Endorsing Harris would effectively make her bulletproof. She would inherit his campaign infrastructure and delegates, giving her a head start over any potential challengers—including Newsom, who has been conspicuously building a national profile over the last couple of years. (Even if Biden didn’t endorse Harris, she would still have huge advantages in fundraising and infrastructure.)
But now we arrive at the other problem. Ordinarily one could expect the vice president to succeed the president in the event of an 11th hour decision to not seek reelection, but voters like Harris even less than Biden. This has been borne out in polling, which regularly shows her faring even worse against Trump than Biden. That’s a rather knotty kink in the argument for replacing Biden.
Klein, to his credit, takes Harris seriously as a candidate, arguing that she is “underrated” even as he acknowledges—in an understatement—that she “has not thrived as vice president.” Still, the idea that an untested candidate like Whitmer or Pritzker—or even Newsom, for that matter—would do better on the national stage than Harris, who served for four years in the Senate, ran a (pretty terrible) presidential campaign, and has been vice president for the last three years, strikes me as unfounded at best. Freed from the shackles of the vice presidency—and allowed to be herself—Harris could conceivably grow on the public.