One very central dynamic in the recent saga of Democratic anxiety over Joe Biden’s chances against Donald Trump, given the weaknesses he displayed in his first 2024 debate, has been the role of his understudy, Vice-President Kamala Harris. My colleague Gabriel Debenedetti explained the problem nearly two years ago as the “Kamala Harris conundrum”:
“Top party donors have privately worried to close Obama allies that they’re skeptical of Harris’s prospects as a presidential candidate, citing the implosion of her 2020 campaign and her struggles as VP. Jockeying from other potential competitors, like frenemy Gavin Newsom, suggests that few would defer to her if Biden retired. Yet Harris’s strength among the party’s most influential voters nonetheless puts her in clear pole position.”
The perception that Harris is too unpopular to pick up the party banner if Biden dropped it, but too well-positioned to be pushed aside without huge collateral damage, was a major part of the mindset of political observers when evaluating Democratic options after the debate. But now fresher evidence of Harris’s public standing shows she’s just as viable as many of the candidates floated in fantasy scenarios about an “open convention,” “mini-primary,” or smoke-filled room that would sweep away both parts of the Biden-Harris ticket.
For a good while now, Harris’s job-approval numbers have been converging with Biden’s after trailing them initially. These indicate dismal popularity among voters generally, but not in a way that makes her an unacceptable replacement candidate should she be pressed into service in an emergency. As of now, her job-approval ratio in the FiveThirtyEight averages is 37.1 percent approve to 51.2 percent disapprove. Biden’s is 37.4 percent approve to 56.8 percent disapprove. In the favorability ratios tracked by RealClearPolitics, Harris is at 38.3 favorable to 54.6 percent unfavorable, while Biden is at 39.4 percent favorable to 56.9 percent unfavorable. There’s just not a great deal of difference other than slightly lower disapproval/unfavorable numbers for the veep.
On the crucial measurement of viability as a general-election candidate against Trump, there wasn’t much credible polling prior to the post-debate crisis. An Emerson survey in February 2024 showed Harris trailing Trump by 3 percent (43 percent to 46 percent), which was a better showing than Gavin Newsom (down ten points, 36 percent to 46 percent) or Gretchen Whitmer (down 12 points, 33 percent to 45 percent).
After the debate, though, there was a sudden cascade of polling matching Democratic alternatives against Trump, and while Harris’s strength varied, she consistently did as well as or better than the fantasy alternatives. The first cookie on the plate was a one-day June 28 survey from Data for Progress, which showed virtually indistinguishable polling against Trump by Biden, Harris, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Gavin Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Josh Shapiro, and Gretchen Whitmer. All of them trailed Trump by 2 to 3 percent among likely voters.
Then two national polls released on July 2 showed Harris doing better than other feasible Biden alternatives. Reuters/Ipsos (which showed Biden and Trump tied) had Harris within a point of Trump, while Newsom trailed by three points, Andy Beshear by four, Whitmer by five, and Pritzker by six points. Similarly, CNN showed Harris trailing Trump by just two points; Pete Buttigieg trailing by four points; and Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer trailing him by five points.
Emerson came back with a new poll on July 9 that wasn’t as sunny as some for Democrats generally (every tested name trailed Trump, with Biden down by three points). But again, Harris (down by six points) did better than Newsom (down eight points); Buttigieg and Whitmer (down ten points); and Shapiro (down 12 points).
There’s been some talk that Harris might help Democrats with base constituencies that are sour about Biden. There’s not much publicly available evidence testing that hypothesis, though the crosstabs in the latest CNN poll do show Harris doing modestly better than Biden among people of color, voters under the age of 35, and women.
The bottom line is that one element of the “Kamala Harris conundrum” needs to be reconsidered. There should be no real drop-off in support if Biden (against current expectations) steps aside in favor of his vice-president (the only really feasible “replacement” scenario at this point). She probably has a higher ceiling of support than Biden as well, but in any event, she would have a fresh opportunity to make a strong first or second impression on many Americans who otherwise know little about her.
I agree completely with Neuhauser and Hapin. I would add two points. 1)Since many social and environmental needs are being neglected and even under the so-called “full employment” of the Clinton years, there weren’t enough jobs available, we need greatly increased federal funding for public-service jobs. 2) We need to reverse Clinton’s negation of federal responsibility for basic economic welfare.
