Opinion | ‘The Real Danger Within the Democratic Party of a Fundamental Crack-Up’

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So I’m recording this on Friday, July 5. As of now, we have not seen Joe Biden’s ABC News interview. There is a lot happening, so I am loath to give a state of play on where the Democratic nomination is at the moment. Because by Tuesday, when this comes out, it might be somewhere very different.

But what I can say is, as somebody who has been arguing for an alternative path to Biden since February, and particularly making the case for an open convention, it has been startling to see so many people come over to this position. And as always, when the conventional wisdom shifts very rapidly, you run the risk of the weak points in it, the flaws, the soft thinking being overlooked.

The person I think making the best argument against some of these pathways has been my colleague at New York Times Opinion, Jamelle Bouie, who has been making very historically, and institutionally, and coalitionary grounded arguments for what could go wrong at a convention. So I wanted to have him on the show to talk through his thinking, how it’s evolving, the weak points he sees in some of these emerging arguments that I’ve been making, and see where we end up. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Jamelle Bouie, welcome back to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

So let me offer a roadmap for this. I want to talk about whether Joe Biden is in shape to govern, which is one of the questions I think people have been batting around; whether he’s in shape to run in 2024 and win; whether he can be replaced and what the downsides of that might be.

But let’s begin with the question of governing. Do you think Biden is fit to serve right now?

If I’m going to be completely honest, I don’t know if I have access to the kind of information that would allow me to make a definitive judgment in that regard. The reporting suggests that he basically has a six hour window in which he is at, like, peak condition and then needs to rest. Other reporting suggests that he’s had sort of forgetful moments and such. But I’m not even sure that offers that much of a window into his capacity to govern.

If we’re going to judge simply by the record of the administration thus far, I would say that, yeah, he has the capacity to govern. The administration has juggled a lot over the last three years and change — major pieces of legislation, foreign policy crises, so on and so forth.

And so if you’re going to look at simply what has the administration been doing, has it been dropping the ball on critical concerns to both it and the country, I don’t think it has been. And so Biden seems capable of governing. Is he capable of the performance of governing? I’m not so sure he is.

It has been, for me, one of the difficult cuts to make in evaluating him. Because there is the administration, which can clearly govern. But, of course, that can in some ways obscure what is happening with the president at the center. There are so many people making decisions, so many people working through the information that, on the one hand, I think we know he’s not making strange or erratic decisions in the way that Donald Trump himself often does and did.

But it’s also not clear for how much credit to give him in his capacity — Biden in his capacity personally. On one level, Biden deserves credit for all that because that’s what the normal rules of how we cover this. And on the other hand, it’s a little hard to see through all that to the man himself.

I think that’s fair. I think I might make the observation that that is often the case for presidents. Right? Eisenhower famously had a matrix of presidential decision making. And I’m not going to remember off the top of my head, but the rough outlines were sort of things that were urgent and the president had to handle, meaning urgent, very important, things that were important but not urgent, things that were neither urgent nor that important, and things that were urgent but not particularly important.

And so much of the duty of being president and of choosing a staff that can help manage all these things is sort of like figuring out which issues go where, who can handle what. And that’s really only something a president can do. And so if we’re looking at the administration’s performance, and if we are saying to ourselves this administration seems to be handling the important, urgent stuff quite well, it seems to be handling the important but not urgent stuff quite well, and so on and so forth — in the absence of any additional evidence, information, we kind of have to attribute at least that management of issues to Biden.

He’s appointed a staff that’s been able to handle information and handle situations as they come. And he seems to be able to at least make decisions about when he needs to step in and when he needs to intervene, which really is so much of the job of being president.

How do you think about the question of deterioration? One of the things that has been coming out in some of the reporting is people saying lapses that we have seen before have become more common — memory issues, a sort of inability to follow the thread. And we’re not just hearing that from inside the administration.

There was a Wall Street Journal piece that was sourced among European diplomats and leaders, and they were saying that they had noticed a change in Biden. It had worried them the way he was performing and participating in things like the G7 meeting had seemed like it was different than it had been at the past. Aging is often a sort of rapid and even exponential process at late ages. Are you personally — I’ve been trying to ask myself this — are you personally comfortable with the idea of Joe Biden as president for another four years?

I don’t know if I am. I’m not someone who thinks that Joe Biden is going to somehow drop dead in the middle of being president. I joke about this. But my sense of who Joe Biden is is that, if he’s elected to another four years or if he serves out another four years, then he will die on January 21, 2029, the day he’s no longer president.

He is powered by a pure love of America.

And pure personal ambition. Maybe the two are conflated in his mind. So I’m not worried about that. Do I think he has the capacity to continue serving? I don’t know. My inclination is to say probably not. There’ll probably be additional deterioration. He is 81.

