Christian Schneider writes for National Review Online about the vice president’s impact on the 2024 election.
Voters are asking Biden to do the one thing that he’ll never do: Throw Vice President Kamala Harris overboard.
Typically, running mates represent only one piece of the election puzzle. The VP pick is meant to fortify some shortcoming in the nominee, such as when old-timer Biden himself calmed fears that newcomer Barack Obama was too inexperienced to serve as chief executive. Sarah Palin bolstered John McCain’s credibility with the working-class wing of his party. For Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan buttressed the nominee against attacks that he was a free-spending Massachusetts liberal. Mike Pence, a human sleeping pill, calmed fears that Donald Trump would be too out of control; Pence was a gift to the Evangelicals troubled by a thrice-married candidate whose past public utterances included revealing tidbits like not being “into anal.”
And in 2020, in order to soften some of his own past racial missteps, calm a nation rioting after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, and fulfill a promise to select a woman, Biden picked Kamala Harris, who had been roundly rejected by her own party during its primary process.
But in 2024, Harris is not just a piece of the puzzle. She is the puzzle. …
… In any sane political environment, Biden would have a release valve — that of a capable vice president who could take over in the event something happened to him while in office. But this is not a sane environment, and Biden is riding along with Harris, whose current approval rating of 37 percent is roughly that of salespeople who squirt lotion on you as you try to walk through the mall.
Thus, while a vice president would typically serve as a falling president’s parachute, Harris is instead the anvil following Wile E. Coyote on the way down, making Trump’s election eminently more possible.
