It’s pretty obvious Kamala Harris’s candidacy changes the 2024 presidential race more than a little, and I wrote at New York about one avenue she has for victory that might have eluded Joe Biden:

During her brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, Kamala Harris was widely believed to be emulating Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign strategy. She treated South Carolina, the first primary state with a substantial Black electorate, as the site of her potential breakthrough. But she front-loaded resources into Iowa to prepare for that breakthrough by reassuring Black voters that she could win in the largely white jurisdiction. She had the added advantage of being from the large state of California, where the primary had just been moved up to Super Tuesday (March 3). For a thrilling moment, after her commanding performance in a June 2019 debate, Harris seemed on track to pull off this feat, threatening Joe Biden’s hold on South Carolina in the polls and surging in Iowa. But neither she nor Cory Booker, who also relied on the Obama precedent, could displace Biden as the favorite of Black voters or strike gold in the crowded Iowa field. Out of money and luck, Harris dropped out before voters voted.

Now Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for 2024 without having to navigate any primaries. But she still faces some key strategic decisions. Joe Biden was consistently trailing Donald Trump in the polls in no small part because he was underperforming among young and non-white voters, the very heart of the much-discussed Obama coalition. Can Harris recoup some of these potential losses without sacrificing support elsewhere in the electorate? That is a question she must address at the very beginning of her general-election campaign.

There’s a chance that Harris can inject a bit of the Obama “hope and change” magic into a Democratic ticket that had previously felt like a desperate effort to defend an unpopular administration led by a low-energy incumbent, as Ron Brownstein suggests in The Atlantic:

“Polls have shown that a significant share of Americans doubt the mental capacity of Trump, who has stumbled through his own procession of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and incomprehensible tangents during stump speeches and interviews to relatively little attention in the shadow of Biden’s difficulties. Particularly if Harris picks a younger running mate, she could top a ticket that embodies the generational change that many voters indicated they were yearning for when facing a Trump-Biden rematch …

“In the best-case scenario for this line of thinking, Harris could regain ground among the younger voters and Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted away from Biden since 2020. At the same time, she could further expand Democrats’ already solid margins among college-educated women who support abortion rights.”

Team Trump seems to believe it can offset these potential gains by depicting Harris as a “California radical” and a symbol of diversity who might alienate the older white voters with whom Biden had some residual strength. Obama overcame similar race-saturated appeals in 2008, but he had a lot of help from a financial collapse and an unpopular war presided over by the party of his opponent.

Following Obama’s path has major strategic implications in terms of the battleground map. Any significant improvement over Biden’s performance among Black, Latino, and under-30 voters might put Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina — very nearly conceded to Trump in recent weeks — back into play. But erosion of Biden’s support among older and/or non-college-educated white voters could create potholes in his narrow Rust Belt path to victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

These strategic choices could definitely affect Harris’s choice of a running-mate, not just in terms of potentially picking a veep from a battleground state, but as a way of amplifying the shift produced by Biden’s withdrawal. Brownstein even thinks Harris might consider following Bill Clinton’s 1992 example of doubling down on her own strengths:

“The other option that energizes many Democrats would be for Harris to take the bold, historic option of selecting another woman: Whitmer. That would be a greater gamble, but a possible model would be 1992, when Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate; Gore was, like him, a centrist Baby Boomer southerner—rather than an older D.C. hand. ‘I love Josh Shapiro and I think he would be a great VP candidate, but I would double down’ with Whitmer, [Democratci consultant Mike] Mikus told me. ‘I don’t think you have to go with a moderate white guy. I think you can be bold [with a pick] that electrifies your base.’ I heard similar views from several consultants.”

Whitmer’s expressed disinterest in the veepstakes may take that particular option off the table, but the broader point remains: Harris does not have to — and may not be able to — simply adopt Biden’s strategy and tweak it slightly. She may be able to contemplate gains in the electorate that were unimaginable for an 81-year-old white male incumbent. But the strategic opportunity to follow Obama’s path to the White House will first depend on Harris’s ability to refocus persuadable voters on Trump’s shaky record, bad character, and extremist agenda. Biden could not do that after the debate debacle of June 27. His successor must begin taking the battle to the former president right now.

Democratic candidates and their campaign workers have an article to read, “Class, race and the chances of outgrowing poverty in America” at The Economist. Some of the observations:

A new study by Raj Chetty, of Harvard University, and colleagues provides fresh data on how America’s landscape of opportunity has shifted sharply over the past decades. Although at the national level there have been only small declines in mobility, the places and groups that have become more (or less) likely to enable children to rise up have changed a lot. The most striking finding is that, compared with the past, a child’s race is now less relevant for predicting their future and their socioeconomic class more so.

The greatest drops in mobility have been not in the places evoked in song, but on the coasts and the Great Plains, which historically provided pathways up (see maps). “Fifteen years ago, the American Dream was alive and well for white children born to low-income parents in much of the North-east and West Coast,” says Benjamin Goldman of Cornell University, one of the co-authors. “Now those areas have outcomes on par with Appalachia, the rustbelt and parts of the South-east.”

The fact that white children have become more likely to remain in poverty than before, whereas for black children the reverse is true, raises many questions. The finding comes from tracing the trajectories of 57m children born in America between 1978 and 1992 and looking at their outcomes by the age of 27. “This is really the first look with modern big data into how opportunity can change within a place over time,” says Mr Goldman. For children born into high-income families, household income increased for all races between birth cohorts. Yet among those from low-income families, earnings rose for black children and fell for white children.

