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.
Some observations on the Childers-Davis race that don’t seem to be getting much play from the relentlessly national focus of MSM coverage:
First, it’s not exactly true that this was a rock-ribbed Republican district. Until 1994 it was represented by that old seg Democratic lion Jamie Whitten; Roger Wicker won it in 1994 and held it since as much by the power of incumbency as by his party label. Secondly, as far as I can tell looking from Nashville, the voting patterns displayed some serious socio-political cleavages of the sort often missed by nonsouthern observers [Not you, of course, Ed!]. Davis is Mayor of Southaven, in De Soto County–the one county that he won really handily. De Soto is a booming middle-class suburb of Memphis, though of a lesser social stratum than tony easterly suburbs such as White Station or Germantown; it’s a product of white flight from Memphis [The suburb just north of the line is appropriately named Whitehaven], and as a result is racially pretty hard-edged. It’s hardly surprising, then, that Davis would have offered to grant political asylum, as it were, to the statues of Jeff Davis and Nate Forrest when Memphis was discussing removing them from a city park. But, perhaps more importantly for this election, the residents of De Soto are socio-economically poles apart from the rest of the district. The problems of the rural South–notably deindustrialization, which Childers addressed with an aggressive economic nationalism–are foreign to a population that’s basically tied to an urban economy, tends to take its prosperity for granted or as the reward for its own virtue, and tends to be much more hostile to government solutions than a rural and small-town region with a heritage of attachment to TVA. Outsiders [You know this, Ed] think southern Republicanism is just redneck racism shifted over bodily from the Democrats after passage of the VRA in 1965; but not only is the political story more complicated, but this stereotype misses the fact that modern southern Republicanism began in the suburbs [at least as soon as there *were* southern suburbs; in my native SC we were just beginning to see them in the 1960s]. Revisionist historians like Matt Lassiter and Joseph Crespino are beginning to rewrite this history. For present purposes, though, the important point is that the suburban character of the Republican base made it vulnerable to a challenge such as Childers’s–especially when coupled with the widespread unpopularity of Bush and [This is a bit of a surprise to me in this district] the Iraq War [but then it’s districts like this one that have borne the brunt of sacrifice]. Thus, while De Soto alone contains 20 percent of the district’s population [and growing], and Davis won it handily, he won virtually nowhere else.
The bottom line? Contrary to the Tom Schallers of the world, Democrats have never stopped being competitive in the South; with the right candidate and appeal, they can beat a Republican Party that’s so tied to a complacent base, and so wedded to the old strategies of tarring local Democrats with national [and black] associations, that it has no clue about how to counter a candidate who can’t credibly be tarred with the “Pelosi Democrat” label and who talks about issues that the Republicans ignore. Of course, the Schallers can’t really be too happy with this result, since their real complaint has never been with southern Republicans, but rather with southern *Democrats.* Childers will be one more Blue Dog, and those who want to run Blue Dogs out of the party are losers here as well. But if Democrats can neutralize the cultural issues and can exploit genuine local problems as they’ve done here [though, as a student of southern economic development, I’m not happy with Childers’s approach on policy grounds]–they’re in the game.