Opinion: Why Kamala Harris’s Biggest Fans Aren’t Joining Calls For Her To Replace Biden

To some, it might seem like the moment Vice President Kamala Harris’ most fervent supporters have long hoped for.

Since President Joe Biden’s poor performance at the presidential debate earlier this month, a range of voices have come out of the woodwork to insist that Harris should step in for Biden as the party’s nominee. As a 2024 DNC delegate, Clinton campaign alumnus and center-left Democrat who would like to see Harris as our first female president ― I hope she isn’t put in that position.

Biden has had a historic first term in office, and there are major strategic and structural drawbacks to replacing our democratically selected nominee. More centrally, however, the base of the Democratic Party doesn’t trust the broader Biden coalition to support Harris should she become the nominee.

We’ve watched how the Never Trumpers, purity-politics progressives and media members most vocally calling for this swap have dismissed and disrespected Harris since the 2020 primaries. Before reality set in that the only realistic replacement for Biden would in fact be his vice president, those envisioning a substitute for Biden made clear their intentions to skip over her .

Suddenly, those who have ignored and downplayed both Harris’ historical significance and her real-world impact for four years find it convenient to sing her praises as a mechanism to undermine Biden. They even accuse Harris supporters who are still fully behind Biden remaining as the nominee of being “delusional” or “gaslighters.”

While I’d gladly support either candidate as nominee, we so-called “establishment” Democrats — the core of the party ― have lived through the racist backlash to President Barack Obama that paved the way for the MAGA movement. We saw firsthand how Bernie bros and the male-dominated media treated the eminently qualified and uniquely prepared Hilary Clinton in 2016. Just months ago we fought back against ludicrous calls from the Never Trump commentary class calling on Biden to replace Harris as his running mate.

Ironically, while we get criticized as “out of touch” for refusing calls for Biden to step aside, in many ways we are the only ones being realistic about the racism and sexism a candidate like Vice President Harris would be up against were she our nominee. After all, against the threat of Trumpism, that was in large part why Biden was such an appealing nominee in 2020. He was viable and practical.

During the 2020 primaries, progressives smeared Harris as “Kamala the cop,” often circulating distorted criticisms of her time as a district attorney.

And in 2016, up to 12% of Bernie Sanders’ primary voters voted for Donald Trump . For those of us who feel at least some part of this was rooted in sexism — why wouldn’t we expect those voters to treat Harris the same as Clinton?

Rightly or wrongly, mainstream Democrats like me assign a healthy chunk of blame for Trump’s initial rise to power to our corporate media. Legacy media has repeatedly engaged in blatantly racist and sexist coverage of Harris . Many of those same media voices now insist Harris is the only path forward for Democrats. Having witnessed how the beltway press has dissected Harris, down to coverage of her headphones , you’d forgive Harris supporters for being skeptical that these same media figures would give the first Black woman nominee for president a fair shake over the next 4 months.

Earlier this year, Bill Kristol, editor of the Never Trump conservative publication The Bulwark, tweeted that “VP Harris isn’t ready” to serve should Biden need to be replaced. Now he tweets out fantastical op-eds about what exactly Biden should say as he announces Harris is taking his spot.

In an interview with The Young Turks, former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh also called on Biden to “step down and hand it to Kamala Harris.” Walsh, 62, who once pushed Trump’s racist birther lie and was fired from his radio hosting job for using racial slurs on air , has also now built a prominent following as a Never Trump Republican. Republicans like Kristol and Walsh already took this long to realize the bigotry rife within the GOP ― a party they helped build ― and now we are supposed to rely on fickle friends like them to rally behind the first Black woman nominee?

The women and people of color who, in large part, form the Democratic Party’s base also know exactly what is at stake for people like us this election. The reluctance to endorse the idea of Harris replacing Biden is not a sign of delusion but a reflection of hard-earned political wisdom. We have a keen understanding that racism and sexism are alive and well in America today.

Harris, despite her many strengths, would face the same entrenched biases and opposition that have plagued her vice presidency. This is why her most loyal supporters understand that she is more likely to be elected president in the future if the Biden-Harris ticket wins this November.