Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter Hamby. Tonight, as Joe Biden fights back against Democratic calls for him to drop out of the presidential race, “coconut-pilled” Democrats are warming to Kamala Harris as his possible replacement. Would she save the party from ruin—or be a bigger risk than Biden? One thing’s for sure: Harris makes way more sense atop the ticket than faddish fantasy candidates like Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro.

But first…

🎧 Biden vs. The Elites: On today’s Media Monday edition of The Powers That Be, Jon Kelly and I weighed in on Biden’s incipient media war (and the final stages of the Paramount sale). Jon and I will have more on this surreal and roiling and historical political-media crisis on a very special Media Tuesday edition tomorrow, wherein we dissect the Morning Joe call and the president’s plan to manage this extraordinary crisis.

🏛️ Six outta 51: Also, if you haven’t already, check out my partner John Heilemann’s dispatch from last night on Biden’s challenged Capitol Hill math. The most memorable section, perhaps: “An A+ Democratic Senate source of mine reckons that, of the 51 sitting Ds and independents aligned with the party in the upper chamber, no more than half a dozen (including Delawareans Chris Coons and Tom Carper, as well as John Fetterman, who spent today on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania with the president after colorfully advising his party’s naysayers ‘to get a spine or grow a set’) believe he still has a plausible chance in November and want him to stay in the race. The ratio on the House side, as best as I can tell, is roughly the same.”

🎟️ Programming note: Last call to RSVP for the event I'm hosting this Wednesday in D.C., featuring pollsters Kristen Soltis Anderson of Echelon Insights and Margie Omero of GBAO, as well as Nancy LeaMond from the AARP. The conversation will focus on new data from a research initiative that aims to understand the voting behaviors of women over age 50, a demographic whose high turnout rates and significant share of ballots cast make them a crucial bloc. Puck subscribers can sign up here. Email Fritz@puck.news with any questions.

Speaking of which, here’s Abby Livingston’s report on the chaos in D.C.…

• The timeline: Sunday was brutal for the White House, with several House committee leaders privately calling for Biden to withdraw. Then, earlier today, embattled Montana Sen. Jon Tester joined the chorus of skeptics by releasing a scathing statement that stopped just short of demanding his withdrawal. But along with his open letter to Capitol Hill Democrats, Biden’s defiant call-in to Morning Joe on Monday already seems to be playing better than Friday’s “If the Lord Almighty comes down” primetime ABC interview with Stephanopoulos. Dick Durbin, the No. 2-ranking senator, who served alongside Biden in the chamber, responded by offering the sort of equivocal pablum that has become the lingua franca of elected Democrats these days. “I watched the debate, and it raised a lot of questions,” he told reporters on the Hill. “He is trying to answer those questions. In some respects, he’s done it very effectively. In other respects, not as effectively.”

  Prominent members of the most powerful House bloc, the Congressional Black Caucus—including Financial Services Ranking Member Maxine Waters, and Steven Horsford, chairman of the C.B.C. and a Frontliner—have also thrown their support behind the president. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who represents one of the toughest states (Nevada) and who served on the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2020, and Rep. Grace Meng of New York, an up-and-comer in the party and member of the Pink Ladies House clique, both came out in Biden’s favor. Fellow Pink Lady and Whip Katherine Clark has stayed mostly quiet, as has retiring member Annie Kuster.

• The fallout: Alas, it’s hard to imagine how the escalating intraparty bitterness doesn’t harden into costly, long-lasting resentments. The row is already reminiscent of the 2008 superdelegate fight between Obama and the Clintons. But while that was a boisterous battle, waged during a presidential contest, Democrats were pretty sure they were going to win. This is a much uglier and more personal fracas, and usually like-minded colleagues find themselves facing off against close friends and Acela seatmates as a potential election wipeout beckons.

  Several older political hands have mentioned that this also recalls the pre-Obama infighting that once engulfed the Democratic Party, like the nastiness over Clinton’s 1998 impeachment or the backbiting around John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. It’s hard to see how any of this is good for morale—which had been the Republicans’ problem until very, very recently.