A black child born to poor parents in 1992 earned $1,400 a year more than one born in 1978. A similar white child earned $2,000 less than one born in 1978. But on average, a poor white child still earned $9,500 more than a poor black child.

Convergence, not equality

This pattern has played out in virtually every county, though with big regional differences. As a result, the earnings gap between rich and poor white children (the “class gap”) grew by 27%, whereas the earnings gap between poor white and poor black children (the “race gap”) fell by 28% (see chart). The class gap did not meaningfully change for non-white people. This convergence between poor white and poor black children is as much the result of improved mobility for black children as it is of decreased mobility for white ones.

The effects echo in other outcomes too. The gap in early-adulthood mortality between rich and poor white Americans more than doubled between the 1978 and 1992 birth cohorts, while the white-black race gap for the same metric fell by 77%. Other gaps between black and white Americans, from sat uptake and rates of graduation to rates of marriage and incarceration, have narrowed similarly.

None of this means that race is no longer relevant for Americans’ chances in life. Although the reversal of the direction of travel is striking, a young black American born in 1992 to poor parents was still four percentage points more likely to remain in poverty than a poor white peer, down from a 15 percentage-point gap for those born in 1978. And while the near doubling in rates of mortality among young, lower-income white Americans is deeply alarming, mortality rates for their black counterparts have increased too, and they are still (a bit) more likely to die young.

In polarised America, where race remains a divisive topic, some are bound to misappropriate the findings. Anti-woke conservatives will claim that the data show how “white privilege” is a myth and that programmes targeting poor black children should instead invest in poor white ones. Woke warriors will argue that race remains the most important factor holding children back from upward mobility, and so dismiss concerns about left-behind white kids. Both are wrong.

Convergence has not yet brought equality. Despite improvements across America for poor black children, there is still no county where their outcomes match those of poor white ones. Yet the decline of the white working class is steep, and bound to cause grief. Telling a young white man with lower life outcomes than previous generations that he is still doing better than the average black peer is about as useful as telling a young black man that he’s doing well “for a black man”.

Another possible misconception is that social mobility is a zero-sum game: that poor white children are doing worse because poor black children are doing better. The authors tackle this by showing how in places where black children have done well, white children’s outcomes have remained stable; and in places where white children have done particularly poorly, their black peers have also not thrived.

In his previous work Mr Chetty demonstrated just how much a child’s chances of outperforming their parents depended on their race and where they grew up. One of the questions the authors were left with was how “sticky” these effects would be over time: could opportunities for the next cohorts of children change within these same places, or were they fixed? The new study’s most hopeful finding is that, far from being fixed, opportunities within a place can change significantly and rapidly. Neither history nor place is destiny.

This offers clues for policymakers. Jobs, and their role in ensuring that communities flourish, are at the heart of understanding these big shifts. Children’s outcomes are tightly correlated with those of the communities in which they grow up. The narrowing of the race gap and widening of the white class gap, write the authors, “can be explained almost entirely by the sharp fall in employment rates for low-income white parents relative to low-income black and high-income white parents”. Growing up in a thriving community is crucial for children’s future outcomes—and which communities have been thriving over the past 15 years has changed in a way that relatively disadvantages poor white families. “In the past 15 years, we’ve seen a decline in conditions in low-income white communities relative to low-income black and high-income white communities,” concludes Mr Goldman.

So the gap between upward mobility stats for African Americans and low-income whites is shrinking a bit, and that’s good for Democratic candidates to consider, when reaching out to working-class voters. When it comes to  dealing with cheap shots regarding Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, however, note also that less than 10 percent of Fortune 500 C.E.O.s  are women and about 1.6 percent  are African Americans, with 3.2 percent of S & P 500 C.E.O.s  identifying as Latinos. A good question for D.E.I. critics is, “So, how would you improve these statistics, or do you think it’s O.K. the way it is?”

Getting a lot of deja vu from the early Republican attacks on Kamala Harris, so I took a look at how a past Democratic nominee handled similar heat, and wrote about it at New York:

A Democratic politician from a famously liberal state who once was ranked as “the most liberal senator” runs for president. They’re pounded relentlessly by Republicans and conservative media as an elitist radical who can’t be trusted with national security or other responsibilities requiring toughness and common sense.

That’s not from today’s news, but from the candidacy of Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts in 2004. Kerry dealt with the “too liberal” label by stressing, then overstressing, his own heroic war record in Vietnam, setting himself up for an intensive smear campaign by a shadowy group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who disputed the details of his military service. That Democrat, of course, narrowly lost to George W. Bush.

During the past week, Vice-President Kamala Harris has been thrust into the harshest spotlight imaginable as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Like most vice-presidents, she has not gotten a great deal of public attention in that job; all glory and honor in the White House is reserved for the president. Her brief and unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2019 had given her a national profile but not a terribly distinct identity other than as a critic of Joe Biden’s civil-rights record, then as a running mate who was acceptable to all elements of the party and fit Biden’s promise to select a woman.

