Kamala Harris Is an Undemocratic Candidate. But She’s Hardly America’s First.
Donald Trump thinks switching Joe Biden for Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ presidential nominee was an act of “fraud.” House Speaker Mike Johnson thinks the Democrats have “steamrolled democracy.” And a chorus of Republicans including Sen. Tom Cotton, Fox News host Sean Hannity, and ’90s House Speaker Newt Gingrich call it a “coup.” Even The Daily Show’s Ronny Chieng joked, “I’m pretty sure Kamala can handle world leaders, OK? I mean, she did just overthrow the president of the United States.”
But, for all of Harris’ historic firsts, her undemocratic rise is not one of them.
This small-d democratic concern can be a lot to take from a former president and his supporters who tried to violently overthrow his last election loss. But the fairest criticism is that Democrats’ nominee shuffle was a surprise to the voters. Though Biden was insisting, before he dropped out, that primary voters had given him a mandate to putter on through November, everyone knows that there was no real primary this year. Democratic voters did not have a chance to say at the ballot box who their ideal nominee in 2024 should be. It’s the first time since 1968 that delegates rather than voters decided the candidate.
But the U.S. doesn’t do anything just one way. American democracy is built on encouraging the freedom for people to change their minds. Hell, one constitutional amendment (the 21st) exists solely to repeal another (the 18th). Consider that the rules of presidential succession have been changed four times—twice by the Founders themselves: the Presidential Succession Act of 1796, the 12th Amendment of 1804, the Presidential Succession Act of 1886, and the 25th Amendment. It all builds up to a helluva surprise—fun fact: Not all U.S. presidents are elected.
Democracy, the most human of governments, is like that. So clumsy, unorthodox, malleable, iterative, flimsy, surprising, embarrassing, and improvised. In the United States, the vice president—a concept not even mentioned until the final two weeks of the Constitutional Convention of 1787—is so inconsequential to government function that, since America’s founding, the nation has operated for a cumulative 38 years without one. And yet just as often, vice presidents are rushed into higher office.
It can be confusing. In the purest sense, Harris’ nomination is undemocratic. But Americans and American democracy can handle it; we’ve survived much worse. This year’s unprecedented election and its strains on the democratic process neatly coincide with Friday’s 50th anniversary of a man becoming president without ever being elected into executive power—not even as anyone’s No. 2. It’s a good time to dust off Gerald Ford. If America can survive him, it can survive anything.
For years, Ford was all-American in the rosiest of ways: There were his two undefeated seasons and national titles as a football player at the University of Michigan, then his turning down the NFL in favor of Yale Law School, and his enlisting in the Navy in response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and he was a longtime congressman for Michigan—known in D.C. as “a congressman’s congressman.”
He ached to become speaker of the House, but when Spiro Agnew resigned the vice presidency in disgrace in October 1973, President Richard Nixon was compelled by the 25th Amendment to fill the vacancy—abracadabra: Ford. The poor guy didn’t even have a chance to move into the new vice presidential residence before Nixon himself resigned, making Ford president on Aug. 9, 1974. Ford began his term by telling America, “Our long national nightmare is over.”
He was president for only 896 days. If you think a president can’t be too consequential in that short time, buckle up, because the Ford administration was a wild ride.
After less than a month in power, Ford pardoned Nixon unconditionally, and a month later became the first sitting president since Abraham Lincoln to testify before the House of Representatives to explain himself. He appointed Donald Rumsfeld as the youngest-ever secretary of defense, Dick Cheney as White House chief of staff, and George H.W. Bush as CIA director. He offered conditional amnesty to Vietnam War draft dodgers, created special education, refused a federal bailout of New York City, oversaw a clumsy nationwide swine flu vaccination, fought for the doomed Equal Rights Amendment, appointed John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court, bailed on Vietnam—declaring the war was over “as far as America is concerned”—and then watched Saigon fall, and froze Israel out of any U.S. weapons agreements for six months. On top of that, he survived two assassination attempts within 17 days (both aspiring assassins, curiously, were white women).
