 Delegates cheer Kamala Harris during the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 22 in Chicago. |
OF ALL the reasons to object to Kamala Harris's bid for the presidency, the most preposterous is that her nomination is an affront to democracy because she wasn't chosen by Democratic primary voters.
Coming from Donald Trump, who disparages any unwanted outcome as "rigged," the accusation that his opponent became the Democrats' standard-bearer in a "coup" is not surprising. But it astonishes me that normal Republicans trot out the charge as if it is not only self-evident but irrefutably logical.
Again and again Trump backers have made the claim that it was an attack on democracy for Harris to replace President Biden as the Democratic nominee.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, for example, indignantly declared that "the self-proclaimed 'party of democracy' has proven exactly the opposite" because it "invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who selected Joe Biden to be the Democrat nominee for president." At the Texas Public Policy Foundation website, the Republican Party's former director of election integrity, Josh Findlay, wrote that Democratic leaders "effectively stole an election" by choosing to "disenfranchise millions of Democratic primary voters" who had supported Biden's renomination. JD Vance, Trump's running mate, said he was "disgusted by how anti-democratic" the elevation of Harris had been and how it ran roughshod over the principle that "if you want to run for president, you've got to make your case to voters [and] win their votes."
To be fair, Democrats who opposed Biden's replacement were pressing this case before it turned into a Republican talking point.
"The voters of the Democratic Party have voted. They have chosen me to be the nominee of the party. Do we now just say this process didn't matter? That the voters don't have a say?" Biden himself wrote in early July, when he still hoped to salvage his candidacy.
But it's a specious argument no matter who makes it.
Primary elections do not confer democratic legitimacy on a party's presidential nomination process and the absence of primary elections doesn't invalidate that legitimacy. Otherwise, no presidential nominee for most of American history — not Jefferson, not Lincoln, not Kennedy — could have been regarded as legitimate. Until 1972, political parties never relied on the outcome of primary elections to choose their nominees. Primaries weren't even invented until the early 20th century, and they were regarded largely as nonbinding "beauty contests" — a way to gauge public sentiment and generate interest but not to displace the role of party leaders in selecting a nominee.
It was only after the 1968 election, when the Democratic Party changed its rules, that primary results were made binding. But that didn't affect the democratic quality of the parties' subsequent nominees. Unlike general elections, which are true democratic public contests, a primary election is no more than a party's private, internal process. Under our system, political parties have no constitutional status and how a party chooses its nominees — through primaries, caucuses, or the consensus of party leaders — is irrelevant. Only when voters choose between nominees does democratic legitimacy come into play.
The "coup" argument fails for other reasons too.
Many observers thought it was a mistake for Democrats to nominate Harris for vice president in 2020. (Even Jill Biden was opposed.) Yet no one claimed that it was "anti-democratic" for her to become Biden's running mate — despite the fact that Democratic primary voters had no say in the choice. She became a candidate for, and was ultimately elected to, the second-highest office in the land, on the basis of one man's preference. If that didn't offend America's democratic values — and it didn't — then neither did the party's decision this year to move Harris to the top of its ticket.
That's not all.
As a matter of formal procedure, primary election voters don't elect presidential nominees. They elect delegates pledged to vote for a specific candidate at the party's convention later in the year. Only when the delegates vote does a candidate's nomination become official. But a delegate's pledge to a candidate cannot be binding if that candidate is no longer running.
By the time Democratic delegates gathered in Chicago this year, Biden had pulled out of the presidential race and endorsed Harris to take his place. His delegates — who were elected in primary elections — weren't required to support his chosen successor, though most of them did so when the roll was called. The nomination of Harris was entirely in keeping with the party's rules.
There is no shortage of serious reasons to oppose Harris's campaign for the White House. But those who deride her candidacy as anti-democratic are arguing in bad faith — and saying more about their own lack of seriousness than about her unfitness to be president.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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