What Americans do generally know about her is that she’s half-Black, half–South Asian, and from California. And it’s very clear Republicans plan to give her the John Kerry treatment, calling her “too liberal,” “extreme,” and “radical” in an effort to thwart Harris’s plan to refocus the campaign on Trump’s bad character, shaky record, and hair-raising agenda of “vengeance.” As Axios reports, there’s already a clear consensus in the GOP about how to go after the veep:

“The National Republican Senatorial Committee is urging its candidates to hit Vice-President Kamala Harris for being too liberal, at fault for the border crisis, and ‘weird,’ according to a memo obtained by Axios …

“The theme throughout: Republicans will paint Harris as a ‘radical’ progressive, pointing to an old ranking of her as the most liberal senator and reminding voters of past pledges to ban fracking, decriminalize illegal border crossings, and eliminate cash bail among other things.”

The “old ranking” in question was a one-year profile of senators from GovTrack in 2019. It was a very dubious enterprise that rated senators as “liberal” or “conservative” strictly on the basis of how many bipartisan bills they sponsored or co-sponsored; it did not factor in actual voting in the Senate or differentiate between significant or insignificant legislation. The rating was discontinued after 2019. Its deployment as a campaign weapon is highly reminiscent of the use of a National Journal rating in 2004, which labeled Kerry as the “most liberal senator.” At least in Kerry’s case, the rating was based on his voting record rather than the meaningless metric of bill co-sponsorships. But it also failed to distinguish major from minor legislation.

Harris critics will be on firmer ground in attacking specific policy positions she has taken, particularly during her presidential campaign; like nearly every other Democratic candidate in the 2020 cycle, she backed decriminalizing (but not indiscriminately allowing) border crossings. And she co-sponsored Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill while later supporting Medicare expansions that did not preclude private health insurance. During her candidacy, Harris briefly supported a ban on fracking but walked that position back after joining Biden’s ticket.

To a large extent, Harris’s issues profile is right in the center of her party, and Republicans waving the “too liberal” banner may just simply excoriate positions very common among Democrats, such as support for what the Trump campaign calls the Green New Scam and federal abortion-rights legislation.

But Team Trump will also try to associate Harris with “radicalism” based explicitly on her geographical background and, more quietly, on her racial and gender identity. Republicans outside California have invested billions of dollars in typecasting the Golden State as a hellscape of crime, high taxes, overzealous regulation, rampant illegal immigration, voter fraud, and hedonistic culture. In part, that’s because San Francisco — the home of longtime GOP devil figure Nancy Pelosi and where Harris served as district attorney — has been a particular object of conservative-media wrath. Much of the plan to depict Harris as not only radical but “weird” will rely on negative stereotypes of California and the City by the Bay.

How will Harris counter these insinuations that she’s out of the mainstream politically and culturally? It’s very likely that much as Kerry responded to the “too liberal” accusation by emphasizing his record as a Navy officer, Kamala Harris will emphasize her record as a career prosecutor. As my colleague Jonathan Chait explained when Biden withdrew his candidacy and endorsed Harris, the framing of the general election as “the cop against the criminal” could not only help refocus the contest on the scofflaw former president but might “convince a few hundred thousand voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and Omaha, Nebraska, that she is not too liberal.”

But just as Republicans went directly after Kerry’s military record to undermine a source of strength and perceived moderation, they will now go after Harris’s record as a prosecutor in Oakland, in San Francisco, and as attorney general of California with demagogic zeal. They will use every bit of real and manufactured evidence to suggest that like famed “rogue” California prosecutors Chesa Boudin and George Gascon, Harris is a crime abettor, rather than a crime fighter, and a radical advocate for defunding the police and emptying the prisons. It is worth noting that one of the main impresarios of the “swiftboating” of Kerry in 2004 is now Trump’s co–campaign manager Chris LaCivita.

Harris will almost certainly respond to attacks on her record with abundant evidence of her tough-but-fair approach as a prosecutor, as Reuters sums it up:

“Over more than a dozen years as San Francisco’s district attorney and then as California’s attorney general, Harris took some stances welcomed by the party’s left flank, including opposition to the death penalty and staking out a hard line during negotiations with big banks over home foreclosure abuses.

“But she rankled progressive critics with other moves, including a policy of criminally prosecuting parents of children who skipped school and rejecting a request for DNA testing from a Black man on death row who says he was wrongfully convicted of murder …

“Harris has characterized her approach as being ‘smart on crime’ and has spoken of the importance of preventing and punishing crime while also protecting the rights of defendants and curbing excesses.”

But it’s supremely important that she learn Kerry’s lesson and not overemphasize this one aspect of her background, record, and character. If the election becomes to a significant degree a debate over the complex undercurrents of criminal-justice reform in California and her role in it, Harris will sacrifice opportunities to build on her strength as an advocate for abortion rights, universal health care, accountability for financial predators, and other themes she has mastered. She’s not simply “a cop” any more than Trump is simply “a criminal.”

The battle to clearly define Kamala Harris will occur with incredible speed and intensity over the next 100 days. She needs to stay on the offensive and make sure Trump’s well-known flaws in character and outlook are front and center.

In “Harris’ big test: reclaiming swing states for Dems,” Erin Doherty writes at Axios: “Early national polls suggest Harris’ entry has given Democrats a bump in a tight race, but the presidential election is a state-by-state contest.

• Harris appears to be energizing many young and minority voters. A big question is whether she also can maintain Biden’s recent success among older voters — and stem Democrats’ losses among groups such as Latino men and whites who didn’t go to college.
• In a strategy memo released early Wednesday, Harris’ campaign argues she can. She aims to do so partly by focusing on women’s reproductive rights and contrasting Trump’s legal problems with her history as a prosecutor.
• Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020 was aided by his gains among whites who didn’t attend college, a group that helped Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center.