The Third-Way’s new report is a far slicker coverage of their thesis than reviewed last summer. But it basically contains the fatal flaws pointed out by John Halpin in Truth-Telling, Populism and Inspirational Politics.
I think Third Way overstates and mischaracterizes what they call the neo-populist position when they make the case for its desrire to “recapture a bygone era” with outmoded solutions. However, that is to be expected since in order to the a “third” way, there must be two other, opposing camps to place yourself in opposition to. (Sort of a tiresome, academic literalness to it all, but not as badly done as the DLC which often resorts to distorted right-wing attacks on the left in order to create a “center” for itself.)
But the fundamental hook they hang their hat on for “de-bunking” the concerns of the “neopopulists” is the graph of the distribution of income by age class. While it does illuminate the age-diversity of income distribution hidden behind a single number of “All Households”, they assert that this very existence proves their point.
But that same distribution would have been true in the past as well.
The question is not just: Is there a spread in 2005? but it is rather: Is that curve significantly different than it was in the past? The curve has always been there, and prime-age earners have presumably always been better off than the average. Duh.
So, does this really tell us anything about their claim that “the middle class is just doing just fine, thanks!”? No.
The other argument they make is that, “Neopopulism feeds off of broad economic dissatisfaction and pessimism, but public opinion polls consistently show Americans to be optimistic about their personal finances.” Then they just ignore the “broad economic dissatisfaction and pessimism” because of the “personal optimism”. Futhermore, they ignore studies showing a much greater concern for whether people think their kids will be better off or not — and from personal anecdotes I can tell that concern has reached surprisingly high levels of the middle class.
I think they miss an important issue here — this is the same phenomenon with Congress (they’re terrible, but mine is ok) and schools (the system is bad, but mine is ok). According to Third Way’s methodology, Congress is doing great! Schools are doing great! The middle class is doing great! I’ve got a life jacket, so I don’t know what the dissatisfaction is with the Titanic — cruises are fun!
I don’t buy it and I think they do a disservice to ignore the broad dissatisfaction. There are important things underlying it.
What this Third Way sanguinity leads to is a set of policies that feel extremely incremental as it doesn’t recognize that we are in the midst of a great upheaval as important as the turn of the last century. There are three great global issues impacting everyone in America:
– globalized terrrorism
– global warming
– globalization’s commoditization of work
To be concerned about these issues as a concern for the future well-being of their children and grandchildren is not necessarily to be a Chicken Little. Nor does it require you to assume that the entire system must be chucked for some wild-eyed notion. Nor does it mean that “neopopulists” have no hope or optimism about the future — just that they think there is more to work on and bolder plans to lay.
When I looked at Third Ways solutions, they are basically:
More education
Retrain obsoleted workers
Tweak savings incentives
Give newborns a savings account
Tweak savings incentives some more
Be nicer to families with kids
Be nicer to families caring for their parents
Do more R&D
Have a more efficient healthcare industry
(One of the troubling aspect of the “nicer to family” solutions is that they are purely about more availability of services and tax (money), one the big issues are around time — it can take so much time to care for an older parent that you can’t work as much and so are earning less when your costs go up.)
All of these assume that people can afford to buy all the insurance and education and retraining and other things Third Way thinks they should and furthermore that they already pay enough in taxes to get back some meaningful amount in tax breaks to pay for them.
Which goes back to the core assumption of the Third Way: people make enough money, we just need to incentivize them to spend it more wisely.
But the reason 40M Americans don’t have healthcare isn’t because they they feel they aren’t getting a big enough tax break to justify buying healthcare insurance! The reason is they don’t have a spare $15,000/year to buy it on the open market themselves, no matter what tax incentives you give.
(I would note that this approach is the same thinking behind Bush’s health insurance “reform” pitched at the 2007 State of the Union.)
The reason this “agenda” sounds so paltry is that … it is!. And the reason for it goes back to the beginning — they think the status quo is basically fine, so clearly what is needed is an era of tweaking a few things to make them a little better.
Happy Days are already here!