The case for, and against, Kamala Harris

Let's be honest: she'd probably be an underdog. But she's still a better option than Biden.

Jul 12, 2024

Kamala Harris debates Joe Biden in 2019..

Perhaps nothing is a clearer indication of the awful predicament that Democrats have put themselves in than this: a lot of Democrats were actually rooting for President Biden to flub last night’s press conference.

Not that it went great, exactly. Biden delivered detailed and coherent remarks about foreign policy. But with the world’s eyes on him, the press conference started an hour late, and Biden referred to Vice President Harris as “Vice President Trump” and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin”.

The theory for why this was a worst-of-all worlds outcome for Democrats is that Biden did just enough to please his backers while also doing nothing to assuage his doubters, meaning that the fight over his remaining at the top of the ticket is likely to be prolonged.

I’m not entirely sure that I believe the theory, insofar as I don’t think the argument over Biden was in some sort of state of repose. Rather, there was already a ton of momentum against Biden. And the anti-Biden forces still seem to have the stronger tug on the rope, from more members of Congress coming out against Biden to unions beginning to have doubts to donors freezing contributions to some of his own staffers reportedly trying to nudge him out of the race. We’re also at the point where there’s a lot of damaging information coming out about Biden, including from some of his former allies, that can’t really be undone.

So use whatever metaphor you want: you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube or turn the floodgates back on once the water is rushing out. That doesn’t mean that Biden will stop fighting or that the efforts to depose him will necessarily succeed. But until and unless he steps aside, there’s going to be some version of this every day through the convention. We’re well past the point where people are just going to cover their eyes and pretend the debate didn’t happen.

One thing we can say is that the decision would be easier for Democrats if they had a popular vice president waiting in the wings. If Kamala Harris were leading in the polls against Donald Trump but Biden wasn’t, my guess is that the “dump Biden” would already have won the tug-of-war — and maybe Biden would already have stepped aside.

But that isn’t the case. I don’t think polls comparing Harris’s standing to Biden’s are all that informative at this point; it’s not really an apples-to-apples comparison since she’s a hypothetical candidate and he’s an actual one, and candidates’ standing often shifts significantly once they actually begin running for president. Plus, the argument against Biden is less one about polls anyway — though they aren’t good for him — and more about his fitness to run an adequate campaign in which he has to mount a comeback under difficult circumstances.

Still, I don’t think you should just totally ignore the polls, either. So here’s what they say — every poll we could find since the debate that has tested Harris against Trump:

On average, Harris trails Trump by 2.9 points. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the exact same margin by which Biden trails Trump in our average. This is, however, a change from before: until recently, Harris had been underperforming Biden in polls against Trump. Now she’s caught up with him — or maybe better said, he’s fallen off the lead lap and back to her level.

There are two other things to note in this data. One is that only a few of the pollsters that tested Harris also put third-party candidates like RFK Jr. on the ballot. That’s a mistake, in my view, because one of the risks Democrats face in nominating Biden is that voters will be so fed up with both their choices that they’ll vote third-party or sit the election out. If Harris can capture some RFK Jr. voters that Biden doesn’t, that’s relevant info.

Also, there’s a fair bit of variation from poll to poll — as you can see, there’s everything from a Harris +2 to a Trump + 11 in the recent data. I don’t know exactly why there’s more variation in Harris’s polling than Biden’s — but it speaks to a theme of how there’s greater uncertainty surrounding Harris, something that’s actually a good thing for Democrats if the alternative is a race they’re probably going to lose.

For the rest of this newsletter, I’m going to steal a format from Matt Yglesias and list 33 quick propositions about Harris’s potential candidacy. Some of these are just a sentence or two long, and are not much more than half-formed thoughts or broad heuristics. 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.

The case against Kamala Harris

Even if it disappoints our KHive subscribers, I think it’s fairer to start with the negatives here since I do think Harris would start as an underdog:

This says nothing about her qualifications for the job, but Harris’s electoral track record is really quite poor. She’s in the upper tier of all-time primary flops — see also Rick Perry and Ron DeSantis — having come into the 2020 race with lots of resources and hype but failing to even make it to Iowa. And she’s never really had to run a competitive general election race — except in 2010, when she only won the Attorney General race in California by 1 point. But that race shouldn’t have been competitive — it’s California, and Harris underperformed all other Democrats on the ballot.
Harris might have a larger Electoral College-popular vote gap than Biden if she does worse among white voters but better among voters of color.
As opposed to an outsider candidate, Harris would inherit at least some of the administration’s other problems — like inflation or the border, for which she drew the short straw and was the public face of the administration’s unpopular policy.
If there’s been some sort of cover-up of Biden’s health or age, she runs some risk of being caught up in it.
It's not great that Democratic party leaders seem less than thrilled about Harris. But it could also reflect other things — I endorse almost every word of this take from Yglesias, for instance: “This is not my brand personally, but given the range of wild things people have been bullied into signing on to in the name of identity politics, I think ‘it’s racist to believe a Black woman is less electable than a white man who can’t get through a 30 minute television interview’ is a pretty reasonable take.”
There’s a risk she’d be “regifted” some of Biden’s hand-me-downs rather than starting with a clean slate and a new staff. If Biden’s ship is sinking and the White House staff is panicking, then Harris is the most obvious lifeboat. I list this as a negative because I think the Biden staff has done a piss-poor job with this race. Their bluff of thinking they could allay concerns about Biden’s age by working the media failed disastrously, and they’ve been in denial about the state of the polls.
Harris would probably be viewed to the left of Biden, even if she isn’t Elizabeth Warren exactly. In my years of work on election forecasts, I’ve consistently found that the median voter theorem is still right more often than not and you’d rather nominate a more moderate candidate, other things being equal. I’m deliberately taking a light touch on Harris’s race and gender in this newsletter, since you don’t need another White Guy With Opinions, but Black and female candidates are probably also going to read as more leftward to voters than white men do.

The case for Kamala Harris

There are more items on this list — reflecting how I think Harris would give Democrats better chances than Biden despite all the shortcomings I mentioned above But they fall into two major subcategories. Items marked with a cross symbol (†) are things that would be advantages for any Democratic replacement candidate. Those without the cross are advantages for Harris specifically.

When you’re behind, you want more variance, just like an NBA team ought to start shooting more 3-pointers when it trails in the game. The problem with Biden isn’t just that he’s trailing now but that the race has been extremely steady and that he may lack the capacity to fight his way back.†
The strong polling performance of Democratic Senate candidates — who unlike Harris, are running actual rather than hypothetical races — plus the strong performance of Democrats in recent special elections, are good arguments that the problem with Biden specifically rather than Democrats generally.†
Harris’s disapproval rating is “only” 49.5 percent, which is bad but much better than Biden’s 56.8 percent. I’m giving this the crossmark, though, since any other Democrat would probably also begin with lower negatives.†
Harris probably has the highest floor of any of the Democrats’ three major options (Biden, Harris, grab bag/contested convention). She’d win back most Normie Dems and at least probably turn the fundraising spigots back on again. That might not be enough to win the presidency. But it would hedge against losses in Congress, or a landslide that would give Trump more electoral legitimacy — or Democrats winding up in a truly unsalvageable position because there’s another Biden crisis after ballots are printed.
It’s not that Biden can’t win — maybe the polls have been way off all along or there will be an alien invasion or something. But any election that Biden could win, any reasonable Democrat should be able win at this point. He is probably a below-replacement-level candidate.†
Since voters know that Biden might not make it through a second term, any electoral liabilities involving Harris are liabilities you’re getting anyway by asking voters to choose the Biden-Harris ticket. If she’s likely to take over at some point, why not just nominate her in the first place?
Republicans would have to prep a whole new campaign — and so far their attacks against Harris have been feeble.†
There is a lot to be said for someone who can do basic blocking and tackling in terms of running against Trump. Let’s not neglect that Trump has lots of liabilities of his own — like that he’s a convicted felon, that he’s very old himself, or January 6 and Project 2025. Almost any Democrat would do a better job than Biden in his current state, although Harris has some additional strengths like having been a former prosecutor.†
Democrats have a deep bench after strong midterms in 2018 and 2022, and nominating Harris (or another Democrat) would open up the VP slot. VP picks generally don’t move the needle, but there’d be a chance to go for some ideological balance or to nominate someone (say Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania) to provide an extra point or two of help in a swing state.†
Let’s not get too carried away with this one, but I agree with Max Read that the ability of Harris supporters to turn some of her goofy catch-phrases into endearing memes says something about the ability to craft a new image for Harris. Like many VPs, she actually hasn’t been in the public spotlight all that much, which means she’s more of a blank canvas.
“The perfect is the enemy of the good” is a reasonable argument, given the Democratic Party’s state of disarray. I still have a fairly strong preference for some sort of open nomination process, in which Harris would participate and perhaps win anyway. But in a perfect world, Biden would have stepped aside a year ago. His refusal to get out of the way means there’s less time for that now.
Running Harris now probably makes 2028 easier for Democrats. If she loses, they have a clean slate. If she wins, she’ll be eligible for another term.
There's a good argument for Harris having extra legitimacy due to this being the natural line of succession: 81 million people did vote for her as part of Biden’s ticket in 2020. Picking her is the most adult move, and the Democratic Party brand is supposed to be about being the adults in the room.
Harris would get off to more of a running start than another replacement, having already been in the thick of the campaign and having had a lot of reps giving speeches as VP. And she’s have the most direct access to Biden’s cash reserves.
If I understand the psychology of the Indigo Blob correctly, Harris or another Democrat would get considerably more favorable media coverage than Biden is going to get. I also think this vibes stuff is overrated — indeed, one of the main problems with the Biden campaign is that they’ve been trying (and failing) to win the media narrative rather than persuade voters. Still, Harris might get a “honeymoon period” of mostly favorable coverage, and there’s only four more months to go until the election.†
Apart from The Squad, which has remained behind Biden, Harris has gotten a relatively favorable reception from most of the left-wing intellectuals and influencers I follow, perhaps because she’s been somewhat to Biden’s left on Gaza. I don’t think Gaza is one of Biden’s biggest problems, but this counts for something. It’s asking a lot of any voter at this point to pull the lever for four more years of Biden, and that’s especially true for voters who didn’t want him to represent their party in the first place.
Harris (or another Democrat) does much better than Biden in what you might call the “game script” test, a term I’m borrowing from football to refer to your mental model of how the rest of the contest will play out. It’s much easier to imagine her making a comeback than it is for Biden, in other words. Maybe that honeymoon period lasts all the way through Election Day, or maybe she wins back some of the support that Biden has lost among nonwhite voters, for instance.†
I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a Pyrrhic victory when the alternative is Trump, but a second Biden term — if he somehow limps over the finish line — would be difficult from the start for Democrats. His victory would probably be extremely narrow, and there would continue to be questions about his age and fitness every day. Democrats might be set up for big losses in 2026 and 2028.†