Driving the news: Larry Ceisler, a Pennsylvania-based public affairs executive, said he doesn’t expect Harris to match Biden’s numbers in rural parts of the state.

• But, he said, Harris “is going to boost turnout and support from African American voters, diverse voters and younger voters.”
• “It could be a net positive for the ticket,” Ceisler said.
• Another thing that might help in must-win Pennsylvania: Harris is considering Josh Shapiro, the state’s popular Democratic governor, as her running mate. Putting him on the ticket could alter the calculus there.

Doherty continues, “What they’re saying: In its memo, Harris’ campaign argues that she’s positioned to expand Biden’s winning coalition from 2020.

• “Her net favorability is 19 points higher than Trump’s among white, college-educated voters, and 18 points higher than Trump’s among voters over 65,” the Harris campaign writes.
• It also claims that the roughly 7% of voters who remain undecided are “disproportionately Black, Latino and under 30” — voting populations more likely to favor Harris.

By the numbers: Few polls have been released since Biden left the race Sunday and Harris jumped in.

• Reuters released a national poll Tuesday showing Harris with a 2-point lead over Trump, (44%-42%).
• The same poll the previous week had Trump with a 2-point lead, suggesting that the Democrats’ candidate switch led Trump to lose ground instead of picking up a post-convention bump.
• A new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll indicates that Harris’ entry reset the race, which the poll says is statistically tied.

Swing-state polls are done less frequently, and don’t yet reflect the historic twists and turns of the past two weeks. The latest batch showed Trump ahead in most of the six states likely to decide the election — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

• In a New York Times/Siena College poll — taken before Biden dropped out and the assassination attempt against Trump — Harris fared better than Biden, and was essentially tied with Trump in Pennsylvania.
• Harris also polled stronger than Biden with Black voters and younger voters.
• In Michigan, Real Clear Politics found that Trump led by about 2 points from an average of Trump-Harris polls.

Doherty quotes Ceisler on Harris again, “She’s going to have to introduce herself to the electorate — and she can’t let herself be painted as some far-left ‘woke’ activist from San Francisco, because she’s not.”

Sahil Kapur and Scott Wong share some observations regarding how “Harris’ candidacy reshapes strategies for key House and Senate races” at nbcnews.com: “For Democrats, candidates in battleground races are still planning to localize their races as much as possible. But lawmakers and party operatives are now hoping they can benefit from the wave of enthusiasm provided by Harris’ campaign in down-ballot races….Republican strategists said their priority is to craft and drive a negative portrait of Harris in the minds of voters, using some of the same issues they attacked Biden on, such as immigration, crime and inflation….“What is going to be critical important for Republicans as a whole is to quickly define Kamala Harris,” said one GOP strategist, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, adding that the party is already evaluating new messages in the field. “We have a very short runway to take the four or five most unpopular positions she has and brand her as a supporter of those.”….Democratic strategists say their candidates will continue to run state-specific Senate campaigns and district-specific House campaigns. Many of those candidates had been overperforming Biden for months before he dropped out, and party operatives expect that to continue with Harris, whose favorability ratings are also under water in recent surveys….They’re also continuing to run against what they’re portraying as Republican extremism and out-of-touch candidates after successfully using that approach in 2022….”‘Despicable Me 4’ was a big hit this summer and the problem in the Republican Party is they’ve got a bucket full of minions running for the U.S. Senate,” said JB Poersch, the president of Senate Majority PAC, a deep-pocketed Democratic super-PAC. “Republican candidates are trapped well behind where Trump is.”

Harold Meyerson opines on “Kamala’s Strengths and Weaknesses: Today on TAP: And how she can talk to working-class voters” at The American Prospect: “….there’s not much in Harris’s history to suggest she’s the cure for the Democrats’ growing weakness among working-class voters—most particularly, the white working-class voters who’ve been trending Republican for a very long time….How, though, can she reach out to the working-class men who build buildings, drive trucks, and operate assembly lines (all alongside women, but it’s the men who’ve been moving en masse into Republican ranks)? Chris Hannan, who heads the California Building Trades Council (which represents virtually every union of construction workers in the state)….was clear on how unions like those represented in his council would campaign against Trump and, now, for Harris. “Trump had an ‘infrastructure week’ every year, which led to no increase in infrastructure construction, every year. Under Biden and Harris, we’re building more roads and bridges and rail lines, and electric car factories and semiconductor factories, with union members and union-scale wages, in California, in Arizona, and across the country,” he said. “Trump gave corporations a huge tax cut with no conditions on spending that money in the U.S.; Biden and Harris have prioritized investing in America.”….Will Harris’s strong environmentalism be an obstacle to winning a number of working-class votes? Most likely, particularly in places like Western Pennsylvania, where her opposition to fracking will surely be something that the Trump campaign will stress. “She may not do well in Western Pennsylvania outside Pittsburgh,” another labor leader told me, “but she’ll boost turnout in [heavily Black] Northern Philadelphia and Detroit, particularly if Obama campaigns alongside her there.” That labor leader is also confident that Harris will stick with the kind of pro-union appointees to whom Biden entrusted the Labor Department and the NLRB. “Democrats with centrist records, like Biden had, now understand this is good policy and good politics,” he added….I herewith offer a couple of suggestions myself that might win her more support, or at least more of a hearing, among working-class voters. As I’ve noted, Trump’s suggestion of making tips tax-free actually won’t affect most tipped workers because they don’t make enough money, even with the tips, to pay income taxes. (Indeed, according to a report released today by UC Berkeley’s Food Labor Research Center and the organization One Fair Wage, fully 66 percent of tipped restaurant workers have incomes falling beneath that threshold.) Nonetheless—and despite some speculation that Wall Street consultants would mislabel their fees as tips if such a change were made—I think Harris should adopt this proposal (saying she’s open to crossing the aisle when a decent, or even half-decent, proposal originates there) and go it one better, challenging Republicans to raise the national minimum wage from the $7.25 where it’s languished for the past 15 years, and the tipped minimum wage from its microscopic $2.13—positions I doubt the newly “pro-worker” Republicans will embrace….As well, she should emphasize the arguments that Hannan has made: that factory construction increased by 73 percent once the Inflation Reduction Act passed, that infrastructure construction stagnated under Trump and soared under Biden, and that, as vice president, she cast the deciding votes on much of the “Build, Baby, Build for a Clean, Prosperous Future” legislation that is Biden’s legacy.”