  So which way is the wind blowing? The pro-Biden forces have been demonstrative in their support, and Mark Warner’s decision to cancel his planned meeting with similarly skeptical senators will at the very least slow down the gathering storm against Biden. But the silence from a vast number of Democratic members remains deafening.

I’d written about Harris’s struggles, both as a political figure who never seemed to live up to the sky-high expectations placed upon her, and as a merciless boss with a roster of aggrieved former staffers in California and Washington. But in Arizona, I encountered a more impressive figure than the Selina Meyer caricature on social media. Harris had grown. How could she not? Three years of media glare, a relentless onslaught of speeches and policy briefings, meetings with over 150 world leaders—she was bound to improve.

Harris was more confident and relaxed, which made sense, since the Biden campaign had detailed her to focus on abortion rights and shoring up Democratic support among young and Black voters. Unlike in 2020, when her primary campaign confused progressive Twitter for real life, Harris now mostly understands the id of the Democratic base. At her rally in Phoenix, she pumped up a crowd of mostly Hispanic and Black party loyalists with her attacks on Donald Trump. This was when the Biden administration was taking heat from young progressives over its support for Israel’s war in Gaza. In our interview, Harris gave a pained and heartfelt answer on Gaza that was more sympathetic to the Palestinians than anything Biden had said. It made sense that her approval ratings among younger voters were a tick higher than Biden’s.

I thought about this over the weekend as I watched a lot of Democrats and Never-Trump warriors slobber all over Harris’s appearance at the Essence Festival in New Orleans, where she lashed Trump and made the campaign’s case to Black voters simply by doing what the aging Democratic nominee cannot do—talk in complete sentences. Thanks to Biden’s dismal debate performance and the apocalyptic panic it’s unleashed among Democrats, a universe of people who considered Harris an afterthought have joined the KHive, rooting for her to replace Biden on the top of the ticket as their last best option to beat Trump. (Her new fans on Twitter are also claiming to be “coconut-pilled”—I’ll let you Google that one.)

Tim Miller, the Bulwark writer who’s lately been among the most outspoken Never-Trump voices calling on Biden to step aside, said that putting Harris on the ticket would make the race about Trump once again. “The vice president is already on that ballot because of Biden’s age, so why not get the benefits that could come with it?” he said. “She can at least offer a coherent contrast message, which would be a welcome shift. It could be ‘prosecutor vs. felon’ or ‘next-generation leader fighting for individual freedoms versus the old white fatso trying to take them away.’ Those are much better elevator pitches than whatever the current message is. What is the campaign’s current message, exactly?”

He has a point. As long as Biden is enduring public and private Democratic anguish, slipping poll numbers, and a ravenous media feeding frenzy—the campaign’s message is a mess. In Washington and Wilmington, his team is playing defense on questions about his old age and frailty. The presidential campaign is not currently about Trump at all. It’s a referendum on Biden. That’s never where you want to be as an incumbent—especially when your approval rating is 37 percent, the lowest of Biden’s presidency.

On Monday, Biden sent a letter to Democrats in Congress as a preemptive strike against any planned revolt, and he dialed into Morning Joe to assure the gang that he isn’t just the “presumptive Democratic nominee”—he is the nominee. Biden has promised more energy and more excitement since the debate. But in his interview with George Stephanopoulos on Friday, his campaign stop in Pennsylvania over the weekend, and his chat with Mika and Joe, Biden didn’t sound much more vigorous or lucid than he did the week before, or the month before that. Politically, it’s hard to see how he climbs out of this hole—which is why the talk of replacing him on the ticket, however fantastical, isn’t going to suddenly disappear anytime soon. And so here we are, with six weeks until the Democratic Convention in Chicago, talking about whether Kamala Harris can beat Donald Trump in November.

But for the Tim Millers of the world, Biden is slouching toward an Electoral College landslide loss in November. That’s what polls currently indicate, including the internal Democratic polling from OpenLabs I reported last week, which showed Biden bleeding support in every battleground state and possibly losing states thought to be safe a few weeks ago, like Virginia, New Hampshire, and Maine. Would Harris be doing much better?