8 more Harris hot takes

This last category consists of takes that don’t fall neatly into the positive or negative bucket but which are important points of context — or which are elements of the conventional wisdom surrounding Harris that I don’t agree with.

If I’m purely predicting what Democrats will do as opposed to what they should do, I think Harris is a considerably more likely choice than “grab bag”. As I wrote here, I think there’s a plausible compromise in which pro-Biden and anti-Biden elements both find her to be a tolerable compromise.
Models that give Biden a heavy “incumbency” bonus, which they don’t assign to Harris, are looking at this the wrong way. Indeed, it’s probably not much of an advantage to be an incumbent at all in such a negatively polarized political climate, and the implicit notion that Biden is as strong a candidate as he was in 2020 is almost certainly wrong. A model does not just fall out of a coconut tree: it exists in the context of the real world that it’s trying to describe.
Harris might be a better candidate divorced from the peak wokeness of 2019-2020 and the left’s electorally unappealing version of identity politics.
I am somewhat skeptical of the take that Democrats must pick Harris or otherwise their voters would be outraged that a woman of color had been passed over. Again, we’re probably past the period of peak identity politics — and Democrats view Trump as an existential threat and want to win. And Harris never did a great job of building up support among Black voters to begin with: that was one of the reasons she disappointed in 2020.
However, I’m very, very skeptical of the “will of the people” argument — that Democrats must nominate Biden because he was chosen in this year’s primaries and caucasus. Those primaries were not competitive, with the White House having successfully nudged all candidates but Marianne Williamson, Dean Phillips and “uncommitted” out of the race. (If they had been — and Biden had to debate, for instance — maybe the problems with Biden would have surfaced sooner.) Plus, there’s material new information — Biden’s age-related problems are now much clearer, and the White House tried to conceal them. Polls of Democratic voters now actually find quite a bit of support for replacing Biden — a majority in some polls.
Whether or not Harris assumes the presidency before Nov. 5 should be based on Biden’s fitness for office and what’s best for the country. Electoral considerations should be secondary from that, and are hard to anticipate anyway.
There’s something to be said along the lines of “you made this bed, now lie in it”. Biden chose Harris in 2020. Was that the electorally optimal choice? Probably not. But it’s the choice he made, and it’s usually good in the long run when people have to live with the consequences of their actions.
I think the White House’s treatment of Harris has been borderline despicable, from giving her impossible assignments like the border and voting rights to bad-mouthing her in private. Contemporaneous reporting from when she was chosen in 2020 suggests that Biden was lukewarm on Harris to begin with. If it’s later revealed that the White House has been trying to undermine Harris so as not to present Democrats with an appealing alternative to Biden, it wouldn’t be surprising in the least.