So over the course of four years, as you say, aging can happen quite rapidly. I’m sure you have seen this, I have seen this, many of our listeners have seen this. And so the odds that next year, if he’s in office, or the following year, there’s just rapid deterioration in his capacity — even if it doesn’t render him infirm, it renders him unable to do the job — I think that’s a real possibility.

There’s another thing in this capacity cut that I’ve been weighing in my own mind, which is I think if you dig in to what’s implicitly being said about the job of the presidency versus the performance of the presidency, it’s that the job of the presidency is to make these high stakes decisions. Will we stand with Bibi Netanyahu? What will we do if Iran is launching an attack on Israel? Should the White House come out for this bill or that bill? What should it prioritize? And then there’s the performance side of it.

But communication is part of the job, too. And I think it’s indisputable that Biden has deteriorated tremendously as a communicator even since 2020, that he’s not persuasive. Right? There’s the old, the power of the presidency is the power to persuade, that Biden is not a guy you want right now negotiating with senators in the Oval Office. I don’t really think anybody believes he’s going to be particularly effective at doing that or negotiating with foreign leaders.

I was surprised in my own reporting over the last week how few Democratic senators have seen him recently. Right? And there had been reporting that the number of in-person meetings with members of Congress had gone down in recent years, which might just be he’s been focusing on foreign policy. But I was a little surprised to hear that.

Is this sort of cut people are making between performing the presidency — which is the cut made — and doing the job of the presidency, is that really a fair cut?

So I would say that the distinction there is worth making. And yet, if you’re going to make the argument that Biden has been an able president behind doors, then I think it’s also true that his inability to perform the presidency for the public, his inability to go to the public directly and make his case, has weakened his behind closed doors presidency, that the two things do operate together.

They’re part of the various levers and mechanisms the president can use to try to achieve their party’s agenda. And it has likely harmed Biden, that he cannot simply go to the American public and make a forthright and persuasive case about inflation to help create a story for Americans to understand why we’ve had this inflation and what his administration is doing.

So going back some years, the Times/Siena Poll has had this question, “Do you think Joe Biden is too old to be an effective president?” In 2020, it was around 35 percent percent of people did. Really all year in 2024, and I don’t think it was that different in 2023, most people, supermajorities, 69 percent, 70 percent have said he is too old to be an effective president. It’s actually sounding to me like you also think that, if I’m reading you right. But tell me if I’m not. So, if that’s true, isn’t that reason enough to not run him?

I think that is an interesting way of posing the question. Because the idea that there is someone who can or cannot choose to run Joe Biden for president, I think, is not the case. We don’t live in a party system where political parties have that kind of control of authority or authority over the people that they nominate for the office of the presidency. The only person who can determine whether or not Joe Biden ran again this year was Joe Biden. And his decision more or less shaped the rest of how the Democratic Party responded.

And if Joe Biden doesn’t think he’s too infirm, then that’s sort of settles the question as far as the Democratic Party is concerned. If I back up a bit here — I think part of my intervention into this conversation has been to just insist on thinking this through within the political system that we have, and not the one that we want or the one that we imagine we have. Maybe I think he’s too old, most Americans think he’s too old, but those aren’t really the relevant actors in terms of the decision of whether a president is going to stand for reelection.

So it’s actually something I’ve really appreciated about your commentary on this. You’re, I think it’s fair to say, sort of an institutionalist. Right? I think you take seriously the institutions of American politics. And I think of myself as that kind of commentator as well. And so it’s been interesting to me where we diverge.

But one place is on this question of the power of the party. We don’t live in the strong party system of Martin Van Buren, but we do live in a system where parties are there and matter. And I’ve personally been surprised by both the fatalism people felt about this but also the rapid emergence of party pressure after the debate.

So it’s true that only Joe Biden really, at this point, can decide whether he runs again or does not. But do you really think he’s not affected by the signals coming from the rest of the party?

So I think it was meaningful when members of the House, like Doggett and Grijalva, began coming out and saying he should not run again. Right? That seemed to me to be an important crack. You’re seeing a lot of leaks from his team in a way we haven’t seen before. There’s a lot more internal administration leaking. I think you should understand that, in a way, is a party action. The donors who are moving Biden has, according to Times reporting, been telling some allies that he recognizes he only has a number of days, a number of weeks in which to save his candidacy.

I think in a way you have to have a very low opinion of Joe Biden to say that if key purple state governors and senators and House members are saying he shouldn’t do this and the donors are fleeing, that that’s not going to enter his calculations, that he’s just going to kind pull forward on this, no matter how unlikely a victory looks for him or no matter what his poll numbers look like.