Not to rain on the big parade, but if Kamala Harris is to have even a shred of a chance to win in November, she needs some tough criticism as soon as possible to help prepare her campaign for  attacks. Michael Baharaeen steps up to meet this challenge in his post, “The Kamala Gamble” at The Liberal Patriot. As Baharaeen writes:

Joe Biden rocked American politics over the weekend with the news that he will be the first incumbent president since Lyndon Johnson in 1968 not to seek a second term. The obstacles against him—stubbornly weak polling numbers, a hostile media, defections from his own party, dried-up fundraising—ultimately proved to be too much to overcome. In his announcement, he endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to be his successor.

Harris is not expected to face much serious competition for the nomination from other prominent Democrats, meaning she will likely lead the party’s ticket heading into November. But while shaking things up may offer Democrats a new lease on life, it’s far from clear that Harris is the strongest candidate to take on Trump. Democrats should consider her many vulnerabilities carefully before coronating her at their convention next month.

First, Harris has popularity issues of her own. Part of the argument for Democrats moving on from Biden was his dreary poll numbers—his approval rating had been underwater for nearly three years with no sign that it would ever bounce back. He has also consistently trailed Trump in head-to-head match-ups, which signifies a severe change from 2020, when he never trailed at all.

But Harris hasn’t fared any better than Biden. Not only has her own approval tracked very closely with Biden’s, sinking into negative territory in mid-2021, but she has also never cracked 50 percent (while Biden at least sat in the mid-50s for the first several months of his presidency). This is a good indication that Harris has been less popular than Biden from the start. And, at least in initial surveys, Harris doesn’t appear to do much better against Trump than Biden did, though there is still time for that to change. Suffice it to say, she will have to work to endear herself more to a skeptical public if she becomes the Democratic nominee.

Second, Harris has a concerning electoral track record. Her first election to a major office came in 2010. That cycle, she won a close race for California’s open attorney general seat, defeating her Republican opponent by less than one point, 46.1–45.3. Though some might be tempted to attribute this to running in a difficult midterm election, except every other California Democrat in a statewide contest significantly outperformed Harris, earning at least 50 percent of the vote and winning their races by double digits.

However, her presidential campaign was perhaps an even bigger disappointment. Despite being a media darling for much of the primary race, her campaign flamed out before the first voters had the chance to cast their ballots in the Iowa caucuses. Some observers attributed this to the lack of a coherent message or reason for her candidacy—and the fact that her campaign became beset by infighting.

Another likely reason was her desire to placate her party’s activist base. For example, rather than touting her accomplishments as a prosecutor and explaining her pragmatic vision for criminal justice, Harris ran from her record, which some on the left viewed as too punitive. She also endorsed some deeply unpopular proposals, including the decriminalization of border crossings and the Green New Deal. All this may have stemmed from the fact that Harris surrounded herself with campaign staffers who seemed to embrace the idea that “Twitter is real life,” and that what progressive voices on the platform espoused was representative of the broader public’s views.¹

If Harris wants to shed any part of her past as she looks for ways to appeal to median voters in swing states, she might consider rebuking these lefty fads in favor of a message that highlights her track record of prosecuting criminals—something that could set up a favorable contrast against Trump.

Third, although Biden will no longer be on the ticket, Harris will be forced to defend his administration, including its less popular facets. In 2021, Biden tasked Harris with the thankless job of trying to help resolve the crisis at the southern border. But far from successfully addressing the “root causes” of the problems there, they grew exponentially worse in the following years, with migrant encounters hitting a record high by the end of 2023. Recent polling has shown that voters trusted Trump over Biden to handle issues related to immigration and inflation, which are top-of-mind for many of them. Switching to that president’s second-in-command isn’t likely to immediately assuage voters’ concerns about Democrats’ ability to handle either one.

Fourth, while the latest polls have shown Harris mirroring Biden’s statistical tie against Trump nationally, this alone doesn’t leave Democrats in a particularly strong position. Consider: in 2020, when Biden defeated Trump, his national polling heading into the election was 8.4 points. Ultimately, Biden won by a more modest 4.5 points. As we know, though, presidential elections are decided not by national popular vote but the Electoral College, and Biden’s win at that level was actually extremely narrow. So simply tying Trump in the national polls still reflects a massive shift relative to 2020 and puts an Electoral College win very much within reach for him. To overcome that, Harris would need to move the needle back in the other direction and probably build a lead of at least a couple points to have a chance of winning.