Ford’s many strident and history-shaping actions might have ignited a national crisis of legitimacy. He ascended to the presidency in perfect legality. But no American had ever voted for him to sit in the executive branch. And yet: No one rioted. No special election was called. There was no crisis. Love him or hate him, America accepted him. This unelected president even ruled over America’s spectacular bicentennial.
When voters finally got a say in the election of 1976, they rejected Ford in favor of Jimmy Carter, who won a wild mix of states including Florida, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and the entire South except for Virginia. A lone faithless elector in Washington state made it a three-way race by voting for Ronald Reagan.
Harris, Trump, and Beltway gadflies could all use a reminder on the extreme flexibility of American democracy. Two of the country’s most consequential presidents—Teddy Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson—ascended to the presidency after assassinations. Vice President Thomas Jefferson gained the presidency by running against his own boss, John Adams, in 1800. When William Henry Harrison died 32 days into his presidency of a cold that developed into pneumonia, ascendant John Tyler returned unopened any letter that addressed him as anything other than “president.” In the chaos of the Civil War, West Virginia just sorta decided to become its own state. The election of 1876—when no candidate earned enough electoral votes because four states disputed their electors—was resolved through a backroom deal literally known as the Corrupt Bargain. James Garfield’s assassination in 1881 involved 79 days of writhing medical purgatory. Usurping Democrats successfully schemed to swap Harry Truman into the vice presidency in the conniving national convention of 1944—so, when FDR died a few months into his fourth term, it was Truman, an ascendant vice president, who dropped atomic bombs on hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting civilians in Japan.
And that’s not even touching contemporary examples like the chaotic Democratic National Convention of 1968, after presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Or the election of 2000, which was resolved by a Supreme Court ruling.
For all the Republicans’ goading and Democrats’ groaning over Project 2025 and its embrace of undemocratic principles, America’s democratic ideal—that the will of the people rules the nation—has rarely been achieved. Our country is frequently a place where the people’s hands are tied—not by autocratic conspirators or other villains, but by policy, protocol, and rule of law. American freedom is not absolute; no American is free from the Constitution’s bridles. Americans’ wildest ambitions are always, in that sense, domesticated.
Biden, the oldest-ever president, could very well die any day before the election, instantly making Harris president. Clarence Thomas, the oldest sitting Supreme Court justice, could also die and be replaced. (And we’ve all seen how significantly the unelected justices, while alive, can overpower the elected people in Congress and the White House.) Just to be fair, Trump or J.D. Vance could also die. Harris or Tim Walz, too. They could all die or be otherwise incapacitated, and be replaced by some guy or some lady that no one ever elected to their position. C’est la vie. William Howard Taft’s vice president, James Sherman, died just six days before the election of 1912. Teddy Roosevelt famously got shot in the chest while campaigning for a third term in the same election. He roared, “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!” and continued to give his campaign speech. Then he lost. We were reminded in July how quickly, in a country with this many guns, it could happen again to another candidate already selected by the voters to represent a major party for the nation’s highest office.
American democracy has survived much greater affronts than what just transpired with Kamala Harris’ nomination. Our democracy isn’t just messy. It is often a dead-ass mess. Deaths. Shootings. Switcheroos. October surprises. No bother. The government—the nation—marches on. The next election comes. America is not a human enterprise; it is an idea, and therefore blissfully impervious to human foibles, shenanigans, and whines. It doesn’t take an episode of The West Wing, Scandal, Designated Survivor, The Oval, Veep, or House of Cards to demonstrate the Constitution’s agility. It is a highly American paradox that Harris can have overwhelming voter excitement—fundraising, likeability, turnout, whatever—despite having a candidacy genesis without voter impetus. Truth is far stranger than fiction when it comes to the White House. Just ask President Ford.
