Is the replacement of Joe Biden with Kamala Harris ‘undemocratic’?

Some have argued that the Democrats’ dropping Joe Biden as their presidential candidate, and replacing him with Kamala Harris, was undemocratic, because rank-and-file Democrats never voted for Harris to become president. For example, GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson complains that “Having invalidated the votes of more than 14 million Americans who selected Joe Biden to be the Democrat nominee for president, the self-proclaimed ‘party of democracy’ has proven exactly the opposite.”

But Harris’s left-wing policy positions are more consistent with an increasingly left-wing Democratic Party than Biden’s were, and polls show most Democrats approve of Harris’s replacing Biden as the 2024 Democratic nominee for president. Polls showed that 65% of Democrats wanted Biden to drop out and be replaced by Harris.

Harris’s left-wing stances, such as supporting the Green New Deal, rent control, and racial redistribution of wealth, fit better with an increasingly left-wing Democratic Party than Joe Biden’s. Biden rejected the socialist label. By contrast, 77% of Democrats now wish America were more socialist, according to a major poll. Most Democrats have a favorable view of socialism but not capitalism. The California Democratic Convention booed former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D), when he said “Socialism is not the answer.”

Unlike Joe Biden, most Democrats support the Green New Deal, which could cost $90 trillion, or at a minimum, $50 trillion — an amount larger than the entire U.S. economy. Harris supports the Green New Deal.

Harris supports imposing a higher tax rate on corporations than socialist Venezuela. Biden doesn’t. Harris supported handing out $21 trillion in welfare payments during the pandemic. Biden didn’t endorse anything that huge.

“While in the US Senate, nobody was to the left of Kamala Harris. Not even [socialist] Bernie Sanders,” notes Jeremy Redfern. As Newsweek reported:

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s pick for his vice presidential running mate, Democratic California Senator Kamala Harris, was ranked as being more liberal than Democratic Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the congressperson often considered the furthest left within the Democratic caucus.

The government watchdog website GovTrack.us ranked all 100 U.S. Senators with an “ideology score” from 1.0 (most conservative) to 0.0 (most liberal). The score is based on each senator’s legislative behavior: namely, how similar the pattern of bills and resolutions they co-sponsor are to other congress members….GovTrack.us gave Sanders an ideology score of 0.02 and Harris a score of 0.00. together, they ranked as the most liberal members of the Senate. The website said Harris joined bipartisan bills the least often compared to Senate Democrats.

Biden hasn’t moved to ban fracking, which will increase the economy by $1.1 trillion and generate 7.7 million jobs by 2025, according to an Energy Department report. Banning fracking would wipe out countless jobs.

By contrast, Harris, like most Democrats, opposes fracking. “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” she said.

Harris has supported rent control for at least 5 years, even though 93% of economists think that rent control is a bad idea that reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.

Biden only endorsed limited rent control this year. But most Democrats have backed rent control for years.

Harris wants America to make race-based reparations payments, which the New York Times said “could cost several trillion dollars.” Nations like Zimbabwe and Uganda ruined their economies through reparations policies, which are a bad idea.

Biden has only supported studying the idea of reparations, and declined to endorse a Democratic Congresswoman’s bill to have America pay $14 trillion in reparations.

By contrast, most rank-and-file Democrats, like Harris, support reparations, according to polls.

Harris is a more avid supporter of writing off student loans than many people in the Biden administration. Critics have argued that writing off student loans is bad, because it results in colleges hiking tuition and increasing administrative bloat; and because it disproportionately enriches wealthy professionals with graduate degrees (“a full 56% of student loan debt is held by people who went to grad school”, and in graduate programs, there are no federal loan limits, so the sky is the limit for loan-fueled tuition hikes).

But most Democrats support expansive student loan forgiveness. Inside the Biden administration, Harris pushed for loan forgiveness, facing resistance from other, more moderate Biden administration officials, like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

By contrast, Biden had expressed doubt about the legality of student loan forgiveness in 2021, and when he later went ahead and did it at the urging of Kamala Harris, the Supreme Court found that his largest student loan forgiveness plan was illegal. Student loan forgiveness was so popular among Democrats, even after the Supreme Court ruled against Biden’s first attempt to write off some student loan debt, that Biden came up with other plans to write off student loans, one of which has been blocked as illegal by a federal appeals court.An April 2024 report by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates Biden’s student loan bailouts, put together, “will cost a combined $870 billion to $1.4 trillion.”