All of that pressure is informal, we’ll say. Right? It’s signals sent to both allies, to the public, to everyone sort of involved. But in the way that the Republican Party of 1872, they could have actually taken specific and concrete measures to remove Ulysses S. Grant from the ticket and nominate someone else, that kind of power doesn’t exist anymore within a political party. And so for as much as there is this real pressure coming from various actors within the Democratic Party and those aligned with the Democratic Party, to my mind that’s almost as much vindication of like, the observation that the parties are just too weak to be able to exert that kind of influence on the president.

Now, do I think that Joe Biden, if the call for him to leave the race were to go — right now, it’s sort of like a growl. If it were to become a roar, do I think that he is going to ignore that? I don’t think so. I think he is too tied in to the Democratic Party as his identity at this point. He’s too committed to his relationship to this institution to completely disregard that. But my main point is that it’s still his decision.

And that’s why so much of this reporting is sort of, what is his family saying? What is his closest associates saying? Because they have as much weight as a purple state governor does, for good or ill. Right? From my perspective, this is bad. From my perspective, it would be a good thing if American political parties were such that after the debate Democratic Party elites, the bosses, could get together and say, OK, we’re not going to run this guy. And he had no choice in the matter. But that’s not the world we live in.

Do you think a Biden ticket or a Harris ticket is a stronger ticket for Democrats in November?

Man, Ezra, you’re putting me right on the spot. [LAUGHS]

Listen, man. You can’t make all these good arguments and then — you know? [LAUGHS] OK, and I’ll answer it, too. You can push this back at me. I’m happy to put myself on the chopping block, too.

OK. To the extent that Biden’s presence on the ticket is undermining party unity in a real and serious way, I think a Harris-led ticket is stronger. That’s sort of making the assumption that Harris is able to bring the entire Democratic Party, elected officials, donors, affiliated groups, affiliated individuals in the press, all that stuff right behind her, unified. Then I think that is a stronger ticket.

I think that if Harris is at the top, she will have a vice-presidential nominee. And the choice of nominee also provides opportunities to send a message, to make a kind of electoral case that I think could be advantageous to the Democratic Party and can sell this image of this is not a radical ticket, this is not a ticket that’s reaching out to transform America. This is a ticket of two moderate politicians who want to stop Donald Trump and want to bring along as many Americans as possible. So assuming unity, I think a Harris ticket is probably stronger. And what polling has at the very least suggests that it’s no worse.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I could give you my case for an open convention and have you poke holes in it. Or do you want to tell me your case against it and we can go the other way? What sounds more enjoyable to you?

How about I just give my case against it?

Go for it.

I don’t think the argument that has been put out there by some observers, that you could remove Biden with no particular incident in terms of his political hit to the Democratic Party, and then have an ad hoc process at the convention — I think that the downside risks of that are actually like very high.

The odds that you get a chaotic, contested convention, a convention process that, for one, isn’t really designed for what I think people imagine happening here — the odds that you get that, that maybe even is inconclusive is, I think, a way worse outcome than just having Biden at the top of the ticket.

The delegates to conventions, if you go on a very micro level, these are not party bosses. This is not 1944, when you have the boss of Saint Louis on the floor hassling people to get Truman on the ticket.

This is not a party convention, even in 1960 or 1964, where you have party bosses, and people who represent constituencies and interests and votes on the floor, hassling people, making deals, trading that kind of thing. That doesn’t exist anymore. It’s some elected officials, but it’s a lot of just ordinary people who are dedicated volunteers in their local parties, their state parties. And they are — they go on behalf of a candidate.

And so I think this is important to emphasize because — no offense to any of these people, they’re all great. I’ve been to conventions. I’ve talked to people who go. They’re wonderful people who are really engaged in the day to day of American democracy. And I have a lot of respect for them.

But I don’t think there are people equipped to do the high stakes negotiating that comes with choosing a presidential nominee. And I think that putting that kind of weight on the process as it actually exists is not going to lend itself well to a kind of orderly or even sort of only temporarily chaotic decision making that I think people want. I think what’s more likely to happen is confusion and disarray in a way that does harm the Democratic ticket.

The alternative to that, which is Biden steps down from his campaign and his vice president takes the reins as the nominee of the Democratic Party, I still think has some risks — it’s sort of unclear how Kamala Harris will be perceived by the general public — but I think has the advantage of — because she was elected vice president, because she is his constitutional successor if he were to leave the presidency — all that kind of like puts pressure in favor of everyone can kind of get behind this and be unified.

If I had to summarize my view of the risk here, it’s that more the Democratic Party is perceived to be ununified and in disarray, to use a cliché, the more dangerous that is for the party’s November chances. One thing I do think — well, two things I think are not taken seriously enough is simply just what the Republican message is going to be here if there is any kind of disarray, even if Biden is — even if you get the best possible scenario here, if Biden steps down and you get Harris or whomever and everyone’s united behind them, the Democratic Party is ready to go, I think the message from the Republicans that first, Trump is so dominant that he forced the president out of the race and second, that can you trust these people to run the country, I think those are two potent messages. And it would take a lot of work to push back on them with success.