The main argument for Harris replacing Biden is that she would be a reset button. After that, she would have to convince the rest of the country of what I saw in Arizona. One former Harris advisor I spoke with today—not one of the bitter ones—said that the expectations game would play to her benefit if she eventually wound up replacing Biden atop the ballot. “If and when she were to become the nominee, I think people would be pleasantly surprised. And I think, candidly, that’s because the bar has been set so low for her over the last few years. But I do think she could beat Trump—but only because it’s Trump.”

The conversation I do find silly is the ongoing West Wing fanfic about a Democrat other than Harris—Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, J.B. Pritzker, whoever—leapfrogging the sitting vice president and becoming the nominee. Several notable Democrats, including the fellas over at Pod Save America, Rep. Jim Clyburn, and strategist James Carville, have advocated for some kind of semi-open nomination sprint in which Harris and the rest would compete for the affections of the 3,000+ delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Harris, they argue, would be a great option, but she shouldn’t be handed the job. “We need to move forward,” Carville wrote in The New York Times on Monday. “But it can’t be by anointing Vice President Kamala Harris or anyone else as the presumptive Democratic nominee. We’ve got to do it out in the open—the exact opposite of what Donald Trump wants us to do.”

I have a hunch that Carville, LSU-clad centrist that he is, harbors doubts about Harris’s political chops and her ability to win over moderate whites—or even suspicious Black men. Or maybe he’s calculating that a Whitmer-Shapiro ticket would guarantee wins in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and a clean Dem victory in November. But cutting Harris completely out of the campaign she’s been helping run and raising money for over the last year? That’s, well, complicated. “Kamala is not a choice. She’s the choice,” said Bakari Sellers, the Democratic lawyer and longtime Harris loyalist. Sellers believes Biden is still the horse for now, but if not: “She has the record, the money, the infrastructure, and something the rest don’t have—my momma and her friends, a.k.a. the base of the party.”

Yes, there is that. Passing over Harris for a white woman nicknamed “Big Gretch” could definitely risk wounding Black women. Harris struggled to connect with Black voters in 2020, especially in South Carolina, where she ran an explicitly identity-focused campaign. But since then, as vice president, she has developed a deeper connection with women of color, especially younger ones. It’s on display at the rallies she’s hosted on college campuses, especially HBCUs. But she still has work to do. Her approval rating among Black voters, you may or may not be surprised to learn, remains lower than Biden’s.

Harris has been loyal to Biden throughout his crisis of confidence. She has a vanishingly small group of trusted advisors, and relies on her family more than any political aide. Yes, some donors are moving around documents and theories to prop Harris up as the nominee. But as far as I can tell, Harris and her confidants aren’t doing anything of the sort, or indulging in the chatter. It would be suicidal to maneuver toward the nomination while her boss is sitting in the Oval.

I can channel what I think a Harris loyalist would say to a reporter right now: Unlike all the other possible Biden replacements, Kamala Harris is vetted. Democrats know her upsides and her downsides. The American public doesn’t hold her in particularly high regard, as with Biden and Trump. But at least they know her. Most voters don’t know a single thing about Josh Shapiro. And learning to be a presidential candidate on the fly is a dangerous thing, especially when you’re running against a wily Donald Trump.

Harris, meanwhile, has endured the national and global spotlight for years now, and would be a much safer plug-in option than any of the Democratic governors who think they’ve been playing in the major leagues but actually haven’t. Among them, only Newsom has come close, with his Fox News pop-ups and his tête-à-têtes with Trump when he was president.

As the former Harris advisor told me, “She has faced big league pitching before. A few of the governors have had their moments. But she has been in there three and a half years now. She has taken her lumps, but she is still standing.” The pressure cooker of a national campaign is far more intense than anything a new-to-the-scene governor has faced, even those from populous states. Harris can grind out three or four speeches a day, do the rounds of press, make the donor calls, sleep a few hours, and do it all over again the next day. As hyped as those other Democrats are, no one knows if any of them could slip right into Biden’s preexisting campaign infrastructure, with an enormous staff that has already been working for her, and hit the ground running.

Back in March, Harris told me she’s ready. “I’m the 49th vice president, the first one that looks like me, so maybe people are trying to wrap their heads around that, too,” she said. “But every vice president understands the seriousness and the significance of this position, which is to be ready. The president can be in one place at one time doing many things, certainly. But the vice president is there to serve, as somebody who can be there when the president can’t.”