If Biden seeks reelection, expect Harris to remain on ticket

One of Washington’s quadrennial parlor games is well under way: Will the president (Joe Biden) bolster his reelection prospects by dumping his vice president (Kamala Harris)? The answer, as usual, is almost certainly no.

In recent months, Harris has become a more public spokesman for key administration policies. Last weekend, she delivered a strong statement condemning Russian “war crimes” in Ukraine. And she has been the lead advocate for its campaign to block further abortion curbs after last June’s Supreme Court decision.

That indicates she may be making progress toward the more comfortable role that’s eluded her, though, like her boss, she remains wary of media interactions.

Still, many Democrats are uncomfortable with a 2024 ticket of an octogenarian president and a running mate burdened with strong public doubts about her presidential readiness. Polls show her standing even weaker than Biden’s.

Nevertheless, the political reasons for keeping her on the ticket far outweigh the reasons for dropping her. That’s why most presidents don’t make a change.

Selecting a running mate is any presidential nominee’s first major decision. Dropping your chosen partner would admit a massive misjudgment no modern president wants to make.

That is especially so in this case. Biden pledged to pick a Black woman as a running mate and chose the first vice president who is also of Asian descent. Dropping her would cause a major uproar in the Democratic Party, where the electorate is 40% non-white, and one-fourth Black.

There have been three instances in modern American political history in which presidents changed vice presidential running mates, two by the same president.

In 1940, as President Franklin Roosevelt was undertaking an unprecedented third term, one opponent was his vice president, Texas conservative John Garner. That made it easy for Roosevelt to replace Garner, who had little influence after helping FDR get nominated in 1932. Instead, Roosevelt picked one of the party’s most prominent liberals, Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace.

But four years later, with Roosevelt in ill health, party bosses were concerned about the prospect that Wallace might become president. The president chose the more moderate but little-known Missouri senator, Harry Truman, who became president when Roosevelt died 82 days into his fourth term.

The other recent example had extenuating circumstances. When Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973 over a bribery scandal, President Richard

Nixon picked House Republican Leader Gerald Ford to succeed him. When Nixon resigned the next year in the face of probable impeachment because of the Watergate scandal, Ford picked New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller as vice president, giving the country two non-elected leaders from the GOP’S more moderate wing.

Facing Ronald Reagan’s conservative primary challenge, Ford dropped Rockefeller. Once nominated, he picked Kansas Sen. Bob Dole as his running mate, but they narrowly lost the 1976 election.

In another modern instance, the vice presidential nominee never made it to the general election. In 1972, Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton was forced to resign from the Democratic ticket after the post-convention disclosure that he had been treated for depression. Presidential nominee George Mcgovern picked Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver to replace him, but the ticket lost badly.

Concerns about Harris stem from her failure to develop a clear role and polls showing she would be a weak candidate if something happened to Biden. She is not regarded as personally close to the president.

Democratic officials generally believe that, if Biden decided not to run, she would have difficulty in being nominated or elected, though those things are hard to predict.

But it’s all almost certainly moot. Biden has made clear she will again be his running mate. And despite widespread concern that the president could face difficulty against a younger Republican nominee not named Donald Trump, no prominent Democrat is so far challenging him for the party’s nomination.

At Munich’s annual Security Conference on Saturday, Harris delivered a strongly worded speech in her soft-spoken manner, telling U.S. allies and national security experts, “The United States will support Ukraine for as long as it takes.”

She said the administration has concluded the Russians have committed “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine and “will be held to account.” She also warned other authoritarian nations like China against feeling emboldened to make attacks like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The words came from the vice president, and Biden echoed them Monday in Kyiv, a one-two combo from a team likely to persist into next year’s campaign.