Kamala Harris was a replacement-level candidate

Trump's win is mostly Biden's fault, not hers. Still, she was a mediocre candidate in a year when Democrats needed a strong one.

Kamala Harris delivering her concession speexh.

I have a lot of sympathy for Kamala Harris’s position, maybe more than I have for any losing candidate in some time.

Obviously, this was a position of her choosing. Harris is ambitious: She sought the Democratic nomination in 2020 and then the vice presidency and quickly moved to consolidate support within the party once Joe Biden was finally shoved aside.

But Biden did her no favors. He gave her tough assignments—the border, perhaps Democrats’ worst issue, and voting rights, an issue on which the White House probably knew it wouldn’t make any progress. He blew up the debate calendar, leaving nothing scheduled after Sept. 11 even though this was one of Harris’s best formats. Even up to the bitter end, Biden was stepping on her message. 

Most appallingly of all, the White House was bad-mouthing Harris to reporters, saying she was a worse option than Biden, even though their internal polls reportedly showed Biden losing 400 electoral votes, according to Jon Favreau of Pod Save America. Do you know how hard it is to lose 400 electoral votes? Here’s what that map would have had to look like: 

OK, now let me just say I wouldn’t take this entirely literally. When Biden dropped out, he was trailing Donald Trump by 4 points in our national polling average. I actually think the final margin would have gotten worse, not better. There would have been another debate and further campaign stumbles. Biden’s fundraising was completely drying up. And like Harris, Biden might have slightly underperformed his polls on Election Day. So I can see Biden losing by 6 to 8 points, probably losing New Hampshire — and maybe Virginia, New Mexico, Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, Minnesota and even New Jersey, where Harris prevailed by just 5.6 points.

It’s a bad enough performance that nobody in the senior ranks of the Biden campaign should ever work in politics again. I don’t think he would have lost Illinois or Colorado, however.

But I think people confuse their sympathy for Harris’s position for her having been a good candidate.

One piece of evidence for this is her inferior performance compared to most Democratic Senate candidates. On net, Harris underperformed the Democratic Senate candidate by an average of 2.6 points and a median of 2.4. Yes, this includes three “Democrats” who were actually independents — nontrivially so in the case of Dan Osborn of Nebraska, who hadn’t said which party he’d caucasus with. (The independents are highlighted in green in the table.) Still, in the five swing states to also feature Senate races (highlighted in gold), Harris underperformed the Senate candidate by an average of 3.5 points, and Democrats won 4 out of the 5 contests in states that Harris lost.

Not all of this can necessarily be attributed to Harris. It could be that Democratic Senate candidates were particularly strong, that Republican ones were particularly weak, or that Trump was an above-average candidate — I tend not to buy the latter given Trump’s long-term electoral track record (he lost the popular vote against Hillary Clinton!), but he’s gotten more popular over time.

Still, here’s something interesting. According to the ”fundamentals” formula our model uses, the Democrat “should” have won the popular vote by 0.4 percentage points. Instead, Harris will lose by about 1.6 once all votes are counted. So that’s a 2-point underperformance, closely matching the gap between her and the Democratic Senators.

I’ve given a couple of presentations already on the election aftermath, listing what I consider to the most important factors in Trump’s win. The first is the global backlash against incumbent parties in an era of high inflation and failed promises for a quick return to normalcy after COVID. Compared to that, Harris’s performance looks decent. I don’t buy this as being dispositive, however, given that I’m something of a believer in American political exceptionalism — I think we often lead political trends rather than follow them. The second factor is inflation¹, the third is Biden’s assistance on seeking another term until he was 86, and the fourth is immigration. None of these are really Harris’s fault — well, maybe immigration to an extent.

Still, when we get further down the list, I have two main critiques of Harris.

One is her inability to drive a message and her refusal to separate herself more clearly from Biden. Now, I’m not going to pretend that these were easy waters for Harris to navigate, given that she was Biden’s sitting vice president. But — you have to at least try, I think? Throw your unpopular boss at least a little bit under the bus?

At times, Harris’s campaign — headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware and staffed mostly by ex-Biden people — seemed reluctant to criticize Biden out of fear of being perceived as disloyal, a stupid thing to be concerned about given that you have an election to win and that Biden frequently undermined her. It wasn’t a risk-free option — Harris might have reminded Americans of what they disliked about Biden — but she needed a bolder strategy, especially given the challenging political environment.

The other big negative is Harris's strongly left-wing positions as a presidential candidate in 2019. She may have tried to pivot to the center in this campaign, but it was a clumsy effort at best given a lack of explanation for why she’d abandoned her previous positions or what her agenda would actually look like.

If you browse the chart of Senate overperformances and underperformances, there’s some evidence that candidates perceived as being more moderate overperformed. I took liberal-conservative scores from OnTheIssues.org based on candidates’ public statements, removed issue areas where candidates hadn’t said enough for OnTheIssues to record a position, and rescaled them to a range of -100 (maximally liberal) to +100 (maximally conservative). Here is that data:

There’s a relatively consistent theme here. Osborn in Nebraska and the relatively moderate Jon Tester in Montana greatly outperformed Harris, while Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders² actually underperformed her. And in Maryland, the moderate Larry Hogan was the Republican to most outperform Trump. There are also counterexamples: Bob Casey is classified as relatively moderate but he lost in Pennsylvania; Tammy Baldwin is quite liberal but she won.

