What Does This Say About Their Judgment?

In yesterday's post, we saw how accounts suggest that Kamala Harris had the inside track for nomination as Joe's running mate in 2020, as well as a lock on designation to replace Joe as the Democrat nominee once he withdrew from the race last July. While some accounts attribute this influence to James Clyburn, I think the evidence points much more strongly to Nancy Pelosi, and to a slighly lesser extent, Barack Obama.

Numerous accounts have reported that Joe is angry at both Pelosi and Obama for forcing him out of the race, for instance:

Pelosi and Biden have not spoken since he stepped away. And the president’s anger flashed to the surface during a televised interview that aired this weekend when he namechecked the former speaker as he explained why he quit the race.

“And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic,” Biden told CBS. “You’d be interviewing me about why did Nancy Pelosi say, why did so — and — and I thought it’d be a real distraction.”

Biden also harbors some resentment that Obama — his friend and former boss — did not call him directly to voice his concerns about the campaign in the aftermath of the disastrous Atlanta debate in late June.

While Obama tweeted in support of Biden immediately after the debate, he then went publicly quiet. The former president did not try to stir up a movement to dislodge Biden from the top of the ticket, but he also didn’t quell one, much to the dismay of some of those closest to Biden, according to the three people.

This glosses over whether they also worked to install Kamala as Joe's replacement, but the references I've used for the past several days indicate that the near-immediate consensus in favor of Kamala wouldn't have taken place without their consent. But we still have the problem of Kamala's track record as a candidate in the 2020 primaries and what it said about her likelihood of success in 2024. Yesterday, Real Clear Politics linked to thois story from Roll Call, Kamala Harris lost, but how weak of a candidate was she?

Harris underperformed across the country, according to the Vote Above Replacement, or VAR, standard. And the dynamic wasn’t limited to critical battleground states but spread over Democratic and Republican territory alike.

Harris finished ahead of a typical Democratic candidate in just 13 states, ran even in Connecticut and underperformed the average Democrat in 36 states.

. . . The VAR metric measures the strength of political candidates relative to a typical candidate from their party within the same state.

. . . Harris’ performance mattered most in the key states that effectively decided the presidential election, and she didn’t do well.

The vice president underperformed a typical statewide Democrat in six of the seven preelection battlegrounds, including Michigan (-2.7 VAR), Arizona (-2.4), Nevada (-1.2), Pennsylvania (-1.2), North Carolina (-0.9) and Wisconsin (-0.9). The only battleground state where she overperformed was Georgia, where the new Democratic Baseline is 47.6 percent and Harris received 48.5 percent of the vote.

The Democrat establishment, presumably led by Obama and Pelosi, already had Harris's track record in plain sight in front of them -- yes, she was potentially an attractive candidate, but faced with bad poll numbers that made donors hesitate, she was forced to end her 2020 primary campaign in Decemvber of 2019, even before the Iowa caucuses. What was her appeal to the kingmakers, who despite her record as a campaigner, wired her in as the 2020 vice presidential pick and then the 2024 presidential candidate?

Let's recall, as I outlined yesterday, that the Democrat establishment promoted Harris despite her electoral record, first as a vice presidential candidate, but then they made her the presidential candidate in 2024 after discouraging any serious primary contests that spring. I think the only explanation is that they were aware of how far left she was, not just as a 2019 campaigner but as a US senator, and they thought it wasn't a bug, it was a feature:

Vice President Kamala Harris served in the Senate between 2017 and 2021, providing a legislative record that allows her to be located along the left-right continuum that dominates legislative behavior in the Congress. Based on her roll call voting record, Harris is the second-most liberal Democratic senator to serve in the Senate in the 21st century.

The obstacle, at least to conventional minds, was that she'd eventually have to get elected, but she'd lasted as far as she had as a national candidate by avoiding elections with the help of Obama and Pelosi. In August of 2023, I noted,

the Democrats can't dump Biden, because as an old white guy who isn't Bernie Sanders, he's the last vestige of the New Deal coalition, and any successor will inevitably be just an unelectable front for one or another leftist splinter faction of the old party.

I brought this up in the context of the "Götterdämmerung strategy", that if yuou know the world is going to end on a date certain, for instance the giant asteroid is going to hit the planet, you run up your credit cards in the weeks and months before in the knowledge you'll never have to pay them off. They were going to put a leftist in, no matter what, and the results were actually predictable. They probably knew the likely outcome themselves.

If you look at Kamala this way, she was the Götterdämmerung candidate, certainly Mrs Pelosi's last hurrah. But Götterdämmerung isn't a governing strategy.