Why the "Open Convention" proposal only appeals to Op-Ed columnists.

Political campaigns are supposed to tell a coherent story. Nominee-by-acclamation is Good, Actually.

[SIDE NOTE: Peter Loge and I cover some of the themes of today’s newsletter in the latest installment of our (otherwise on hiatus) podcast, “Office Hours with Karpf and Loge.” If this week’s emergency-pod gets a lot of listeners, it will help me heckle Peter into recording more of them. And I really enjoy heckling Peter. So please give it a listen...]

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Ezra Klein is one of the people who keeps me subscribed to The New York Times. I find him to be an interesting and well-informed thinker. His podcast is typically excellent. He can be a bit too enamored by the techno-optimist crowd, but usually in a way that informs and strengthens my more critical takes.

I think he’s quite wrong in his latest podcast/column though. In “Are Democrats Right to Unite Around Kamala Harris,” Klein argues that the rush to acclaim Vice President Harris as the nominee has been a mistake. He acknowledges that there has been a massive groundswell of support for her, but still insists that it would be better if the Party organized a few debates where Harris could face off against “second- or third-tier candidates” (since all the first-tier options have already endorsed her). Klein writes:

Think of it not as a contest. Think of it as an exhibition. Maybe the people who’ve endorsed Harris can participate, too. She’s going to need a vice president. So maybe Gretchen Whitmer and Shapiro and Kelly and Beshear should be up there, too. The Democratic Party has been acting like a party lately. Maybe it should show up in these next weeks as a party, not just as one person. Maybe a little strategic ambiguity about what these candidate forums and voter town halls are would be good. It would be the kind of free media, excitement, anticipation that Democrats could never otherwise get. It’d mean Trump and Vance would have a hard time breaking into a news cycle. And by the way, when Trump has trouble attracting attention, he reacts by getting outrageous, chaotic, aggressive. That’d be a gift to Democrats.

Harris would have to falter catastrophically to lose the nomination. But it’d be good for Democrats and voters to see her win the nomination, not just be handed it. It would help her sharpen her message before the convention. It might convince those who still doubt her. And if Democrats should have learned anything from the last year, it’s that more information about their presumptive nominee is better than less.

This is the strongest version of the “hey please can we have a little suspense/entertainment” argument that I have seen. (Bret Stephens offers a much weaker version in his column today, titled “Democrats Deserved a Contest, Not a Coronation.” Bret, as usual, isn’t worth taking seriously though.)

And it’s still… just completely unconvincing. It seems to me that Ezra is making two critical, and potentially interesting, mistakes:

(1) This was not nominee-by-coronation. It was nominee by acclamation.

This could have been a contested nomination process. Even with President Biden (sensibly) endorsing his Vice President. Gretchen Whitmer or Pete Buttigieg or Josh Shapiro or, I dunno, Mike Bloomberg still could have declared their intention to pursue the nomination.

It became uncontested within a few hours because the entire party network — from grassroots to governors — immediately reacted to Biden’s announcement by saying “okay so it should be Kamala, right? I am thrilled to support Vice President Harris. Everyone psyched? Let’s do this.”

She raised $81 million in 24 hours. That money came from the grassroots. The donations were not because the party bosses had anointed her, but because the party base was signaling their overwhelming support.

Joe Manchin expressed interest in challenging her for the nomination. His interest lasted only a few hours. Even his #NoLabels donors looked around and acknowledged there was no there there. (Do you have any idea how clear and overwhelming public opinion has to be for the NoLabels crowd to get the message right away?)

When the entire party base is excited to unite behind a candidate, it is a bit foolish to insist that they wait a few weeks to reconsider. (“Hey, I know you’re itching to sign up for volunteer shifts and start taking the fight to Trump/Vance, but what if we paused for a few weeks and conducted a debate between Vice President Harris and Dean Phillips or whoever?”)

Such debates would do nothing to cement her legitimacy.

She’s already legitimate. Just listen to all the people out there legitimating her.

I also think Ezra is massively overestimating the “free media, excitement, and anticipation” that would result from weeks of televised fretting over the potential nominee.

CNN and Politico and Axios and the New York Times itself would run wall-to-wall “Democrats in Disarray” stories. The Trump campaign would leak oppo on every potential nominee, and see it credulously laundered into “some people are saying…” stories. And the impression inattentive voters would be left with is “the Democrats have no idea what they’re doing. They can’t run anything competently.”