And so I think where I am at this moment post-debate is actually quite agnostic about whether Biden should step down or not. But if that’s the choice, people are going to make, I’m urging everyone to take the practical stuff very seriously. Do not think of this as, oh, he’ll be gone and everything will be magically better. Maybe you raise your odds from where they are, but there’ll be a whole new set of challenges to tackle once you take that step. And be prepared to tackle them and not be caught flat footed by them.

The critique I would make of the Democratic Party with Biden over the past couple of years has been that they’ve been playing it safe in a way that I think was predictable but proved to be playing it very unsafe. And the way they were doing this was by denying themselves information. There was no competitive primary. The thinking there made some sense.

A competitive primary will weaken an incumbent president. That’s typically something that happens to incumbents who are going to lose. So I understand why you don’t want that.

At the same time, he wasn’t doing tough interviews. He wasn’t giving press conferences. He was skipping the Super Bowl interview. We had no information about how this guy would perform in public, under pressure, in uncontrollable situations. And again, just at his age, for anybody, that would be a thing worth finding out.

And then they put this June debate on the board thinking that he’s going to perform really well and it’s going to really help them in the campaign. And it actually turns out he cannot perform under the lights. And the argument I would make for some kind of open convention over some kind of coronation is that the Democratic Party just needs information it doesn’t have.

I think Harris is underrated. But I don’t know if you want to be reductive and put candidate quality on a 1 to 10 scale. If you say she’s currently viewed as a 5 — which I’m not saying is true, just for the sake of argument — she could be underrated and be a 6 or underrated and be a 9, and those are very, very, very different conditions.

You want to the extent you can, how all these people seem when they really have to perform under high levels of pressure and really have to introduce themselves in an intensive way to the American people. And I think the Democratic Party has become a very orderly party, unlike the Republicans who keep knocking out their speakers and primarying themselves. The Democrats don’t like chaos. But sometimes it seems to me need disorder to surface information. And if Democrats want to win in November and also want to pick somebody they’re excited about, they need as much information as they can get.

I think that’s a really powerful case for a convention of some sort to determine the nominee. And this idea that the Democratic Party has been quite orderly is compelling. When I think about discontent with the Democratic Party, especially among younger voters, I do think there’s a sense that sort of it’s completely calcified and that there’s not really much one can do to create different outcomes within it. And so if a convention process would help push back on that, I think that might be beneficial to the Democratic Party. See, I’ll be frank with you, Ezra. There is a mode of thinking and writing about politics that looks at it purely in terms of entertainment, and I just find that so distasteful. And so I’ve seen arguments for — and this is not an argument you’ve made at all. But I’ve seen arguments for conventions sort of like they’re like, oh, it’d be entertaining. It’d be an exciting thing to see. And I’m just sort of like, this is choosing the nominee to be President of the United States. Like, what?

But at the same time, I have made the argument that part of what is harming the Democratic Party and its political strategy is that it does not do enough — and I think this echoes you here — to create the conditions for getting earned media, to put it very mechanically, but to create splashes, to do things that draw attention and that refocus attention on it and its priorities, and so on and so forth. And so knowing that I’ve made that argument, it does stand kind of in tension with my distaste for the idea of a convention.

And I think I have to concede here that, yeah, if you can have some combination of orderly with enough performed disorder, that could be a political asset for a Democratic Party that needs to not just energize its own voters, but show the broader public that there’s energy there. In addition to one thing this might be valuable for is allowing Democrats to put forth what their vision for the country ought to be, what the vision for the country is, which I’ve been struck by how little of that we’ve gotten in this campaign thus far. What exactly does the Democratic Party want the United States to look like four years hence?

I think you’re right, actually, that it is a bit distasteful. I have in me a certain respect for the systems where the way the leader of the party is chosen is by the people who know the leader of that party really well, the sort of more parliamentary systems. But given the one we’re in, this question of what is your theory of attention, I think, ends up being really important.

And one of the things that I think they’ve been struggling with, the Democrats, this year is that their theory of attention in 2020 and 2024 was the same, which was let Donald Trump control the attention and let Donald Trump be the media strategy. And in 2020, the idea was if everybody’s thinking about Donald Trump, well, they don’t like Donald Trump. So if they’re thinking about Donald Trump, they’re going to vote for Joe Biden, which at a critical level proved true.

And in 2024, that was their theory of it again. Biden’s campaign, over and over, made the case that presidential approval ratings and presidential vote were going to decouple here because you didn’t really need to Joe Biden to vote against Donald Trump. But the problem they faced is that as Donald Trump has again sort of absorbed the attention — and not in ways you would necessarily think are positive for him, in the news every day for, you know, criminal cases — it hasn’t seemed to hurt him. He’s polling better than he ever has before. And Biden has not been effective at retaking attention for his initiatives or for his policies, or for his vision.