Finally, in addition to issues related to herself and the Biden administration, Harris will be contending with broader problems that the Democratic Party has not fully reckoned with. For instance, survey data indicates that they have experienced substantial attrition among black and Hispanic voters, which may at least partially explain why important swing states like Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada have shifted in Trump’s favor this time around. Trump has also made more overt overtures to union voters, a longtime Democratic constituency that has shown cracks in recent years—and that could put other battlegrounds like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in play.

Democrats have also lost ground with rural voters, working-class voters, and even some young voters, a group that hasn’t been competitive in a generation. While Biden appeared to be attracting higher levels of support among seniors, a higher-turnout bloc that has historically leaned Republican, it’s not clear that those voters would stick with another Democratic nominee.

Some of these are longer-term issues that the party has been contending with since at least the start of the Trump era. Some may be specific to this cycle: third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for example, are disproportionately attracting younger and non-white voters. There is also early evidence that Harris may perform better than Biden with some of these groups and have more success pulling them back into the fold. Still, she’ll be confronting these bigger coalitional issues with less than four months to go in the campaign.

Democrats’ best case for Harris is that she is a wild card: neither they nor Trump’s campaign know how her candidacy would shake up the race. If voters’ views of her aren’t as entrenched as they are for Biden, she might have a slightly higher ceiling. Given the opportunity to prosecute the case against Trump, she is also likely to be far stronger and more effective than Biden, which could level the playing field more in Democrats’ favor. And polls show that many Americans want someone, anyone, who isn’t Biden or Trump. Maybe all that is enough for someone like Harris to succeed.

Even so, a simple swap of candidates isn’t guaranteed to immediately put Democrats in a stronger position than they’re in today. Harris will need to distance herself from the perceived setbacks of the Biden administration, come into her own as a candidate, and develop a campaign pitch that will appeal to the handful of voters in swing states who will decide this election—all in the next three months (or less). It will still be an uphill fight, but if she can achieve these things, she might yet be able to pull out the win.

From “What do the polls say about a Harris vs. Trump matchup?” by Geoffrey Skelley and G. Elliot Morris at 538, via abcnews.com:

“While Harris consistently polled worse than Biden did against Trump before the debate, since then she’s sometimes polled ahead of Biden. In fact, Harris fared the same as or better than Biden in close to half of the post-debate polls: A near-bell curvedistribution in the differences between their margins in these polls is centered close to 0, suggesting little to no meaningful difference between how Harris and Biden performed.”

“And it seems that Harris’s stronger showing in these later polls is more about her having made up distance on Trump than Biden losing ground. Across nine national surveys before the debate, Harris did about 3 points worse than Biden on average, but in 25 post-debate polls, she’s only performed about 1 point worse than Biden on average — even as Biden’s margin in the same set of post-debate surveys also got slightly better.* Harris also improved her showing across the swing states, based on a very limited sampling of polls.

“To be clear, this doesn’t mean that Harris will run notably stronger than Biden, only that she could. Her post-debate polls against Trump relative to Biden have a great deal of variance, ranging from around 8 points worse to 4 points better than how Biden performed. Based on an average of 26 national polls conducted over the past month, Harris trailed Trump by 4.5 points nationally compared with a smaller 3-point deficit for Biden.

“Polling at the state level is limited at this point, with no more than four polls conducted in the past month in any battleground state. But based on the state-level polls we do have, things don’t look any more rosy for Harris there, as she lags behind Biden’s margin against Trump in the key battleground states for which we have data. In our aggregate of this limited set of polls, Harris trailed Trump by around 3 points in Wisconsin (Biden trailed by about 2 points), by almost 5 in Pennsylvania (Biden was down around 4) and by 5 in Michigan (Biden was behind by about 2). This raises the possibility that she could have a harder time than Biden winning the Electoral College and thus the election.

“Still, if Harris does end up as her party’s nominee, Democrats will hope that her polling improves as she mounts an active campaign against Trump. For one thing, Harris could experience something of a quasi-convention bounce in the wake of the coverage of Biden’s departure and her now-active candidacy. Moreover, until Sunday, any poll that tested Harris (or any other possible Democratic candidate) had been hypothetical for survey respondents. That is not the case anymore, which could at least partially reset the race and shift how some voters are thinking about it moving forward. For Democrats, Harris could represent an escape hatch from the doom spiral of negative media coverage that had hounded Biden following the June debate, as well as the heightened concerns about his capacity to serve at 81 years old and fears that he could not recover the momentum against Trump.

Skelley and Morris conclude: “If nominated, Harris could absolutely end up losing to Trump — after all, the same post-debate polling that suggested she could do better than Biden also pointed to a potentially lower floor of support. But for Democrats who felt like they were slouching toward defeat in November behind a candidate whom voters were increasingly unenthused by, a Biden alternative could shake up the race, excite the party and give Democrats a chance of rebuilding an anti-Trump coalition that could win.”

