How Harris quickly locked up Democratic support after Biden's sudden exit

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

If you had fallen into a coma on June 26th and had awoken, say, yesterday, your doctor would have told you that Donald Trump, having survived an assassination attempt, is neck and neck in the polls with Kamala Harris, who is now weighing possible vice presidential running mates to face off against J.D.

Vance.

And you would have thought that your doctor was having, to borrow a term of art, a cognitive fluctuation.

Tonight, we'll talk about the entirely new race for president materializing before our eyes.

Joining me tonight at the table, Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Eugene Daniels is a White House correspondent and a co-author of Playbook at Politico, Adam Harris is my colleague and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and Asma Khalid is a White House correspondent for NPR.

So, yes, a year's worth of news in a week.

ASMA KHALID, White House Correspondent, NPR: That was a good intro.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, yes, I know.

It's true.

It's true.

You think about all the things that happened, it's too many things.

That's why we're going to talk tonight.

Peter, maybe you can start us off by just trying to lift up to 30,000 feet.

You know, in less than a month, we have reached this point.

JOE BIDEN, U.S. President: I revere this office, but I love my country more.

So, I've decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Even on June 28th, the day after the debate, I could not imagine that.

Kamala Harris is the nominee and running neck and neck in the polls right now.

How did we get here?

PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Yes, it's extraordinary, isn't it?

That Oval Office address that the President gave was his fourth of his presidency.

It took three and a half years for him to give the first two.

He gave the second two, second pair in ten days.

That's how accelerated this news cycle has been.

And this is going to be a period that historians go back and look at for, I think, years and generations, right, like the period before Nixon resigned or before LBJ decided not to run, very different circumstances.

But the idea that a presidency ends in something other than an election is a pretty rare thing in our lifetime.

And we've now seen it happen in just 29, 30 days.

And as you say, nobody would have thought a month ago that Kamala Harris would be the nominee, a presumptive nominee, and that she'd be running even if not, in fact, ahead of Trump by a point or two.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Eugene, what's the most surprising thing to you in all of this?

EUGENE DANIELS, White House Correspondent, POLITICO: I mean, that it happened.

I mean, you know, I've been -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: All the journalists in Washington are still in a bit of like fatigue and shock, right?

EUGENE DANIELS: We're kind of all walking around like Frankenstein.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: There's a little bit PTSD.

EUGENE DANIELS: A lot of it.

You know, the thing that was on Sunday, right, when this letter pops off, everyone's kind of thinking, maybe he's going to do it later.

If it's going to happen, it's not going to happen.

We made it to Sunday, it's the middle of the day.

And when this comes out, I started calling folks.

And I think what I was so surprised by was the amount of people who did not know this was coming.

I talked to people on the campaign and people at the White House crying out of shock from what has just happened, people who up and moved to Wilmington, Delaware, to work for this man and get him elected and they have been promised up until that morning by senior advisers of the president, not the ones that were in Rehoboth with him, but the others and said, you know, go full steam ahead.

If a reporter asks you, you know, call them a big dummy, and same person.

And that continued over and over and over again.

So, I think.

And then you have, I was talking to aides of Vice President Harris and they're racing to the vice presidential residence, the Naval Observatory, because now she has to start making these calls.

She made a hundred calls in ten hours to senior officials in the party to basically say, you know, I want your support, and I didn't want the day to go by without you hearing from me.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: How much notice did she have, though?

She didn't have very much.

EUGENE DANIELS: He called her that morning, is my understanding.

You know, he made the decision on Saturday night.

Him and his team start to write the letter.

In the morning, she's the first call of the people who weren't there, and lets her know, I am dropping.

It's on you, kid, and it's off to the races.

They talked a few times, is my understanding.

And she didn't have a lot of time.

And the aides that came to the Naval Observatory were basically told, like just come.

We can't tell you why.

And then they saw the letters, like, oh, that's -- we get it now.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

Asma, you're in the White House all the time.

