Democrats have a two-word problem in 2024 and it’s not Joe Biden.
The bigger overall headache for the party is Kamala Harris, the inept, inarticulate understudy who stands to become president if Biden can’t serve out a second term.
If Biden pulls a switcheroo and doesn’t run for a second term because of his age and health, Harris would be the presumed frontrunner. That’s a big problem.
Polls show that Americans have even less confidence in Harris than they do of Biden and that’s saying a lot.
Voters are not completely clueless. They see Biden stumbling around on stage and fumbling his words and realize that the president’s chances of making it through a second term at age 86 are not good.
That’s why Democrats are planning for Biden to go through the motions of a primary campaign over the next year, to promote his “successes,” shore up his glaring weaknesses and dispatch Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Kennedy is polling at about 20% right now even though he’s barely begun his campaign – a sign of just how dissatisfied Democratic voters are about Biden.
But every time Biden does something weird like grope an actress, forget what state he’s in, belt out a head-shaking “God Save the Queen,” or call someone a “dog-faced pony soldier,” voters are hit on the head with a brick: the vision of Kamala Harris in the Oval Office.
And you just can’t wipe that away with a Biden campaign ad.
Or, as Republican presidential contender Nikki Haley put it, “I think that we can all be very clear … that if you vote for Joe Biden you really are counting on a President Harris because the idea that he would make it until 86 years old is not something that I think is likely.”
Republicans would be smart to keep harping on that theme in the coming months.
The RNC should be seriously thinking about developing campaign ads prominently featuring Harris and her incoherent sentences. As the New York Times recently put it, “it’s as though her sentences, dissatisfied with fulfilling merely ceremonial duties, begin flailing around in a doomed search for profundity.”
There are plenty of examples out there, like, “I love Venn diagrams. I do. I love Venn diagrams, the three circles.”
Or how about, “It is time for us to do what we have been doing.
And that time is every day.” And when trying to speak about abortion rights, Harris said this:
“So I think it’s very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders for us at every moment in time and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, ad to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.”
Harris’s moment in time could come soon. And that’s what has voters so worried.