In his column, “Biden made a very tough decision to save the soul of America — again. Democrats need to get to a Harris nomination through a process the whole party will see as fair,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes: “Choosing someone other than Harris, who has already been well vetted, would invite turmoil the party can’t afford. Dumping your entire ticket three months before an election is not a good look. But Democrats need to get to a Harris nomination through a process the whole party will see as fair….Doing so would only strengthen Harris’s candidacy. So would a strong running mate. Govs. Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan are among the many good options Harris would have….Biden’s decision will bring new energy to a party that had already gained confidence in its capacity to win, courtesy of Trump’s 92-minute disquisition on Thursday that drove even ardent loyalists to weariness and exhaustion. Trump’s lack of discipline and his vaudevillian affection for his old act led him away from the recommendations of his advisers. They understood that natural sympathy had rushed Trump’s way after a failed assassination attempt. They promised he would tell his moving personal story and call for national unity….Although the choice was excruciating, the president should be — and deserves to be — at peace with this outcome. None of what happened reflects badly on his record as president. He didn’t fail in that debate. His age failed him….All along, Biden cast himself as the person who could best preserve democracy by stopping Trump a second time. Paradoxically, perhaps, he stayed true to that mission by removing himself from the contest. He did the hardest thing a politician can do: relinquish power. His decision saved his legacy.”

“What we can say from head-to-head polling of Harris is that the general trend has gotten a lot better for her,” Christian Paz writes in “Does Kamala Harris give Democrats a better chance to win?” at Vox. “A year ago she was underperforming Biden in head-to-head polling against Trump in a variety of surveys. Closer to the debate and right after, she began to perform about evenly. And more recently, in July, a few polls comparing Biden and Harris against Trump in battleground states and nationally have shown Harris even with Biden or slightly ahead of him….The first sign of this change came from CNN’s first post-debate poll, finding the vice president trailing Trump by 2 percentage points (within the margin of error) while Biden trailed by 6 points. And in FiveThirtyEight’s polls-only post-debate comparison of Harris and Biden vs. Trump, Harris performs slightly better than the president in battleground states — though not in all of them….Recent polling from Pennsylvania and Virginia also shows more positive signs for the vice president: New York Times/Siena College polls this month show that while Harris still trails Trump by 1 point in Pennsylvania, that’s a smaller gap than the 3 points that put Trump ahead of Biden there. Both of these results are within the polling’s margin of error, making the race in the state essentially tied. In Virginia, meanwhile, Harris’s lead over Trump is 2 points larger than the lead Biden has over the former president….And a post-assassination attempt national poll from Reuters/Ipsos shows a statistically tied presidential contest for either Biden or Harris against Trump….Under the hood, however, Harris backers can find an additional data point in their column: 69 percent of respondents think Biden is too old; Harris doesn’t face that concern. And Biden is more unpopular than Harris, something that is consistently true: As of July 18, Biden has a net -17.7 approval rating in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate. Harris’s disapproval is at 11.8. And in RealClearPolitics’ average of favorability ratings, Biden (-16.3) is also more unpopular than Harris (-14.9).”

In all the talk about whether Joe Biden should “step aside,” there hasn’t been enough discussion of the rationale he should present if he does so. So I offered one at New York:

The Democratic Party’s semi-public bickering over what to do with Joe Biden needs to come to an end very soon, lest it turn into a horrific party-rending conflict or a de facto surrender to Donald Trump. While he can technically be pushed out of the nomination, it would be nightmarishly difficult to do so given his virtually unopposed performance in the primaries and the lack of precedent for anything like a forced defenestration of a sitting president. It would also express disloyalty to a brave and dedicated leader. But Biden has already lost the united, confident party he needed to make a comeback. He’s trailing in the polls right now. And even more importantly, his own conduct and fitness for office will command center stage for the rest of the general-election campaign, which is precisely what he cannot afford given his poor job-approval ratings and the sour mood of the electorate.

So Joe needs to go of his own accord, and it needs to happen quickly before Republican and Biden-loyalist claims of a “coup” become all too credible. But it’s obviously a humiliating exercise. So if Biden comes to realize the futility of going forward, what can this proud and stubborn man say that will make him something other than an object of derision or pity?

I have a simple answer: He can tell the truth.

The truth is that Biden’s firm commitment to the pursuit of a second term, despite his advanced age and increased frailty, hardened into inflexible determination when Trump made his own decision to launch an initially unlikely comeback. When Biden took office, Trump was a disgraced insurrectionist whose very defenders in his second impeachment trial mostly denounced his conduct, even as they urged acquittal on technical grounds. The 46th president was in a position to serve one distinguished “transitional” term and retire with a wary eye on his fellow retiree festering in anger and self-righteousness in Mar-a-Lago. But as Trump slowly recovered and eventually reemerged as a more dominant figure than ever in a MAGA-fied Republican Party, Biden became convinced that as the only politician ever to defeat Donald Trump, he had the responsibility to do it again and the ability to remind voters why they rejected the 45th president in 2020.

As this strange election year ripened, Biden had a perfectly plausible strategy for victory based on keeping a steady public focus on Trump’s lawless conduct (including actual crimes), his erratic record, and extremist intentions for a perilous second term. The polls were close and Biden wasn’t very popular, but these surveys also showed a durable majority of the electorate that really didn’t want to return Trump to power, particularly as economic conditions improved and the consequences of Trump’s Supreme Court appointments grew more shockingly apparent each day.

Then came the June 27 debate, and suddenly Biden lost the ability to make the election about Trump. He needs to look into a camera and say just that, and conclude that just as the threat posed by Trump motivated him to run for a second term, the threat posed by Trump now requires that he withdraw so that a successor can make the case he can’t make as he’s become the object of endless speculation about his age and cognitive abilities. Biden does not need to resign the presidency, since his grounds for withdrawing his candidacy are about perceptions and politics rather than any underlying incapacity. Biden would be withdrawing as a weakened candidate, not as a failed president.

