Kamala Harris will run unopposed for the Democratic presidential nomination
By 
I mean probably literally unopposed, and certainly functionally speaking.
The DNC approved final rules for the virtual delegate vote yesterday, and they include a requirement that any potential candidates have to submit paperwork between today and Saturday afternoon. Any candidate who does so must then get signatures of support from at least 300 delegates, no more than 50 of whom can come from the same state.
It’s very likely that Harris will be the only candidate to file paperwork; the odds that any other potential candidate can get the requisite support to actually appear on the virtual ballot can be safely calculated as zero.
This is as it should be: The only process that ever made any sense for replacing Joe Biden as the nominee was one that, for reasons that should be at this point too obvious to require further elaboration, would replace him with his vice president.
Now naturally Republicans are squealing like stuck pigs about how all this is an anti-democratic “coup” (rain, wedding day), but what it really illustrates is a healthy and robust political party dealing a crisis brought on by an unavoidably bad situation in the most optimal way possible under the circumstances. Indeed, the fundamental difference between a healthy political party in a modern democracy, and an authoritarian cult of personality masquerading as the former, is that in a healthy party the myth of the indispensable man is treated as such.
This is especially important in presidential systems, which naturally tend to gravitate towards a problematic quasi-royal mentality towards the person who leads the executive branch of government, treating him as some sort of almost literal embodiment of the State, rather than as the top officer in the sprawling bureaucracy that is just one branch of the government. I’ve always disliked stuff like Hail to the Chief, the concept of a First Lady — and hopefully soon a First Gentleman — and all the other frippery surrounding the office for this reason, and the less we have of that the better.
One of many reasons why that kind of thing should be minimized is that it conceptualizes the president as a kind of national father figure, with all the problems that that sort of thinking has for the new era of women major party presidential candidates that we’re finally beginning to enter.
Let’s hope that the next four years will feature a political culture that tries to figure out how to handle having a Mommy instead of a Daddy at the head of the national political psyche. Under the present circumstances, that would be what Chris Partlow would call “one of them good problems.”