Kamala Harris’s Ironic D/Democratic Coronation and Genuine Electoral Reform

Maxwell L. Stearns

Something strange happened in U.S. politics. Vice President Kamala Harris was nominated as the Democratic Party candidate in the 2024 election through an unprecedented political process. That process, and what it tells us about electoral legitimacy, holds implications not only for an election cycle initially cast as a referendum on democracy, but also for the hope of genuine democratic reform.

Following incumbent President Joe Biden’s remarkable decision to step aside and not run for reelection, the Democratic Party accepted his endorsement of sitting Vice President, Kamala Harris, as the Democratic nominee. There was never a primary in which Harris’s name appeared to let registered Democratic voters formally decide that she should be their general election candidate. For the first time since the primary voting process began, a candidate has emerged as a major party nominee without a single primary ballot or caucus vote expressing that preference.

Republicans point out the irony, to some the hypocrisy, of the Democratic Party having pitched Election 2024 as vital to democracy while having selected their presidential nominee through a seemingly non- or, even, anti-democratic process. By contrast, Democrats were mostly gushing, enthusiastically embracing Harris. They did so stunningly rapidly and despite sometimes harsh criticism in earlier periods of the Biden administration in which critics claimed Harris was ineffective. Some had even hoped Biden might replace her if he ran for a second term. If nothing else, these events illustrate our capacity to endure political whiplash. But I will argue that they do a great deal more than that.

Regardless of views concerning Kamala Harris as a 2020 Democratic primary candidate or as Biden’s Vice President, Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, state governors, other officials across the country, and past Democratic presidents and party nominees unfailingly followed the President’s lead, enthusiastically endorsing Harris. A mere eleven days after Biden dropped out, Harris secured a sufficient number of votes to lock in her nomination at the Democratic National Convention. Democratic voters gleefully acquiesced in what became a coronation, not a contest.

These rapid events occurred in the primary stage in our two-party presidential elections. And they arose in the context of a single, quite unusual, election. Even so, they convey something profound about meeting our ongoing crisis of democracy with truly meaningful reform that tackles our electoral system and system of executive accountability. These developments demonstrate that contrary to common intuition, perhaps conventional wisdom, even in the United States democratic legitimacy is not necessarily tied to casting an ultimate ballot on who wins a particular high-level electoral contest, such as a major party’s nomination for President, or, by extension, a final vote for President in a general election.