Overall, though, there’s a statistically significant relationship. For every point on the -100 to +100 scale that the Democratic Senate was closer to the center than the Republican one, they gained 0.08 points of vote margin. That means, for instance, that Angus King of Maine (-50) did about 4 points better than if he’d been as left-wing as Sanders (-100). King would probably have won his race even with more liberal positions, as he’s a popular incumbent in a state that tends to like its incumbents, but 4 points helps.

Harris’s score on this scale is a -70. What if the Democratic nominee instead had a score like King (-50) or Tester (-40) or Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania (-51)? That translates to a popular vote margin that would be 1.5 to 2.5 points better against Trump than Harris’s was. In other words, she’d have won the popular vote by half a point or so instead of losing it by 1.6, probably enough for her to win Wisconsin and Michigan and send Pennsylvania and Georgia to photo finishes that might be headed to recounts.

If Democrats had actually held an open primary, Harris might well have won anyway; she quickly became very popular within her party. But if Democrats had nominated a Shapiro or a Gretchen Whitmer (-60 on the liberal-conservative scale) or an Andy Beshear (-30) — someone with some arm’s-length distance both from Biden and from Democrats’ unpopular left-wing positions, I tend to think they’d have been the slight favorites. Democrats didn’t actually lose this election by all that much.

I don’t think, however, that Harris would have won just by running a better campaign. She had trouble shaking voters’ doubts about her, mostly because they were reasonable doubts. According to the AP exit poll, Harris did manage to persuade 59 percent of voters that Trump was too extreme. But 56 percent of voters said the same of Harris. (By comparison, 44 percent said that Biden was “too tolerant of extremist groups” when the AP asked a similar question in 2020.)

Of course, there’s also the elephant in the room: why Biden chose Harris in the first place in 2020 despite her poor electoral track record. The reporting at the time made this clear enough:

Ms. Harris was one of four finalists for the job, along with Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Susan E. Rice, the former national security adviser. But in the eyes of Mr. Biden and his advisers, Ms. Harris alone covered every one of their essential political needs.

Ms. Rice had sterling foreign-policy credentials and a history of working with Mr. Biden, but was inexperienced as a candidate. Ms. Warren had an enthusiastic following and became a trusted adviser to Mr. Biden on economic matters, but she represented neither generational nor racial diversity. Ms. Whitmer, a moderate, appealed to Mr. Biden’s political and ideological instincts, but selecting her also would have yielded an all-white ticket.

Emphasis mine. Look, I really try not to get too carried away with the identity politics stuff around here; you don’t need another middle-aged white Substacker who makes it his main beat. But this is the New York Times reporting unambiguously in 2020 that although Whitmer appealed more to Biden’s “instincts”, he was concerned about the optics of an all-white ticket in the peak-woke days of the 2020 summer.

Lots of VP picks could be derided as “DEI hires” — including Biden himself, who also had a poor track record running for president in 1988 and 2008 but was chosen by Barack Obama as a safe, moderate-seeming white guy. And nobody is saying Harris wasn’t qualified — well, some people might be saying that, but I’m not — just that she’d never shown a particular knack for, you know, actually appealing to voters.

And if someone like Whitmer had been chosen by Biden instead, she’d have more of his baggage as the incumbent vice president. Still, the whole sequence might have played out differently, with Biden — who clearly thought little of Harris’s electoral prospects — more willing to consider an earlier exit from the stage.

Harris had her moments as a candidate. But this result was somewhat predictable. I wrote in July that I thought she was the better choice than Biden in his current condition and had a higher floor — good enough, as it turned out, to keep Democrats in a competitive position in the 2026 midterms. But I also said that I thought she’d be an underdog:

But we’re overdue for more coverage of Harris and I hope the overall thesis is clear enough: that while Harris would face a number of challenges as a candidate and would probably be an underdog to Trump, she would nevertheless have both a higher floor and a higher ceiling than Biden does.

In baseball and other sports, the term “replacement level” refers to a player who’s right on the fringe between being a big leaguer and not, someone you can call up from AAA or pick up on the waiver wire. Even these athletes are still better than 99.999+ percent of people to ever play their sports. Watch NBA players take warmups before the game, and even the last men on the roster are nailing 3-pointers with uncanny precision. I have a friend who’s an extremely talented amateur tennis player in his 40s, but when he scrimmages against his coach, he gets destroyed — even though the coach left the pro tour ten years ago ranked something like #150.

Kamala Harris is a replacement-level politician. She has plenty of talent, and she builds relationships and gives speeches better than I could, or 99.9 percent of the readers of this newsletter might. And sometimes, replacement-level talent is good enough in a pinch. But this was a difficult electoral environment for Democrats. You only get so many Obamas — your #1 overall draft picks — so I’m not asking for a superstar. But they needed someone who was average to solidly above average, and they have a good bench after their strong midterms in 2018 and 2022. Those candidates were left on the sidelines, and now Trump is headed to the White House again.

1. Granted, this may be redundant with the overall backlash against incumbents.

2. Just barely in Sanders’s case.