Then the debate happens, which is supposed to be this moment of people coming face to face with Donald Trump in this deeper way, and they come out feeling better about Donald Trump and worse about Joe Biden. So on the one hand, I think I emotionally am more where you are on this. I don’t prefer this as a way of picking presidents. And on the other hand, I think one thing Democrats need to understand as a problem for them right now is they had a theory of attention, which is let Donald Trump take it and repel the electorate. And that theory is failing. And they need some other theory.

But I don’t understand. I actually myself do not understand what the alternative theory of attention under Joe Biden would be. Whereas I think sort of an argument for all the other candidates, Harris on down, is that we don’t know how it would play out, but all of them would change the intentional dynamics of the election. If Biden stepped aside tomorrow, Donald Trump would spend the next two months trying desperately to break into a news cycle.

I think that’s right. Simply standing back and letting Trump drown is not a viable strategy. Right? This is the thing that Democrats have been struggling with the past couple of years as well, that just they get no credit for anything. There’s a perception that the Biden administration has just not done anything in office. And I think that owes itself a lot to the fact that the administration — although it’s not like they’re not holding events and they’re doing all sorts of things, but they don’t really break through into the public consciousness in a way that would at least remind people, tell people that things are happening.

I think [LAUGHS]: when the IRS announced that it had collected $300 billion from tax cheats — $300 billion in taxes that had gone unpaid, I’ll be fair — then I think Biden should have had a press conference where he presented to the American people with a $300 billion check. I think that would have been silly, but it would have created some attention and would have grabbed the imagination a little bit.

Yeah. They don’t have real showman instincts over there right now —

No.

— I think for part of the reason you describe, a sense of distaste for it. I’ve heard reporting that there were discussions around the stimulus, the Covid stimulus, when Biden was in office, that they should try to do more of what Donald Trump did and send these checks that really emphasized that Biden was president, and Joe Biden himself was personally sending you a check, and that Biden himself did not like that idea, that he felt that was a bit unseemly.

And morally and ethically, I am with him on that. And politically, I am not with him on that. Because we’re at the risk of now, I think, too much agreement. Let me have us pick into ways that the open convention could go wrong. And one that you’ve spoken about, one that others have spoken about, is what if it ends up feeling illegitimate? Either who chose is illegitimate or who they chose is illegitimate. They didn’t end up choosing Kamala Harris and people are pissed, maybe. Maybe young voters. Maybe it’s Black voters. Talk me through some of the things that actually could go wrong, that the Democratic Party, if it goes in this direction, is going to need to think very carefully about how to manage.

Yeah. I think that, to me, is the big — as I’ve said before, that is the big risk that the outcome out of there is perceived as illegitimate, and perceived as illegitimate because it basically sidelines Kamala Harris. I don’t think one should take lightly the fact that she was on the ticket. She was the voters’ designated choice — 81 million voters’ designated choice for who should take over in the event that Biden was no longer able to. And that is real Democratic legitimacy. It may not be the same kind that you get through a party primary, but it is real legitimacy that no other candidate would have.

And so I do think that a process that produced someone other than Harris runs the risk of — I’m not saying angering all Black voters or anything, nothing like that. But it is undoubtedly true that Harris is on the ticket, in part, because she does represent Biden’s close alliance with many Black voters in the Democratic Party who delivered him the nomination in 2020. And sidelining her and muscling her out, however you want to put it, could be quite alienating. And I think people would be asking legitimate questions about why. Essentially, why are you having this process when the vice president is right there? And you’d really be relying on discontented Democrats to just fall in line. And I don’t think you want that. I don’t think you want discontented Democrats to just fall in line. I think you want everyone to be enthusiastic about the choice.

What is your explanation and assessment of why the Washington political view of Harris fell so much between 2020, when she gets named to the ticket and doesn’t perform badly in the election or anything, doesn’t have huge mistakes, or gaffes, or problems, and January 2024? What happened in the sentiment around Harris? And do you think it was fair?

I find this very interesting, you might even say strange, because you’re right. During the 2020 campaign, Harris does not perform poorly. She performs pretty well. She performs basically what you would expect a capable, confident vice presidential nominee to perform. She’s doesn’t take away from the ticket, does not harm the ticket, and is an able surrogate for Joe Biden.

It’s true that her primary campaign came to a premature end. But I don’t see that — I’ve encountered many people who see that as dispositive of her political skills, that she didn’t make it into voting, therefore, she’s bad at politics. But if that’s going to be our measure of whether or not someone is good at politics, then how did Joe Biden become president? Right?

Yeah, exactly. How was Joe Biden’s 2008 campaign?