For this withdrawal to represent a stabilizing event for his administration and his party, it’s critical that Biden not equivocate or complain, and that he show his mastery of the situation by clearly passing the torch to the vice-president he chose four years ago. For all the talk of an “open convention” being exciting (for pundits) and energizing (for the winner), the last thing Democrats need right now is uncertainty. No matter what the polls show and how badly his old friends want him to succeed, it’s the prospect of 100 days of terror every time Biden makes unscripted remarks that is feeding both elite and rank-and-file sentiment that a change at the top of the ticket is necessary. The fear and confusion needs to end now, and Biden effectively made his choice of a successor when he made Kamala Harris his governing partner. The president needs to reassert his agency now, not look like he is abandoning his party and his country to the winds of fate.

A straightforward and honest admission of why Biden 2024 is coming to an end could go a very long way toward enabling Harris and other Democrats to shift the nation’s gaze back to the ranting old man whose acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention showed that he has not mellowed or moderated at all. Of course Biden wants to solidify and extend his legacy over the next four years. But right now, the clear and present danger is that it will be extinguished altogether. He alone can address that threat, not as a candidate, but as a president and a patriot who recognizes his duty.

Plenty of good and bad ideas are popping up in this summer of Democratic anxiety, but it’s one of the latter I tried to knock down at New York:

Coming out of the agonizing intra-Democratic debate about Joe Biden’s fitness to beat Donald Trump is a sort of plan B scheme. Donors, we are told, are considering shifting resources to an effort to flip control of the House (just four seats away) in order to block a Trump-led Republican trifecta and a bacchanalia of authoritarian extremism next year. The reigning assumption is that absent a presidential win (which provides the tie-breaking vote in the Senate), maintaining Democratic control of the upper chamber will be almost impossible, since Republicans are sure to flip West Virginia, and all the other competitive races are on Democratic turf. So making Hakeem Jeffries House Speaker offers the best return on investment and perhaps relief from the agony of watching Biden like a hawk every time he’s on-camera.

It’s an interesting strategy but not terribly promising from a historical point of view. The last time House control flipped in a presidential-election year was in 1952, when Republicans benefited from a presidential landslide. The last six times House control has flipped (in 1954, 1994, 2006, 2010, 2018, and 2022), it’s happened in midterm elections featuring a very common backlash against the president’s party. You know how often a party has lost the White House and flipped the U.S. House in the same election? Zero times. There were times when Senate races (with their highly eccentric landscapes thanks to only one-third of seats being up in any one election) moved in a very different direction from the presidential election. But the House has always been harnessed to White House results in fundamental and even predictable ways, as political scientist David Faris points out:

“Political scientist Robert Erikson found in 2016 that for ‘every percentage point that a presidential candidate gains in the two-party vote, their party’s down-ballot candidates gain almost half a point themselves.’ A 1990 study by James E. Campbell and Joe A. Sumners found that for every 10 points that a presidential candidate gains in a state, it boosts that party’s Senate contender by 2 points, and its House hopefuls by 4. This basic logic is a large part of why the past five presidents brought congressional majorities into office with them when they were elected to their first term.”

And most of this historical record, mind you, was forged in the bygone era of relatively nonideological major parties that made ticket-splitting immensely more common. House Democrats entered the 2024 cycle optimistic about making gains since 16 Republicans are in districts carried by Biden in 2020 while only five Democrats are in Trump ’20 districts. But as J. Miles Coleman of Sabato’s Crystal Ball observes, an even Biden-Trump race in the national popular vote would turn six Democratic-held House districts red. A 3.3 percent Trump advantage in the national popular vote (his margin in the polling averages Coleman was using) would turn 19 Democratic-held House districts red.

Flipping the House if Biden loses decisively is hard to imagine. Even now, with polls showing a close presidential race, all of the major House prognosticators give Republicans a slight advantage (Cook Political Report, for example, shows the GOP favored in 210 races and Democrats favored in 203, with 22 toss-ups, half of them currently controlled by each party). The congressional generic ballot, polling that estimates the House national popular vote, is dead even (on average, Democrats lead by 0.5 percent in FiveThirtyEight, Republicans by 0.3 percent in RealClearPolitics). This will be an uphill fight for Democrats in the best of circumstances. And it should be remembered that Biden’s party lost 13 net House seats in 2020 even as he won the White House.

History, current analysis, and common sense indicate that abandoning the presidential ticket to focus on House races as though they are isolated contests is a fool’s errand for Democrats. Whether it’s Biden, Kamala Harris, or some improbable fantasy candidate heading the ticket, the presidential race needs to stay highly competitive if Democrats want to make House gains. If Trump rides back into the White House with a solid win, his toady Mike Johnson will almost certainly be there to help him turn his scary plans into legislation.

There is no telling how long the Republicans’ post-convention bump will last. Nor is there any way to peg the shelf-life of their re-branding as a ‘populist,’ pro-working-class party, which the Vance veep pick is supposed to symbolize.

Republicans appear unified, but only if we choose to ignore the reality that a large group of anti-Trump Republicans still hope to reclaim their party as a legitimate conservative force, instead of a personality cult. One anti-Trump Republican, George Conway, has produced a hard-hitting video. featuring Trump’s own appointees warning about his mental health issues. Here it is: