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.
At first I was wondering if this Haiti thing was a distraction, but this article says making Haiti an issue might be a good idea:
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/state/8074992.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
Bush’s policies on Haiti at issue
BY PETER WALLSTEN
pwallsten@herald.com
Lingering questions over what role the White House played in the Haiti uprising — and whether race was a factor in sending back hundreds of fleeing refugees — could haunt President Bush as he tries to win Florida again this year and secure reelection.
Leading Democrats, including presidential front-runner John Kerry, moved quickly Sunday in the wake of Haiti President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s resignation to condemn Bush — painting the situation as a foreign policy failure by a president whose reelection campaign is based largely on national security.
”The United States should have been an honest broker for nonviolence,” Kerry told The Herald in a telephone interview from New York, where he was campaigning for the Tuesday Democratic primary. “This is one more indication of how the administration comes late to an issue, very ideologically colored in their approach, and allows things to get out of control as they have elsewhere in the world.”
`DOUBLE STANDARD’
Kerry also described the Bush administration’s policy of blocking Haitians from fleeing the chaos while giving greater access to Cubans escaping communism as a ”double standard,” but he stopped short of critics who call the Haitian policy racist.
Democrats believe the issue presents an increasingly complicated political problem for Bush and his national security team — especially as the administration justifies ousting a dictator in Iraq in the name of fostering democracy, while it stood by as armed rebels forced out a democratically elected president only hundreds of miles off Florida’s shores.
Some Democrats went further to frame the debate about Bush’s priorities, accusing the administration of fueling a coup to overthrow a legitimate president.
”The conspiracy theory is alive and well as it relates to their hand in this,” said U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, a Miami Democrat who is Kerry’s Florida campaign chairman and who confronted Bush on Haiti last week along with other members of the Congressional Black Caucus. “This is going to be front and center in the campaign, just like Iraq will be.”…