Right. How was his 1988 campaign?

I find this so weird, like this unbelievable memory hauling of Joe Biden’s ‘08 campaign, which got nowhere in the primaries.

It got actually nowhere.

But he’s still a good vice president and a good 2020 candidate.

And if you want to go down the list of the people who’ve been president over the last 40 years, Reagan did have a pretty strong ‘76 campaign, but he ended up losing. H.W. Bush, lost his 1980 primary and was by no means an inspiring figure. This measure of political skills as being solely tied to your performance in a presidential primary, I just don’t think holds up.

Now, since she became vice president, there were these early stories about her office, about disorganization or conflict. Those have subsided. And it really, by all appearances, seems that the office is run very smoothly, very tightly, that she’s been an able ally to Biden over the last year and a half or so since really the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs. She’s been on the stump speaking on abortion rights and has been very good at this. If you’re looking at just like the evidence, it’s like, there’s no evidence that Kamala Harris is some uniquely bad politician. The other data point people will point to is her 2010 race for California Attorney General. But she ran in the worst year for Democrats of the 21st century so far against the L.A. district attorney.

So it’s sort of like, I don’t know. Did you underperform the state ticket? Yeah. Does that tell us much when the following cycle she performed just as well as the rest of the ticket? I don’t know if it does. OK. So having said all of that, my sense of why people are nervous about Kamala Harris is a couple of things.

The first is that during her 2020 campaign, or at least during 2019, she seemed to display some of the instinct that has hurt Democrats in the past, which is being a little too afraid of just forthrightly putting out what her vision of the country is, and sort of putting out these piecemeal, neoliberal-y policy proposals, which just don’t fire anyone up and seem to display bad instincts. I think she’s pretty good on the stump but — how do I put this — she’s a little corny as a politician goes. I don’t think this is a bad thing.

I like corniness. I feel like politicians who win are corny, typically. Everybody loves cringe. That’s why it’s cringe. [LAUGHS]

Ezra, this is exactly right. But I think that that rubs off, at least on some people, the wrong way. And then, this is not last or least, the fact that she’s a Black woman. Right? And I feel like this is the unspoken thing in all of this, and that no one wants to just say outright, we think that a Black woman would not be able to win a national election. And I would prefer that if folks do think that, that you should just say it and so we can debate that and think that through openly. But I do think that’s behind some of the nervousness.

My own view is that, in an election cycle where there’s a lot of discontent and people are looking for something new, I don’t think that that’s a debility for a Harris ticket. Not saying that this is going to necessarily drive tons of people to the Democratic ticket, but it is a true novelty that might be more asset than liability. But I do think that race and gender are lurking here. The last Democrat to lose to Donald Trump was a woman, Hillary Clinton, and there is fear of repeating that with another woman and with a Black woman in particular.

I agree with you that that is a huge part of what people are actually debating here without often saying it aloud. And the way I would frame it — and I’d be curious if this framing resonates for you — is that Harris was both helped and then wounded by a fairly rapid change in the Democratic Party’s theory of politics that happened between 2020 and 2024.

When she’s picked for the ticket, it’s the post-George Floyd moment. There’s a sense that the Democratic Party is this rising, multiethnic demographic play. The demographic lines, you could just look at them on a chart and the multiethnic coalition was rising. And then there was this sort of whole backlash to wokeism or what gets called wokeism, and backlash to this sort of moment in politics. And Harris, who I think was in part for the Biden campaign, a way of having someone on the ticket who could represent that moment and also be sort of a bridge that Biden would build to the next part of the Democratic Party and she could take the baton, to mix a metaphor.

That’s no longer really believed. Harris’s pick is part of a theory of politics that did not quite work out. And now, explicitly or implicitly, the view in the Democratic Party is you run moderate white people from Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, that kind of thing, or really extraordinarily, talented politicians like an Obama, or people sometimes talk about a Warnock. But the thing that propelled her in the first place has ceased to be the dominant theory of politics in the party.

I think that’s a really astute analysis of what has happened with Harris, and I think I agree with it. I think that especially Trump’s performance with Black and Latino voters after 2020 really spooked Democrats quite a bit. And there’s been this ongoing conversation about what to do about that, how to address that. So if you’re going to make a case for Harris, given what the theory of winning appears to be, I think that, first of all, you have to recognize that running moderate whites has not been a perfect solution for winning in the Biden years thus far.

Not every candidate who fits that bill has won. Candidates who do not fit that bill have won. We just mentioned Warnock. He’s a great talent as well, but it’s still quite extraordinary that he is one of the senators from Georgia right now. So this is for listeners who may be more on the left. I feel like they’re not going to want to hear this.