That isn’t nearly as good as nominee-by-acclamation. It wasn’t guaranteed that the party would unite this fast and ferociously behind Vice President Harris. The case for an open convention would have been a lot stronger if the party hadn’t been so firmly convinced that Harris was the best replacement candidate. It is a significant, rare, positive sign. A unified and excited party is a good thing. There is no need to overthink it.

(2) The Democrats are the incumbent party. To win reelection, they’re going to have to act like it.

Ezra suggests that Kamala Harris’s biggest weakness may be how closely she is associated with President Biden. “The Biden administration’s record is unpopular, and she cannot make a clean break from it,” he writes.

It is true that Vice President Harris cannot make a clean break from the Biden Administration’s record. But no other Democrat would be able to make a clean break either. They just wouldn’t be as well-positioned to defend it.

Democratic voters broadly believe the Biden/Harris administration has been good and effective. That’s why the only challenge Biden faced in the primaries was from Dean Phillips, on a platform of “we could be younger.” This wasn’t Ted Kennedy vs Jimmy Carter in 1980. Under Joe Biden’s leadership, the economy recovered from the catastrophe of the pandemic. We passed a massive infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act. We rebuilt the government’s ability to actually govern. And this all happened against the backdrop of a Trump-appointed Supreme Court and a Trump-addled Republican Congress that went to extraordinary lengths to make the country effectively ungovernable.

Ezra’s excitement about flash primary debates is rooted in his belief that it would give Democratic voters information. He writes “if Democrats should have learned anything from the last year, it’s that more information about their presumptive nominee is better than less.”

But this isn’t actually what campaigns are for. The purpose of a campaign is not to impart information. The purpose of a campaign is to convey a narrative.

Mike Podhorzer made this point earlier this week:

While the person at the top of the Democratic ticket will matter, it is secondary to the factor that will most determine whether or not Trump wins in November: what voters think this election is “about” in October. 

We know the story that Trump is going to tell. We heard it last month at the debate and we heard it last week at the RNC. He is going to argue that the past four years have been terrible, that the country is falling apart. That things were so much better when he was in charge. He is going to insist that Biden is so unpopular that they knew he couldn’t beat me. And so they abandoned their primaries and picked someone else in the hopes that voters would give them another chance.

Trump’s story isn’t true. But it is internally consistent. And the problem that a Gretchen Whitmer or an Andy Beshear would face is that it becomes much harder to counter the central premise (“the last four years have been a disaster”) when you’re stuck litigating the latter claims (“no, that isn’t why we replaced him on the ticket!”)

And here’s the thing: if that central premise were true — if the past four years had, in fact, been awful — then the incumbent party would surely lose.

What the Democratic nominee (any Democratic nominee) has to do is convince voters that times are in fact pretty good now, compared to 2017-2020. That’s what they have to do to win. Switching out the sitting President for a popular-but-nationally-unknown governor wouldn’t change that. They are the incumbent party, regardless.

But also, that’s ALL they have to do to win. Running against Trump means there is no “change” candidate. This isn’t a decision between the status quo and the aspirational claims of the opposition party. We can evaluate how Trump will govern based on how Trump did govern. (And also on how he pursued vengeance in the years since.)

Incumbent Presidents tend to win reelection. Vice President Harris gets to run as an incumbent. Her campaign will remind people of the chaos of the Trump years — culminating in a nightmare year of pandemic mismanagement — versus the slow, stabilizing process of rebuilding that marked the Biden/Harris years. We’re already seeing a potent rallying cry coming into focus: “We won’t go back.”

That slogan packs a punch. It tells a story. It works. It tells the truth and highlights the stakes.

More information, obtained through a series of staged, quick-hit debates, would do nothing to advance the story of the campaign. In fact it would do just the opposite. A series of “are-we-really-sure” debates, at this stage, would reinforce the perception that the Democrats are unpopular and won’t confidently defend the record of this administration.

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I haven’t seen this level of mass enthusiasm for a Presidential candidate since the Obama '08 campaign. The party is united, and energized. They don’t want to spend a few weeks evaluating who the candidate with the highest favorability rating might be. They want to stand together, declaring in one voice “We won’t go back” and defeat the existential threat posed by Trumpism.

The Harris campaign is positioned to tell a compelling story about the stakes of this election. No other potential nominee would be positioned to tell such a clear, compelling story.

Vice President Harris has the support of the entire party. The purpose of a primary is to build that sort of unity and enthusiasm. She has it already. Nominee-by-acclamation is Good, Actually.