24 Days in 2024
From Biden to Harris (to Trump)
Since 2024, there has been a pretty real schism in the backrooms of the Democratic Party between people who wanted Biden to stay in after the presidential debate on June 27, 2024, and those who wanted him to drop out. Obviously, Biden ultimately dropped out and Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, and she lost to Trump last November.
Currently, this battle is raging again because Olivia Nuzzi is the main character of politics social media (again).
Nuzzi, formerly of New York Magazine and currently with Vanity Fair, had an affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when covering him on the campaign trail in 2024, and her ex-fiancé,
1, is airing their dirty laundry in a five-part Substack series. There’s a lot going on in that sordid story, but the relevant aspect is that in June 2024, during her affair with his opponent, Nuzzi wrote a piece titled, “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden.”In it, Nuzzi characterizes Biden as completely unfit to be president, not just old but massively declining, physically and mentally. She writes,
“Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth.
[…]
The administration was above conspiratorial chitchat that entertained seriously scenarios in which the president was suffering from a shocking decline most Americans were not seeing. If the president was being portrayed that way, it was by his political enemies on the right, who promoted through what the press office termed “cheap fakes” a caricature of an addled creature unfit to serve. They would not dignify those people, or people doing the bidding of those people, with a response.”
After Nuzzi’s affair with RFK was discovered, and especially once Lizza started sharing the details of just how professionally and personally unethical his ex-fiancée was, many members of the Democratic Party, including Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress and former senior advisor to Biden, in tandem with affiliated partisan media figures started circling the wagons, insisting that her reporting on Biden is rendered false due to her conflict of interest. Nuzzi is a convenient means of discrediting any opposition to Biden because she’s very compromised and deeply dishonest, but she wasn’t the first or the last person to comment on his age and infirmity.
is currently arguing with Tanden, taking her task for covering for Biden’s age during his presidency2; conversely, she is deflecting by stating that Silver isn’t suitably focusing on Trump’s age, which matters more than Biden’s age since Trump is in the Oval Office.To be clear, Silver is on the record supporting a constitutional amendment mandating that presidents be 75 or under on inauguration day, and he wrote a piece less than two weeks ago pointing out that Trump is also too old to be president.
But, Silver and Tanden’s isn’t about Trump or about Nate Silver for that matter. The argument is about the Democratic Party, its factional wars, its relationship with the media, and what happened behind the scenes from June 27, 2024, the day of the first presidential debate of the 2024 election between Biden and Trump, and July 21, 2024, when Biden ultimately dropped out and endorsed Kamala Harris.
In 2024, I was a Washington state delegate for Kamala Harris, and prior to Harris securing the Democratic nomination, I was a Washington state delegate for Joe Biden.
I don’t know everything that transpired in the backrooms of the Democratic Party from June 27-July 21, 2024, but I’m sharing my perception of this period in order to confirm existing reporting and correct any potential misinformation about this time.
In addition, people whom I regard as at least partly culpable for the Trump administration (specifically members of the Biden administration and their allies within the DNC) are quietly attempting to claw their way back into grace. If the following reflections raise questions about whether these people ought to be anywhere near power again, I’ll have done my part.
I watched the June 27 debate at home, and I was appalled and furious that Biden’s inner circle had kept us all in the dark about his condition. I knew that Biden was old, but I didn’t realize how frail and tired he was, and not just from a mild cold as his team insisted. Trump isn’t youthful or vital, no matter what his superfans claim, but Biden looked like a strong gust of wind could blow him over, and that is not what I or most of the country wants from our Commander in Chief.
I started frantically texting and making calls to my friends and colleagues, as well as to trusted journalists. I didn’t know what I could do as a delegate, or at first, what the party should even do, but I knew that Biden wouldn’t be able to defeat Trump, and we were sleepwalking into disaster.
After the debate, Biden HQ started calling all the delegates from different Delaware based phone numbers, trying to lock down our support for Biden as the presidential nominee. I picked up the first call, and when I realized why they were calling, I told them I had [solidcore], and hung up. After that, I ignored their (many) calls and deleted their voicemails, but I did screenshot a few things for posterity.
Despite whisperings of an open primary (which Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama apparently wanted), I knew that there was no other real option for the Democratic nominee besides Kamala Harris. Harris was the only one with the full donor list, so swapping her out for Biden seemed like the simplest (if arguably not the most effective) solution to the mess we were collectively in. Moreover, Harris was the sitting Vice President, the first Black woman in the role, and bypassing her for another candidate would not sit well with Black voters, who are still the most reliably Democratic racial group, and the group that propelled Biden to the Democratic nomination in 2020 (and Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Barack Obama in 2008).
But, the Biden team, the Democratic National Committee (especially its chairman Jaime Harrison, who spent much of these 24 days arguing with Biden’s online detractors), and state Democratic parties were frantically trying to ensure that Biden remained the nominee, regardless of the misgivings of many Democratic voters and even some delegates.
