Are Democrats Right to Unite Around Kamala Harris?

An open convention or a coronation aren’t the only two options. Mentioned: “Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden” by The Ezra Klein Show “What Is the Democratic Party For?” by The Ezra Klein Show Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This audio essay for “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Kristin Lin. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Aman Sahota. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  Last week, the Republican Party held its convention in Milwaukee. My colleague Elias Isquith described it as a megachurch service held in a Vegas casino under the ever-watchful gaze of a living god. And that felt about right to me. All that week, I heard, "America first, America first, America first." It was crystal clear who came first: Donald J. Trump. This was a party that had persuaded itself that one man's ambition, his insatiable, unquenchable lust for power, was actually self-sacrifice, that Trump cared not a whit for himself. He was only in this for you.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  My father didn't have to run for reelection this year. He doesn't need the money, the fame, the power.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Donald Trump didn't need to run for president for fame or money. We all know he doesn't need this. This guy's got a great life.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  He's a billionaire who could play golf every day at his own golf courses.

• 1:22Speaker 04

  And yet, instead of choosing the easy path, he chose to endure abuse, slander, and persecution.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  He's not doing it for himself. He's doing it for everyone here tonight, for everyone watching at home.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Because he loves this country.

• 1:42Speaker 04

  Because he loves this country.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  He's willing to risk it all because he loves this country.

• 1:50Ezra Klein?

  Across that convention, Trump was spoken of in religious terms. He was a man persecuted on behalf of all who put their faith in him, a leader on a divine mission, chosen and protected by an almighty god. If you did not believe in him, you did not believe in America. On the final night, shortly before Trump spoke, Hulk Hogan took the stage wearing a shirt emblazoned with the American flag. He sent the crowd into a frenzy as he ripped that shirt, ripping the flag on it in half to reveal a Donald Trump campaign shirt beneath. It was all so unbearably literal.

• 2:29Speaker 05

  When they took a shot at my hero, and they tried to kill the next president of the United States, enough was enough. And I said, "Let Trumpamania run wild, brother. Let Trumpamania rule again. Let Trumpamania make America great again."

• 2:58Ezra Klein?

  In 2020 and early 2021, Donald Trump tried to overturn an election he lost. He used the full power of the presidency to pressure state election officials. He whipped up a mob that stormed the Capitol and endangered the lives of the men and women he served with, including his own Vice President, Mike Pence. People died on that day. And how did the Republican Party react? Ultimately, by submitting to Trump's fantasies and resentments. Where was Mike Pence, the Vice President from Donald Trump's first term, the longtime loyal Republican? He wasn't at the convention. He was in exile, replaced by J.D. Vance. Pence certified the 2020 election.

• 3:42Ezra Klein?

  At a crucial moment, he put America first. Vance has said he would have backed Trump's challenge, indulged his lies. There was no price Donald Trump would not have paid to cling to power. And the message of the 2024 Republican Convention was that there was no price. There is no price. The Republican Party would not pay to give Trump that power again. The message is simple: Donald Trump first.

• 4:08Speaker 06

  With faith and devotion, I proudly accept your nomination for President of the United States. Thank you.

• 4:17Ezra Klein?

  What President Joe Biden did on Sunday, that is what it looks like to put country first. What the Democratic Party did over the past few weeks, that is what it looks like to put country first. The catastrophe of the debate for Biden was that he couldn't draw the true contrast between him and Trump. Instead of highlighting Trump's narcissism and illiberalism, Biden was highlighting Trump's relative energy and vigor. On Sunday, though, Biden upended all that. In one decision, he drew a very different contrast between him and Trump. Trump would not peaceably step aside even after losing an election. Biden stepped aside before the 2024 election.

• 4:59Ezra Klein?

  He willingly gave up his own nomination because he understood that the party and the country are bigger than he is. He put his own ambition second. That's what it looks like to actually put America first.

• 5:14Ezra Klein?

