The U.S. presidential election ballot has changed dramatically over the past month, following incumbent President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race and Vice President Kamala Harris’ nomination as the Democratic candidate.
Harris is set to face Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump in the next presidential debate on Tuesday. Stanford political pundits have paid close attention to the election landscape, especially the immediate and longterm political impacts of recent shake-ups and their effect on voter turnout.
Before Biden dropped out of the race, Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy, said that independents, minorities and young people might be so uninspired by choosing between Trump and Biden that they might just “stay home and not vote at all.”
Democratic voters expressed dissatisfaction with Biden after his performance during his first presidential debate with Trump on June 27. Terry Moe, political science professor and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, called the debate a “disaster” for Biden due to his perceived inability to speak in a compelling manner.
“He came across as feeble and not mentally competent,” Moe said. “ I think that this is just unacceptable for a presidential candidate.”
After being pressured by prominent Democratic party members, including House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama, Biden withdrew from the race on July 21.
Diamond said that Biden made the right move by dropping out of the race, as he feels the country needs someone who comes across as a “strong, active, robust, vigorous president” to deal with the international and domestic challenges facing the next term. Still, he expressed admiration for Biden’s achievements and said that his withdrawal was a selfless act that will lead “historians to view him in a much more favorable light.”
An unlikely presidential candidate
With the incumbent out of the picture, Didi Kuo, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies center fellow, believed that the intense party- and donor-support the Harris campaign has generated indicates that Democrats have united behind her.
Diamond agreed that Harris’s campaign seems to be generating significant enthusiasm and feels that she is a more competitive candidate than Biden.
“It is still going to be a close and hard-fought election,” he said. “But I think the Democrats have gone from having about a 20% chance of winning to perhaps having a slightly better-than-even chance of winning because of the momentum and enthusiasm gathering behind Harris, and because the age question has now turned to the disadvantage of the Republicans.”
Biden’s withdrawal from the race is not the first event of its kind in American history. Former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s exit from the 1968 election resulted in an open convention and the eventual rise of Vice President Hubert Humphrey as the Democratic nominee. However, Humphrey’s experience in office did not reel in enough support, and he lost to Republican candidate Richard Nixon.
Moe argued that Humphrey lost in large part due to the Vietnam War baggage he inherited. “If it had just been…Senator Humphrey running for president, I think he would have won,” Moe said.
He raised concerns that Harris might face similar circumstances, as she carries “Biden baggage” from the current administration that he feels may do her more harm than good. He added that it is also unclear whether Harris has done “especially well” during her own term as a vice president.
“If there are people out there who are upset because of inflation, or interest rates, or what the administration has done on immigration, she’s going to be tarred with that,” he said.
Republicans rally behind Trump
The summer also saw the first time a U.S. president was injured in an assassination attempt since 1981, as Trump was shot at a campaign rally on July 13. Kuo felt that the attempted assassination only exacerbated the public perception of political instability within the country.
“I think that we live in a society that has a very high baseline level of violence,” she said, citing threats of violence made against public health officials and election officers since the COVID-19 pandemic. “For there now to be targeted violence against high profile presidential candidates and former presidents — I mean, that is potentially ushering in… a darker period for the United States.”
The assassination attempt seemed to bring about more unity within the GOP. Trump spoke at the Republican National Convention, where he accepted the nomination, just days after the incident. Kuo said that Trump’s reaction to the attempt on his life makes him come off as a “very strong person and candidate,” but she remained skeptical that it will significantly boost Trump’s popularity or change the election’s outcome.
Shortly after the assassination attempt, Trump selected Ohio Senator J. D. Vance to be his running mate. As a Yale Law School alumnus, Silicon Valley venture capitalist and author of the award-winning memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” Kuo believed Vance represents a new generation of young conservatives who are highly educated and very ideological but less extreme than some of their peers in Congress.
“He’s a pretty smart pick because there might be people who would have been alienated if Trump had picked someone who was identifiably in the MAGA mold,” she said. “He doesn’t necessarily have a lot of political expertise, but he is the author of a best-selling memoir that people really resonated with across the political spectrum.”
What’s at stake
Diamond believed that, while both the strength of the Democratic party and Harris’s policies are up for debate, Harris would uphold the Constitution in ways Trump would not.
“A second Trump presidency would present an existential threat to American democracy,” he said. “The Republican Party is no longer wedded to democracy or democratic norms. They believe in winning at all costs, no matter what they have to do. And that’s really dangerous.”
Regardless of the events of the summer, Kuo noted that political chaos is not unique to this election or the United States.
“That’s how most American students are taught — that we are so exceptional…that we are the only country with extremism on the political right,” she said. “We are not the only country with a leader with populist or liberal traits.”
Kuo felt that individual political engagement is of the utmost importance; the political apathy or pessimism that Americans felt in July cannot continue.
“The only way to solve problems within a democracy is through democracy,” she said.