But one of the criticisms of Harris from the left has always been about the fact that she has this criminal justice background. She was prosecutor, attorney general, quite carceral in her thinking, all those sorts of things. And to my mind, that has always been kind of her great political asset. Her having been the chief law enforcement officer of California is a political asset when it comes to reaching out to moderate voters.

And it’s not hard at all to think of a message for the Harris campaign in the wake of Dobbs that is all about speaking forthrightly about the consequences of Dobbs for violence against women. All that stuff is like — those are real political assets for Harris. I’m not sure how you counteract the feeling that moderate white candidates are sort of your best bet. I’d only observe that politics is just not that mechanistic. You know? You know this, that things can be very unpredictable. I agree with this.

People have their intuitions, and they should not disregard their intuitions. But things can work out in practice that you wouldn’t have imagined actually working out in your theories. That, I think, is some of the story of Joe Biden. Again, Biden having been in politics for so long and being such an old hand, I think, obscures how genuinely strange it is that he became president. That a guy who, although well loved by Democrats, well liked, well respected, at the twilight of his career, doing something that’s genuinely difficult in American politics, which is defeating an incumbent president, unlikely.

And I think it’s important to take seriously that unlikely things, things that seem unlikely, happen quite frequently in politics. And so maybe it’s the case that Kamala Harris is — her gender and her race are these insurmountable obstacles for her. But who knows. This is not something I think we can actually predict. And I think that as a politician, Harris has enough assets, and if the Democratic Party does unite behind her, that there’s no reason she couldn’t win.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So Jim Clyburn, the Congressman from South Carolina, co-chair of Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign, he’s been very clear that he supports Biden, that if Biden drops out, he supports Harris. But he was asked about this on CNN. And I want to play his comments to you because I thought they were actually pretty important.

So what I understand him is saying there — and he talks at different points in this interview about other pieces of it — is that the D,N.C. could create what he calls a mini primary. There could be town halls. There could be interviews on CNN and MSNBC or who knows, Fox News, the network news shows. They could do all kinds of things — debates, I mean, the D.N.C. runs debates and knows how to do that.

But his argument is that you could build something that would give people information beforehand. Then we could see who’s doing how well in the polls. We could see who’s getting which kinds of endorsements. Then, obviously, you’d actually hit the real convention and there’d be these big speeches, and that if you did that, on the one hand, if Harris is going to win, it would make that win feel fair and legitimate. She would have beaten these other contenders. She’d have a good idea of who would be good in the number two slot for her. And, presumably, even if she doesn’t, then at least there’s been a real process. What do you think of that?

You know what? That sounds OK to me. [LAUGHS]

Let it not be said that I won’t change my mind. That sounds totally reasonable to me.

What are we going to do for the rest of this podcast then, man? [LAUGHS]

If the desire here is to be fair, and give everyone a fair shake, and not create the sense that it’s just a done decision by a handful of party elites — which, as I suggested before, I have no particular problem with — then I think that makes a lot of sense, especially if — one of the arguments I’ve made is that I think, because the Democratic coalition, there are fractures in it. Right? And so a process that risks creating disunity, that will not be settled during the course of the campaign or will likely not be settled in the course of campaign, I think, is one where people should tread lightly.

Even if I think Clyburns idea has real merit to it, that is always the application, I’m not sure how you navigate it. I’m not sure how democrats — if this were to happen, if you were to have this open process and let’s say Harris performs great. Let’s say it turns out she’s like, an eight, in terms of political skill, just a totally — and yet, nervous Democrats go for a white candidate who just isn’t as skilled on the stump, maybe seem like they might be but turns out not quite as good as you would have liked. If that happens, that’s a real problem. And I’m not sure how you resolve that.

It’s a real problem, especially given the larger context in which it’s happening, which is the Supreme Court going after affirmative action, the attacks on D.E.I. It would feel like the Democratic party basically recapitulating things happening nationwide in political life.

I think this question of irresolvable discontent is a really profound one for this election. Because when I think about the different pathways here, I see a real risk of it in all of them.

If Joe Biden keeps running, despite all of these calls for him to step aside, despite 75 percent of voters saying he’s too old for the job — if the party closes ranks around him, which as much discontent as there is right now in private — relatively few elected Democrats have come out for him to step aside — and he loses, I think the fury is going to be actually quite overwhelming.

I think people aren’t prepared for what a breach that will be between the party and its base. The anger I get right now in my own email of Democrats who feel they’re being gaslit by their party, you being told this was 90 minutes versus three and a half years or a whole career, they’re furious about it.

So if the party runs Biden, I think there’s this issue of discontent because how could you do this? Right? Everybody can see this is going to go badly. If the party coalesces around Harris really rapidly, I could imagine discontent from people who feel, look, we never got a chance to vote on her. I don’t think she’s a strong candidate. Right? She was not able to answer these questions people had about her. And then, if she loses, I think that will really explode, too.