How did this, how did this materialize so quickly after all of these promises from the Biden team that is never going to happen?

ASMA KHALID: Yes.

I mean, the sense that we have is that Biden ultimately came to the conclusion, as he says, that it was just -- there was not a winnable path for him.

I think what's remarkable to me, though, is how quickly the party seems to have coalesced behind Kamala Harris.

I spent a lot of time over the last three and a half years, Eugene, too, covering the vice president.

I will argue there's not a lot of journalists in Washington who've really spent that much time paying attention to her.

There was a sense that the first year of her vice presidency was really rocky.

And folks sort of thought she didn't have what it took to be president.

I would argue that over the last year at a lot of her public events, she was bringing out pretty sizable crowds, particularly on reproductive rights issues.

But still there was talk in the party that maybe she wasn't the right person.

Maybe she wasn't going to be able to beat Donald Trump.

You look at what -- it was a 24-hour span in which she basically had accrued.

By Sunday, Biden dropped off, Monday night, she had enough, you know, pledged, committed delegates to be the likely presidential nominee.

That is extreme rapid speed.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, the obvious question is, how much preparation did they do behind the scenes, in secret, just in case he dropped out?

It seems like this thing kind of came off pretty smoothly given the chaos.

ASMA KHALID: I mean I heard from people who were helping her to organize those delegates that they started rapidly making calls on Sunday.

I don't know that there was advanced notification.

I heard that particularly black women within the Democratic Party quickly coalesced around her.

I think there became this inevitability to her very quickly.

But I don't get the sense that there was an advanced operation.

EUGENE DANIELS: I don't think there was.

I mean, they were -- the folks that are around her and are allies of her, I was calling them, and they were like, what do you want?

I got two minutes, you know, and so those kinds, because, you know, people like Donna Brazile had just started calling delegates for her, kind of creating kind of a whip operation.

Her team quickly put together a list of these more than a hundred Democrats to call.

This all happened very fast, and it speaks to kind of an understanding of the gravity of the situation, but also a fear and a concern that there might have been a mini primary, even with President Biden saying that it should have been her.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Now, clearly, Barack Obama wanted a mini primary.

I mean, that's the -- I mean, he just endorsed today.

And I wonder, I mean, if you're getting -- any of you are getting the sense, Adam, anyone, getting the sense that there's any kind of regret that they didn't have a mini primary or is this week going so well, has this week gone so well for Kamala Harris, not just in comparison to J.D.

Vance's week, which we will get to in a moment, but is it going so well that people are like, oh, maybe this is the way it was supposed to go?

ADAM HARRIS, Contributing Writer, The Atlantic: Yes.

And I think that there's been a sort of groundswell of enthusiasm, not just from within the party, but also sort of the voters, right?

If you're looking at polls of, you know, likely voters, you're looking at polls of registered voters, You're seeing already these sort of large gaps that she's made up from where Joe Biden was, you know, early in July.

If you're thinking about black voters, if you're thinking about Hispanic voters, Joe Biden was running at about 63 percent favorability with black voters, 31 percent favorability with Hispanic voters.

You fast forward to now and, you know, with Hispanic voters, she's really blowing that out of the water.

She's at about 64 percent and 77 percent.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, is this -- ASMA KHALID: The same with young voters has been a key problem for Biden.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Is this the end of the discussion, Peter or Eugene, is this the end of the discussion about Donald Trump making huge inroads into the black and Hispanic population, especially males?

PETER BAKER: I mean, it seemed hard to imagine he's going to do what he thought he was going to do, right?

He thought he was going to sort of rewrite the political playbook, if you will, to be this -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: He's always rewriting the playbook.

PETER BAKER: Yes, in which he's rewriting every night.

But, yes, I mean, I think so.

What's so striking is, to Asma's point, is that this is not the Kamala Harris of year one, but the Kamala Harris of year four, right?

She clearly is more seasoned.

She is more confident.