  After the debate, I asked whether the Democratic Party was still a true political party, an organization dedicated to values and ideas that transcended any one leader, or whether it had, like the Republican Party before it, been corrupted into a vehicle for one man's ambitions and resentments. Now we have our answer. The Republican Party is a personality cult run by the dear leader's daughter-in-law. The Democratic Party is a political party. It is a political party that wants to win. But now the Democratic Party has a decision to make: an open convention or coronation of Vice President Kamala Harris. As you know, if you've been listening to the show over the last year, I've been arguing

• 5:56Ezra Klein?

  for and describing an open convention since February, and I still believe it would have been a good idea, the right idea. What Democrats denied themselves over the past year with Biden was information. He ran functionally unopposed in the primary. He avoided debates and interviews and press conferences. And Democrats didn't know until it was almost too late, the toll age had taken on him. What a blitz primary leading up to an open convention would have offered them is information. They could have seen how their candidates would perform. But that is not what happened. And in my conversations with top Democrats in recent weeks, I've come

• 6:36Ezra Klein?

  to the view that it's not going to happen now. Biden did step aside, but it was a grueling, uncertain, painful month for the party. This was difficult work. People convincing someone they loved that he had to leave. The party is exhausted. It is tired of its internal drama. It wants to turn its attention back to Donald Trump. It wants to raise money, build get out the vote operations, run ads, and it feels above all that time is now short. The convention is mere weeks away. But something else happened during this period too. Campaign strategists sometimes talk about the tangibles and the intangibles of

• 7:17Ezra Klein?

  candidates. The tangibles are everything that is obvious about a candidate on paper. Josh Shapiro is the governor of Pennsylvania, a swing state. Mark Kelly was an astronaut, the coolest job in the world. JB Pritzker is rich enough to self-fund a campaign. But those intangibles are trickier, and you don't know them before you see a candidate running for office. How do they respond to pressure? Do they come off as honest and authentic to voters? Or does something about them read as false and opportunistic? Do they have that charisma, that ineffable something, that convinces people to knock on doors for them, share memes of them, proselytize to family members about them?

• 8:02Ezra Klein?

  Harris's reputation was as a candidate with the tangibles, but not the intangibles. She was great on paper, but in 2020, she couldn't put the pieces together. I remember watching her campaign speech and finding it hollow.

• 8:16Kamala Harris?

  Our United States of America is not about us versus them. It's about we, the people.

• 8:26Kamala Harris?

  And in this moment, we must all speak truth about what is happening. We must seek truth, speak truth, and fight for the truth.

• 8:40Ezra Klein?

  It was built around these cliche refrains. For the people, let's speak truth. But then there was just this laundry list of Democratic priorities. There was no core to it. And that's how many in Washington saw Harris as a talented politician without the stable vision and message, without the why that powers the candidates who tend to win the presidency. I've come to see that as a consequence, maybe a byproduct, of the moment in which Harris ran. Because Harris's identity in California was clear. She was this moderate, smart-on-crime prosecutor. But that's not what the Democratic Party wanted nationally in 2020, not after Ferguson,

• 9:25Ezra Klein?

  not amidst Black Lives Matter, not amidst a moment in which criminal justice reform was dominant. And so Harris tried to change who she was. She foregrounded her life story, her Jamaican father, her Indian mother, their civil rights background, the unlikeliness of her being on the stage at all, in this echo of Obama's campaign. She, of course, was aware of Bernie Sanders' success in 2016, so she endorsed Medicare for All, not, again, the profile she had in California. But then she brought out a plan that I would say sensibly fell short of abolishing private insurance, but that was a standard Sanders had set. And so was she endorsing Medicare for All? Was she not? Was she triangulating? She ended up satisfying no one.

• 10:08Ezra Klein?

  In her biggest moment in the campaign, she attacked Biden for his past position on busing. But she didn't herself have a very different position on busing. What was that attack even all about? Her candidacy had this tendency to feel tactical, not strategic, like she was switching between identities, not committed to a stable vision for the country. She dropped out before Iowa.

• 10:32Ezra Klein?

  There were other problems that dogged Harris, too. Her Senate office was known to be badly run. In the first few years, so too was her vice presidential office. She had a reputation for burning through staff, and she has few advisers who have been with her for long enough to really deeply know her. And the Biden administration, they didn't set her up for success either. They gave her impossible portfolios, like the root causes of the border crisis, which she never had the power to solve. But over time, Harris found her footing in the administration. She became its primary messenger on abortion and the Supreme Court. She developed a steadiness in her presence on the campaign trail that she hadn't had before.

• 11:14Ezra Klein?

  Since the night of the debate, Kamala Harris has been running a race of her own. From the first interview she gave that night on CNN, where she made the case against Trump that Biden had failed to make, she has been in an almost excruciatingly delicate position of backing Biden absolutely while showing Democrats that she is fit to take his place atop the ticket. And she has not misplaced a single foot. Her speeches have been searing and clear.

• 11:41Kamala Harris?

