Democrats think Kamala Harris would lose to Trump. Polls say they're probably right.

The subtext of why there was no serious primary challenge to Biden

Unless there’s a last-minute health scare or scandal, Joe Biden is almost certain to be the Democratic nominee for president again in 2024. RFK Jr. and Marianne Williamson don’t have traditional qualifications for the job — remember, Democrats still care about experience if Republicans don’t — and are nowhere close to Biden in polls.¹ And it’s probably much too late for someone else to jump into the race and build out the campaign they’d need to seriously contend — let alone actually defeat a sitting president.

Biden has probably been fortunate to avoid a more serious primary challenge. Polls throughout 2022 found that a majority of Democrats didn’t want him to run again. Now, you can’t take those polls at face value, since preferring “someone else” is a grass-is-greener answer that’s different than settling upon one particular alternative. Still, there are a lot of ambitious politicians in the Democratic Party who might have taken their chances on being “generic Democrat who isn’t 80 years old” — and none of them did. California Governor Gavin Newsom came the closest, running a kind of quasi-campaign against Ron DeSantis. But Newsom has a lot of liabilities as a candidate and never gained traction — and then Democrats’ relatively good midterm made the party’s voters and elites a bit less nervous about Biden’s re-election prospects.

But there's also one critical factor I haven't mentioned yet: Vice President Kamala Harris. If someone else were to run against Biden, it would lead to a lot of entirely reasonable questions about why they'd jumped in line ahead of her. Or, Harris could have decided to run herself. All of this could plausibly have factored into Biden’s decision to run again. In response to Monday’s newsletter on the electoral and substantive risks posed to Democrats by Biden’s age, commenter Brian Want said something that I’ve thought about a lot too:

I wonder how much of the concern about Biden would be alleviated if he had a different Vice President. I understand that, for political reasons, he cannot replace Harris. And of course his age would be an issue no matter what. But if she had better favorables, it might be easier for skeptical Dems and hesitant independents to assuage their worries by saying to themselves, "well, if Biden dies, we are in good or possibly even better hands." Unfortunately, I don't think many people beyond the fervent Dem base feels that way about the ticket. It also makes me wonder if/when we've ever had a VP who was notably more popular than their President.

Leaving aside the question about whether a VP has ever been more popular than their president², it’s remarkable how little enthusiasm there is about the prospect of a Harris candidacy or presidency. I’m not particularly well-connected among Democratic Party establishment types — it’s just not my crowd. But between the conversations I have had with people in those circles and my “normie D” friends, I don’t think I ever heard a single person advocate that Biden should settle for one term and let Harris run instead. Hell, even in her column that did advocate for Biden to step down, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg — who I find to be a consistently thoughtful reader of progressive sentiment — conspicuously mentioned that the alternative didn’t have to be Harris, citing Harris’s poor polling.

How much is the perception that Harris would be an electoral liability grounded in reality? One always has to be concerned that perceptions of “electability” can be skewed against women candidates, an idea that was probably reinforced among Democrats by Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016.³

Still, Harris fares meaningfully worse against Trump than Biden does in polls. Here is a compilation of every poll since last year’s midterm where the pollster asked about both the Harris-Trump matchup and the Biden-Trump matchup.⁴

On average, Biden was tied 44-44 with Trump in these polls, while Harris trailed him 42-46. It’s not that big a difference, I guess, but a net margin of 4 points is a fairly big deal; it’s more likely that not that the next election will come down to 4 points or less in the tipping-point states.

It’s also a pretty consistent pattern; Harris polled worse than Biden in literally every poll that I could find. And I’d note that it’s not just a matter of Harris performing worse against Trump because she’s less well-known and so more voters flow into the undecided column. Instead, Trump actually gained vote share against her, getting 46 percent of the vote against Harris as compared to 44 percent against Biden.

It’s at this point that I’d usually say that it's awfully early to look at general election polls and that Harris's numbers against Trump would improve if she were actually to become the Democratic nominee. And I still think that’s still probably true. If nothing else, Democratic Party elites would fall in line and come to her defense instead of often trying to undermine her.

However, Harris has run for president before and it didn’t go well — it didn’t go well at all. Considered one of the frontrunners⁵ for the Democratic nomination when she launched her campaign in January 2019⁶, Harris wound up dropping out of the race in December, well before the Iowa caucuses. It was in the Scott Walker/Jeb Bush/Phil Gramm/Ed Muskie/Rick Perry tier of epic primary season flameouts.

I know some people are going to be annoyed by this and say the vice presidency shouldn’t be a popularity contest. But, well, elections are popularity contests. And vice presidents quite often become candidates for president themselves. That was particularly likely to be the case for Biden’s running mate, given that he'd be 78 at inauguration and would be in his 80s during a potential reelection bid. To have chosen a running mate who was a demonstrated electoral underperformer was a big risk for Biden and Democrats. It’s one that has considerably limited their options this year and which could haunt them if Biden has age-related health problems or stumbles.

1. Plus, RFK Jr.’s policy positions aren’t a good match for those of Democratic primary voters.

2. Mike Pence was less unpopular than Trump, but I wouldn’t call him “notably more popular”.

3. The same potentially holds for nonwhite candidates, certainly — although there the electoral success of Barack Obama assuages potential concerns for Democrats.

4. If a pollster has asked this question on multiple occasions, I simply averaged all their polls together.

5. I was no exception here; I initially thought that Biden and Harris were the two strongest candidates.

6. If you click on that prediction markets link, you’ll notice that Beto O’Rourke was also considered one of the favorites in January 2019! I’d somehow managed to memory-hole that!