And then, as you say, there’s the open convention version of discontent, which is that the open convention doesn’t feel legitimate to people.

Managing the possibility for maybe not schism, but anger and a feeling that we were not listened to in every one of the past Democrats have now seems really quite tricky to me.

I think you’re right to sense the real danger within the Democratic Party of a fundamental crack up. And part of what has been interesting about Biden, the choice of Biden and the Biden presidency, is that it has, I wouldn’t say papered over divisions within the Democratic Party. But sort of the desire to get Trump out and to keep Trump away has, through Biden, really kept rival factions, wings of the party, kind of at bay.

But this situation has the real possibility of tearing the whole thing apart. I think you’re right, that if Biden stays in and loses, that’s going to be a kind of injury to the Democratic Party from which I’m not sure it could actually recover. That feels like the kind of thing that just tears a political party apart straightforwardly. Maybe it didn’t happen at the ‘68 — of the Democratic Party that emerges out of ‘68 is — and out of Nixon’s victory is much changed and has significant divisions. But this feels on that order at the very least.

And then, if he does drop out, whoever is chosen, if they lose, that’s a whole other set of recriminations. It’s just a bad situation. I don’t know. This is where I’m finding myself, as a political observer. It’s an unprecedented, terrible situation. In some other world, Joe Biden is 15 years younger and this isn’t an issue. But in this world, he isn’t.

And so there are a bunch of suboptimal choices. As we’ve been discussing, I’m skeptical of the open convention thing. But there’s downsides to just going, as you mentioned, just going straight ahead with Harris, even though there may be the least there. There’s real downsides and issues there, separate and apart from however her performance might be in a general election. And there are obvious downsides with sticking with Biden.

And I think what makes this so hard and so contentious is that there’s no clear answer. You’re really just making a leap of faith here. You just sort of have to make a decision and then, you know, stick with that decision.

And I’m trying to think of that line Slim Charles has on “The Wire” about going to war on a lie. This wouldn’t be going to war on a lie. But once you’ve committed, then you’re committed. You have to stay it through. You have to carry it through. I think that’s the situation Democrats are in.

You’re a history guy. Do you find there to be something eerie this year about the Democratic convention being in Chicago, the possible first serious, even open convention since the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago that was such a catastrophe in a year when the sitting president decided not to run again, that it led to the end of open conventions in the modern era? Isn’t there something strange about the location that this might all play out?

Yeah. No, it’s eerie. It’s weird. It’s very strange that we are — we’re not recapitulating 1968. It’s a very different world, a very different set of situations, very different political party. And yet there are these echoes. There are these vibrations, you might say, that are weighing on the situation — an unpopular war abroad, a divisive incumbent president, who may very well be declining to stand for re-election, a contentious, perhaps convention, a vice president that people are very suspicious about and uncertain of. All of these elements are there, and it’s very strange.

And I have no great, grand historical insight here other than to say, it’s really weird. It’s really strange. And the comfort we should all take is that history does not actually repeat itself. The past is the past. And whatever happens at this Chicago in 2024 is going to be shaped by the particular dynamics and forces at work in this political environment, in this world.

I think that’s a good place to end. Always our final question — what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

Since I just sort of alluded to Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s Vice President in ‘68, I’m going to recommend first a great book, “Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights.” It’s by Samuel g. Freedman, and it is basically a biography of Hubert Humphrey up until the 1948 Democratic convention, when he maneuvers with the Americans for Democratic Action to put a civil rights plank — a strong civil rights plank into the Democratic Party platform in the ‘48 convention.

This is one of the real pivotal moments of American political history. And the book kind of details the kind of changes happening in especially American cities, within Democratic politics, through the New Deal, into World War II, that kind of produce both a style of liberalism that Humphrey exemplifies, an activist movement exemplified at the time by A. Philip Randolph and other figures, and how this comes together to produce this major change that fractures the Democratic Party at the time but ends up transforming American politics. Great book. You’ll come away with real appreciation for Humphrey. I did. So there’s that.

A second book is “Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War.” This is about the Wide Awakes, a kind of quasi-military force of young men who were ardent Lincoln partisans in the 1860 election. It’s a book very much about the Republican Party of that era and its sort of partisan — the Republican Party as a partisan organization, as a party. And it’s by Jon Grinspan, and it’s a lot of fun to read. And if you, like me, are just a fan of 19th century American politics, you will enjoy this book.

And then, for a third book, this is a little, I’d say, left field of these two books, which are — these two previous books, which are very much about party politics. But I read Steven Hahn, a historian, his new book, “Illiberal America,” which stretches back to America’s — the country’s colonial origins to the present, to think through the illiberal political tradition in American life. It’s wide ranging, and very interesting, and worth reading.

Jamelle Bouie, thank you very much.

Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Elias Isquith. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon.

The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. We have 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. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.