It Wasn’t a Coup

By Philip Klein

Thursday, August 01, 2024

 

As Vice President Kamala Harris has turned the presidential race into a tossup on the backs of a united Democratic Party and support of an adoring press, there are Republicans who are comparing the pressure placed on President Biden to drop out of the race to a coup. Harris, it’s true, didn’t win a single primary. She didn’t have to submit herself to months of campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire. She didn’t have to face voters in town halls and cook outs, submit herself to difficult interviews, or debate other Democrats. She has been able to flip flop on key issues via campaign statements to the media without risking any blowback from voters she’d need to win caucuses and primaries. Instead, she effectively sewed up the nomination within days without campaigning for it.

 

The reality is, however, that the party always decides. Top Republicans and party delegates, in theory, always had the ability to pressure Trump to drop out, or even forcefully remove him on the ticket. But they wouldn’t because he has a much more passionate following among Republican voters than Biden did among Democrats.

 

On the day after the debate, I argued that Democrats would dump Biden. Here was the crux of my case: “The biggest difference between the two parties right now is that the Republican Party is a vehicle for Donald Trump, but Joe Biden is a vehicle for the Democratic Party.”

 

That ultimately proved the case. Once polls showed Biden couldn’t win, Democrats were happy to give him the boot and there was no mass uprising among the base, which you would expect to see if Trump were booted.

 

Another way of looking at this is that as currently structured, the Democratic Party is focused on winning elections and the Republican Party is focused on placating Trump. It is of course possible that Republicans could still win with Trump and that Democrats could lose despite their best efforts to win. But we should at least be clear on what happened here.