She gets up there at that rally in Milwaukee, and she's got that crowd, the biggest crowd that that campaign has had, bigger than the crowd that Joe Biden got, eating out of her hands.

You and I, we've all been to these rallies for Joe Biden.

They're tiny, and they're not enthusiastic.

They're polite, but they're not like energized.

They were energized for her.

Now, part of that's her, and part of that is that she's not Joe Biden.

Honestly, let's be real.

For a lot of people, I think, that felt like it wasn't a campaign until this week, and suddenly they remember what it was like to have a candidate get up there and prosecute the case against Trump and deliver a line in a coherent, cogent way.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: How long does not Joe Biden work, though?

EUGENE DANIELS: I mean, we only have like 102 days.

So, you know, it doesn't have to work that long.

I was at that rally in Milwaukee and, you know, me and some other reporters who had been covering her for a long time were like, oh, my God, like this is so -- it was such a -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You were not expecting to see what you thought -- EUGENE DANIELS: It was like was such a strange situation for some reason.

You have all of these 3,000 people who, for the first time this entire election, are excited.

And there's an energy that is like hard to kind of quantify other than, you know, is it her, is it not Biden.

It doesn't really matter at the end of the day, because they're excited, they're giving money, and more importantly, they're volunteering.

ASMA KHALID: I also think it's the moment, because I remember you would go out with her, this is back in, you say, 2021, 2022.

And voters would ask me, you know, I don't hear that much about her, what has she been up to, this was a routine question I would hear.

And she's been doing a lot, I would say, particularly on abortion issues.

But I think it's this moment.

It's this moment where she is able to make the case and say, as she often has been now on the campaign trail, that she's a prosecutor.

He, Donald Trump, she says, is a convicted felon.

It is a line that she can articulate in a very, I would think, compelling to the Democratic base.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Both things are true.

It's interesting, Adam, though, we were talking about this, and we've been talking about this for years.

Her, in 2020, after George Floyd, after the racial reckoning period, that being a prosecutor was not considered a positive on now that time has elapsed, time has passed, and it turns out that she's running against the first convicted felon to ever be nominated for a major party nomination.

Talk about the shift in the zeitgeist around her resume.

ADAM HARRIS: Yes.

You know, going through that primary season, going into the election season, even after she was chosen for V.P., you did hear a lot of young voters say that, well, you look at her record in California as a prosecutor, right?

It wasn't something really -- yes, something that they weren't really excited about, was also something they were kind of knocking her for.

But in this cycle, right, you're, one, prosecuting Trump, you're also saying, you know, this is a guy who is trying to run his campaign about law and order, you know, someone who is a prosecutor, it's like, well, which one is it going to be?

Is she a cop or is she so liberal that she's going to be really soft on crime?

And they have to pick one of those lanes.

But, you know, her position is that, well, you know, you saw me engaging Jeff Sessions when I was in the Senate.

You know, you've seen how I operate and how I'm able to prosecute this case against Trump and his attacks on democracy, and I think that that's (INAUDIBLE).

ASMA KHALID: I also think that she is far better and appeals more to a Democratic base when she is on the offense against Trump than she is when she's trying to articulate an affirmative vision for herself.

I think that's why she struggled, you know, during that primary cycle.

It was a crowded field of Democrats in 2020.

Her job is different in this moment.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, in the primary cycle, we couldn't really get a sense of what she believed.

I mean, she was running from parts of her record and -- PETER BAKER: Very tactical.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, it seemed overly tactical.

PETER BAKER: So now, I mean, she owns the Biden record, the Republicans say that's a bad thing.

But for the Democratic base, it's actually a good thing.

And she didn't have to necessarily articulate a new vision, but I think that part of the problem was that the people who have drifted away from Biden 2020 are people who the Democrats believe need to be reminded why they didn't like Trump in the first place.

And she's able seemingly to prosecute that in a better way than he was.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But let's talk about strengths and weaknesses for a couple more minutes.