People in power were attempting to bequeath Biden the nomination by means of virtual roll call well before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. They tried to claim an obscure state law in Ohio meant that if Biden was not formally nominated well before the in-person convention in August, he wouldn’t appear on the ballot in the state. Harrison in particular insisted that pushing Biden through before the convention was an act of democracy and stated, “We certainly are not going to leave the fate of this election in the hands of MAGA Republicans in Ohio that have tried to keep President Biden off of the general election ballot.”
However, at this point, the state of Ohio had already passed legislation ensuring that the deadline for political parties to certify their presidential and vice-presidential candidates was September 1, WELL after Democrats’ convention in Chicago. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine had signed the bill which moved back the filing deadline on June 28, 2024, the day after the disastrous debate, and a week before Democratic power brokers came up with the bright idea to use the law to coronate Biden as our party’s presidential nominee before the convention. As Ben Kindel, a spokesperson for Ohio Secretary of State, Frank LaRose said, “The issue is resolved in Ohio, and Democratic activists should stop trying to scapegoat Ohio for their party dysfunction.”
None of this stopped the Biden team, the DNC, and state Democratic parties from trying to push Biden through by obfuscating these details to the delegates, who are ultimately the ones who decide the Democratic party’s presidential nominee.
This screenshot below is from the chat on our July 13 WA delegate Zoom call, during which Shasti Conrad, the Chair of the Washington State Democratic Party and current Vice-Chair of the DNC, informed us that we’d be nominating Biden by virtual roll call before the in-person convention in Chicago. I pushed back, and was shut down.
The Washington State Democratic Party, like the national Democratic Party, was in complete shambles, and none of the higher-ups were willing to answer my questions or address my concerns, and my fellow delegates, were quite frankly, too cowardly to back me up. They would have rather gone down with the Titanic that was the Biden Administration than grab the tiny door which saved Kate Winslet.
But, I’ve always been much more risk-tolerant than your average liberal woman, so I took matters into my own hands and sent out this email to all my fellow WA delegates.
The replies I got ranged from reluctantly agreeing, to insisting Kamala Harris couldn’t win because she was a woman, to calling me (a woman of color) a racist misogynist for suggesting that Harris (a biracial woman) replace Biden (a white man) as the Democratic nominee. But, not a single one of the other 100+ WA delegates was willing to publicly oppose Biden as the nominee.
I continued my conversations with colleagues and journalists, and while I’m not exactly sure how or even if my internal machinations impacted the final outcome of this fight, Biden ultimately dropped out of the presidential race on July 21, 2024 and within an hour, endorsed Kamala Harris.
To be clear, I knew Harris would lose even before she was the nominee (see above post on alt). But, I believe the internal polling I saw which showed Biden would have lost by much more; he was trailing Trump in New Jersey, and massively dragging down House and Senate Democrats. I trust the polling, even if I take the punditry with a massive grain of salt.
Harris as the nominee saved four Senate seats (Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada) and at least a dozen House seats. She turned a 1980 loss into a 2004 loss; despite the current vibes of the country, she lost the popular vote by only 1.5%, and the electoral college by ~230k votes across Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Relatedly to my previous bit about theater kids, I strongly believe the Democratic Establishment being utterly terrified to challenge the status quo almost resulted in a collective death march to Republicans having 57 Senate seats and 240 House seats, and I’m never going to forgive them for that.
But why did I even bother sticking my neck out? Wouldn’t have it been easier had I kept my head down and let Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and people much more powerful than me handle it all? Why did I put my reputation on the line and under my (extremely unique) real name at that? Why am I sharing this now?
The answer is boring, but I spoke out then and am sharing this now because I thought it was the right thing to do. You can disagree with my actions and motivations, many people that I love do, but I make no apologies.
I knew that Trump and a Republican trifecta would be disastrous for the United States and the world (just the USAID cuts have killed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide). I felt that with Harris, we had a fighting chance to prevent it, so I made an effort to give us that opportunity. I couldn’t save the country from itself, but I tried.
Last week, there was an argument, on X-ter over the existence (or lack thereof) of liberal nationalism (as per
), i.e. if liberals are as patriotic as they ought to be, and if this lack of warmth towards Americana™ has electoral consequences.Obviously, the vast majority of liberals aren’t going to loudly embrace liberal nationalism, and aren’t capable of faking it well enough to bamboozle enough moderate-to-conservative voters to win the Senate. I don’t expect everybody to love America and think it’s the greatest country in the world like I do, but since I actually believe there’s nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America, I see it as my civic duty to put my weight (all 115 pounds of it) into my convictions.
Like Joan Didion said, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes, they know the price of things. And for all my flaws, I possess self-respect in swades.
It should be noted that Lizza himself was fired from The New Yorker in 2017 over “sexual misconduct.”
On June 24, 2025, almost a year to the day from that debate, Tanden testified in front of the House Oversight Committee and stated that she had “no concerns” about Biden’s cognitive abilities when he was president.