Republican Gov. Mike DeWine extended Ohio's first-in-the-nation ballot deadline to allow Democrats until September to nominate their presidential candidate this year, solving a filing date technicality that had seemed to threaten President Joe Biden's Buckeye State ballot status. Still, Democratic power brokers have proceeded as though the Democratic National Committee has only until Aug. 7 to formalize their general election ticket.
So even though Biden is polling worse than any Democratic presidential candidate — much less, an incumbent — against a Republican challenger in 20 years, the Democratic Party seems slated to ignore the majority of its voters who wish to replace the president in a fall fight against former President Donald Trump, the 2024 Republican nominee.
In part, this may be a product of the party elders accepting the inevitable. With the worst inflationary crisis since that which made Jimmy Carter a one-term president, as well as Trump's cinematic survival of a heart-stopping assassination attempt, the DNC may simply be resigning itself to the reality that effectively disenfranchising its voters by replacing the candidate they (nominally) selected only to lose to Trump anyway may not be worth it. More realistically, the Democratic defeatism is a product of the potential peril of a presidential candidacy by Vice President Kamala Harris .
The only person who could practically replace the sitting president on the ticket is his vice president, as even if convention delegates allowed the party to leapfrog the first female, first black, and first Asian vice president with a different Democrat, only Harris would be legally allowed to inherit the Biden campaign's quarter-trillion-dollar war chest . And the choice of Harris would cement the explosive exodus of the Silicon Valley and high-dollar donor class to the GOP under Trump.
President Biden has governed dramatically to the left of the already liberal Vice President Biden when he was in President Barack Obama's administration from 2009-17. And a President Harris would likely push her economic agenda even further leftward than Vice President Harris. Biden, in his desperation to shore up the youth vote, is now pushing a radical national rent control cap that would cap annual rent increases at just 5%. Jason Furman, one of Obama's top economists, rightly blasted such rent control as "disgraced as any economic policy in the toolkit," and judged that the Biden proposal in particular would "make our housing supply problems worse, not better."
But whereas Biden's bluster is likely a mere extinction burst evident of a dying campaign, Harris has historically been a true believer in such macro malarkey going back to the beginning of her career in Congress. As a California senator, Harris endorsed an Oregon rent control law that mimicked the same San Francisco statute that wound up increasing rental prices after housing supply plummeted. And Harris's proposed Rent Relief Act would issue a tax credit to the tens of millions of renters who spend more than 30% of their incomes on rent, an unfunded liability that would work as well as Obama's federalization of the student loan system.
And while Harris would likely favor the same sort of green central planning executed by her boss, she also pledged her support socializing one-fifth of the nation's economy with "Medicare for All" during her failed 2020 bid for the presidency. Although Harris would later pretend otherwise, she fully favored criminalizing private health insurance to achieve a government takeover of the healthcare system.
Most egregiously, Harris was one of the original co-sponsors of the 2019 Green New Deal , which calls for nationalizing not just the healthcare industry but also the entire energy industry, or nearly 30% of the U.S. economy . The plan would also cost between $52 billion and $93 trillion in 2019 dollars, according to various estimates at the time.
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In the history of her various flip-flops throughout her career, Harris has supported a federal $15 per hour minimum wage even when the median wage in certain states was lower than that, the elimination of right-to-work laws, and opposed both the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the North American Free Trade Agreement. Harris voted against confirming Jerome Powell's chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, instead introducing a law to require that a racially, ethnically, or gender diverse candidate is interviewed for all central bank vacancies.
Harris does not poll much better than Biden in head-to-head matchups against Trump, and historically, she has polled worse than her fellow California Democrats in statewide races and abysmally enough in the 2020 primary to force her withdrawal before Iowa. But her actual legislative wish list is worse than merely incompetent. It is truly radical, and if implemented, would risk accelerating Biden's stagflationary policies into something more Soviet.
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