an electorate convinced the country was heading in the wrong direction and eager for change. Plus, it is always complicated trying to run as a vice president, especially following in the footsteps of an unpopular president.

And there is no guarantee a longer campaign would have changed anything. “Based on her run in 2019 and early 2020, not sure she had the depth to go the distance in anything but an anointed nomination,” said Scott Reed, the manager of the 2012 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, a Republican.

From that perspective, there is another way of looking at the trajectory of a campaign that took off like a rocket before returning to Earth. Perhaps the real problem for Harris was not that this campaign was too short.

The problem may have been that it was not short enough.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.