  As many of you know, I am a former prosecutor. So I say, let's look at the facts, shall we? So Donald Trump tries to claim he brought back American manufacturing. The fact is, under Donald Trump, America lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs. And more than 1,000 factories closed under his watch. The facts.

• 12:13Ezra Klein?

  Her interviews have been strong.

• 12:15Kamala Harris?

  So I think that what Donald Trump is doing is grasping for straws. And look, of the two people on that debate stage, only one of them has the endorsement of his vice president. And let's not forget that. Let's not forget that.

• 12:29Ezra Klein?

  Very awkward and very, very true. She's been, if you've been watching, and I've been watching, much better than some of Biden's other eager surrogates at admitting the concerns about his performance while convincingly defending his record and taking the fight to Trump. It is easy, if you're doing that work, to fall into a kind of Baghdad Bob-like denial of reality, happy talk. She's been walking that line very gracefully. In Washington, the estimations of Harris's political skill and acumen had fallen sharply since 2020. In the last few weeks, they have risen almost as sharply. And at the same time, Trump's criminal charges and convictions have made her prosecutorial background appealing.

• 13:12Ezra Klein?

  She's now battle hardened and vetted in a way that doesn't really happen if you haven't had the kinds of national campaigns and periods in the political wilderness that she's experienced. She's been up, she's been down, she's learned from both. There are a lot of candidates who look good before a campaign, but wilt under pressure. Harris has been under enormous pressure this last month, and she's never faltered. And then something happened that I don't think many would have predicted. People got excited about her, about her. This vast array of very online socialists and liberals and Democrats and moderates

• 13:53Ezra Klein?

  all began proclaiming themselves coconut-pilled, making memes out of this quirky story Harris likes to tell.

• 13:59Kamala Harris?

  My mother used to, she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, "I don't know what's wrong with you, young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you."

• 14:18Ezra Klein?

  Videos of her describing recipes circulate now on TikTok. Her dances get set to music. She's having these positive viral moments that Joe Biden just was not, this sort of authentic enthusiasm that wasn't there before. She's not just connecting because she can deliver an anti-Trump roundhouse. She's connecting because people are connecting to something about her, something intangible. And now the party is closing ranks around her. Biden dropped out, and he endorsed her fully. Then Gavin Newsom endorsed her, and Josh Shapiro endorsed her, and Elizabeth Warren endorsed her, and AOC endorsed her, and Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, endorsed her, and Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, endorsed her, and the Tennessee State Democratic

• 15:02Ezra Klein?

  delegation endorsed her, and the powerful labor union SEIU endorsed her, and the list here could just go on and on and on. Now, the party converging around Harris doesn't mean Harris is a safe bet. It doesn't even mean Harris is the right bet the candidate Democrats would draft if they were starting from scratch. People argue here about the polling. I don't find the polling on her very telling. In head-to-head polling right now with Trump, she polls similar to maybe a bit above Joe Biden. Her favorables and unfavorables are similar to maybe a little bit better than Biden. I think that's to be expected. She is his vice president. She should poll like he does.

• 15:44Ezra Klein?

  But Harris has never won an election atop the ticket. In Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, or Michigan, she hasn't won any of those primaries. She's never won an election atop the ticket anywhere but California. The Biden administration's record, Democrats have to be honest here, it is unpopular. People are mad about inflation. They do not feel the effect of the Inflation Reduction Act or the bipartisan infrastructure bill. And Harris cannot make a clean break from an administration that she was a vice president in. Immediately uniting around Harris feels safe to some Democrats. To other Democrats, it's unsafe. It's risky. They worry they're making the mistake they made with Biden, which is being so afraid

• 16:28Ezra Klein?

  of disunity that they're failing to gather the information they need to know how their candidate will really perform. But here's the truth. Everything right now is risky. It could all go bad, no matter what path is chosen. But I do think there's a middle path here that Democrats aren't really considering but should. Look, none of the top-tier candidates are going to really challenge Harris for the nomination. But what about some second or third-tier candidates? Let a few up-and-comers make their case against Donald Trump. Let's see some town halls on MSNBC and CNN, and yes, Fox News. Let's see some multi-candidate forums. Let's see voters asking questions of them.

• 17:10Ezra Klein?

  Nobody's going to go negative on each other here, but give the country a reason to watch a lineup of young Democrats, most of all Kamala Harris, make their cases against Trump day after day for the next few weeks. What I'm describing here is not really a contest. It's not an open chaotic convention. It's an exhibition. Maybe the people who've endorsed Harris can participate too. After all, she's going to need a vice president. So maybe Whitmer and Shapiro and Kelly and Beshear, maybe they should be up there too. The Democratic Party has been acting like a party for the past month. Maybe it should show up in these next few weeks also as a party, not just as one person.

