Democrats Deserved a Contest, Not a Coronation

The last two times Democrats attempted to stage a coronation instead of a contest in choosing a presidential nominee, it did not go well. Not for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Not for Joe Biden this year.

So why would anyone think it’s a good idea when it comes to Kamala Harris — the all but anointed nominee after barely a day?

Maybe the answer is that a competitive process, either before or during the Democratic convention, would have been divisive and bruising. Or that Harris’s fund-raising advantages over any potential rival were already insuperable. Or that Democratic Party big shots (though not Barack Obama, at least not publicly yet) genuinely think the vice president is the best candidate to beat the former president.

But the one thing the Democratic Party is not supposed to be is anti-democratic — a party in which insiders select the nominee from the top down, not the bottom up, and which expects the rank and file to fall in line and clap enthusiastically. That’s the playbook of ruling parties in autocratic states.

It’s also a recipe for failure. The whole point of a competitive process, even a truncated one, is to discover unsuspected strengths, which is how Obama was able to best Clinton in 2008, and to test for hidden weakness, which is how Harris flamed out as a candidate the last time, before even reaching the Iowa caucus. If there’s evidence that she’s a better candidate now than she was then, she should be given the chance to prove it.

Or perhaps that’s what party leaders fear. They seem as determined to ignore Harris’s manifest weaknesses as they were to ignore Biden’s — right up until the fiasco of last month’s debate. Weaknesses such as:

She’s unpopular: As of July 22, only 38.3 percent of Americans approve of Harris, as against 51.4 percent who don’t, according to 538. She has not had a positive approval rate since September 2021. Why would Democrats rush to nominate a candidate who’s been so consistently underwater with the electorate?