• 17:53Ezra Klein?

  Maybe a little strategic ambiguity about what these candidate forums and voter town halls really are would be good. It would create the kind of free media, excitement, anticipation, that Democrats could never otherwise get. It would mean Trump and Vance don't know where to put their attacks, that they would have a hard time breaking into a news cycle. And by the way, when Donald Trump has trouble attracting attention, he reacts by getting outrageous, chaotic, aggressive, sloppy. That too would be a gift to Democrats right now. Harris would have to falter catastrophically to lose a nomination. But it would be good for Democrats and for voters to see her win the nomination in public, not just be handed it.

• 18:36Ezra Klein?

  It would help her sharpen her message before the convention. It might convince those who still doubt her that she's the right candidate. And if Democrats should have learned anything from the last year, it isn't more information about their presumptive nominee is better than less. If Harris really isn't up to it, they need to know that now. But the point of an exhibition isn't fear or failure. It is to showcase talent, most of all, the talent of the likely champion. And you know what? I think Harris is up to it. I've been watching her speeches. I've been listening to her interviews. I think she's really changed as a candidate. Maybe in some ways she's changed back. I went back recently to read Harris's 2009 book, Smart on Crime.

• 19:22Ezra Klein?

  It was a very different book than I'd expected. I'm used to the gauzy, memoirish quality of quickie campaign books. But Harris, in the opening pages, she speeds through her biography as if she cannot wait to be done talking about it. This is a book not about her. It is about policies and programs that she thought as a DA were promising to prevent and reduce crime, promising to make prison a place of rehabilitation rather than a place that turns out more hardened criminals. But from those very first pages, there is a clarity to what Harris cares about, about what she is trying to achieve, that I really haven't heard from her since she burst onto the national stage.

• 20:05Ezra Klein?

  Harris writes, quote, "Nothing is more important than how we choose to keep ourselves, our families and each other, safe." A few pages later, she says, "Still driving me is a notion that safety is a fundamental civil right." I like that, "Safety is a fundamental civil right." She goes on, quote, "I believe that people have a right to feel safe on the streets and in their homes, and they have a right to keep and protect the things for which they've worked." None of that is earth shattering. I'm not trying to pretend that it is. But I've spent so long hearing Harris say that she is a prosecutor, that she can prosecute the case against Donald Trump.

• 20:45Ezra Klein?

  It was almost jarring to read a whole book about what she was trying to do as a prosecutor, why she was a prosecutor. Safety. And it got me thinking about Donald Trump and about his convention and about what the case against him really is. If you watch that convention, the case they made against Democrats was that Democrats can't keep you safe. But if you actually think about the problems Donald Trump, it's that Donald Trump is fundamentally unsafe. He poses as a strong man, but he makes us less safe. Our democracy is less safe under Trump. The world is less safe with Trump cozying up to dictators. We were less safe while Trump was bungling the response to COVID.

• 21:30Ezra Klein?

  Fundamental rights have been erased because of Trump's Supreme Court picks. The people that Donald Trump appointed to top positions in his first term, the people he would appoint in the second, they made and will make our water and our air dirtier and less safe. They made and will make our financial regulations weaker. It's all written down in Project 2025, which is why Donald Trump is running away from this thing that his own top staffers wrote. And you know what? Americans know and sense this about Trump. It's another one of those intangibles. The guy is chaotic and he's threatening and he's out for himself. Democrats sometimes fool themselves. There are things people like about Trump, virtues people see in him. But they get this too.

• 22:15Ezra Klein?

  They get this part of him. And then in picking J.D. Vance rather than Doug Burgum or Marco Rubio, Trump reminded people of that side of himself. He didn't go for a comforting, steadying pick. He went for an ideologue and an enforcer. He went for somebody who sends the message that this time there will be nobody holding Trump back, nobody to check him. If you were worried about Trump then, you should be much more worried about him now. And that puts Harris in, I think, a pretty strong position to take back an idea Democrats have not been fighting for nearly hard enough in recent years. No, I don't think Harris's ideas about crime from 15 years ago

• 22:58Ezra Klein?

  are the basis for a whole national campaign. But safety, that actually is. That's something Democrats should win back. They should take it from Donald Trump. And I think Harris could take that from Donald Trump. And the time to show it is right now.