The VP is clearly the stronger candidate

The case for Kamala Harris, from a former hater

I did not support selecting Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020.

My reasons for this were pretty boring. It’s genuinely difficult to make it to the top of the political pyramid in a large blue state like California, but the primary political skill that this requires is making yourself appealing to Democratic Party elites and insiders. That’s also a pretty good way to get selected as vice president. But it’s a bad selection criteria for a vice president, who should align with the president’s values while helping to maximize the ticket’s appeal to voters. I understood the logic of selecting Harris over the two other vetting finalists — Susan Rice, who had no political experience, and Val Demings, who had minimal experience in the media spotlight. But I did think that suggested Biden’s team should’ve gone back to the drawing board.

Regardless, Joe Biden did not listen to me about this, and at the time, Democratic Party elites were broadly very supportive of the Harris nomination and of the decision-making process that led to it.

Early on, Harris proved to have exactly the weaknesses one would expect from someone with her profile, and insiders made a hard pivot against her. But that pivot has grown over the past few years into a wild overcorrection to the point of paralyzing the Democratic Party. It’s led to ideas like, “Maybe she’s less electable than a guy who can’t get through a press conference” or, “We should replace the nominee only if we can guarantee the existence of a process that leads to the election of a fresh-faced yet well-vetted outsider.”

This is what happens when people are unwilling to admit their own errors.

Picking a California senator as VP was a moderately bad idea for completely banal reasons. But rather than own up to having done something moderately misguided, Democratic insiders convinced themselves that Harris somehow committed unique blunders and monstrous political crimes. The reality is that over the past few months, she has managed to improve her numbers, while Biden’s have only gotten worse. She polls better than Biden in matchups against Trump. And what’s more, at this point, Biden is almost surely dragging her down since she needs to vouch for him as a candidate. But more to the point, she’s a candidate with dramatically more upside than Biden. Like anyone, she has political vulnerabilities. But it’s not hard to sketch out a strategy to address those vulnerabilities, while it’s extremely hard for Biden to address his.

Most of all, though, whether or not she’s the optimal candidate, she’s a politician who would be capable, not only of dramatically outworking Biden, but dramatically outworking Trump. Harris could be doing large numbers of brief, reasonably friendly media appearances where she does what any normal politician could do: deliver crisp, clear versions of Democratic Party talking points about how Trump is a criminal who wants to blow out the deficit with regressive tax cuts and she is a prosecutor who wants to protect abortion rights and make the rich pay their fare share of taxes.

There are no guarantees in life, but if you have to choose between two politicians, picking the one who is already more popular and who has a much clearer path to addressing her weak points is a no-brainer.

Harris beats Biden by the numbers

Joe Biden currently has a net approval rating of negative 18.6 in the 538 polling average, a rating that is right in line with where George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Donald Trump were at this point in their presidencies, and worse than anyone who won re-election.

Kamala Harris, by contrast, is at negative 11.8, which is obviously not a good number, but it is seven percentage points better than Joe Biden.

A lot of the Ridin’ With Biden takes hang their hat on the true observation that while Biden is currently clearly down in the polls, it’s not as if he’s down by a cataclysmically wide margin along the lines of the 1984 or 1972 landslides. That’s a valid observation that I believe reflects both the rising polarization of the country and also the reality that Donald Trump is a very weak candidate on many levels. I think the right lesson to take from the relatively narrow Biden-Trump margin, though, is not that Biden is fine, but rather that Trump is very beatable. Defeating him does not require a miracle worker or a generational political superstar — Biden himself was neither — but it does require a candidate without crippling weaknesses. Harris being seven percentage points stronger than Biden in net approval is a potentially big difference-maker.

Let me also note the head-to-head polling, where Harris runs about half a point ahead of Biden on average.

I wish the polling here were more decisive. I will note, however, that the couple of polls that make Biden look stronger than Harris are from GOP pollsters. Harris has a substantial three-point edge in the NYT/Siena polls of Virginia and Pennsylvania.

You also have to be realistic about the fact that it’s inherently challenging for a VP to outpoll her own boss. Harris, as a good soldier, has not been able to publicly break with anything Joe Biden has said or done, even though everyone knows she’s not an inner-circle decision-maker in this administration. And while the difference here is currently small, I do think it’s clear. It’s also important to clear up a misconception about margins of error. Due to the vagaries of sampling, it would not be surprising for a poll to be two or three points too favorable or too hostile to Democrats, but the amount of within-sample error is much smaller than that. In other words, this modest Biden-Harris gap is almost certainly real as a static snapshot of public opinion.

That said, I think this is ultimately not provable on the basis of math.

The real issue (which is reflected in the job approval numbers) is that Biden’s campaign is almost monolithically focused on shoring up his core support, which is bleeding away due to his limited capabilities. He’s doing interviews that are at best unimpressive, on average defensive and peevish, and at worst highlight his diminished verbal dexterity. More to the point, his team — which continues to be a sharp group of people — is focused on base-consolidating policy rollouts rather than addressing swing voters’ concerns. What Harris can do is take more people for granted (her better net favorable ratings) and run a proper campaign. Of course she might fail — but she might not!

Harris’ problems are solvable

I know some people who are profoundly convinced that all of Harris’ political struggles stem from racism and misogyny. But I think this is a weird corner progressives have talked themselves into, where representational politics matters but also only white men are electable.

People know that women are more liberal on average than men, and that Black Americans are more liberal on average than white ones. So in the absence of detailed information, there is a sort of lazy heuristic that assumes Republican women must be moderate and Democratic women must be progressive. This is certainly not a crazy heuristic — it’s probably not a coincidence that the two pro-choice members of the GOP Senate caucus are both women, or that Tim Scott is a strong opponent of racially biased policing. Because the median voter self-identifies as moderate, it is a genuine disadvantage for female and non-white Democrats to be stereotyped as particularly liberal.

But this is hardly an insurmountable challenge.

We have plenty of examples of Democratic women turning in strong performances in purple (Gretchen Whitmer, Catherine Cortez Masto) or even red (Laura Kelly) states, and the same is true of non-white (Raphael Warnock) candidates. All candidates, after all, have points of vulnerability that they need to address. And “people might assume you’re really left-wing” is, in the grand scheme of things, a pretty easy problem to address. In fact, for some of the same reasons that a Black woman might face initial skepticism, a Black woman also has more room to deploy moderate messages. When J.D. Vance starts talking about how he wants to help stay-at-home moms, I think a lot of women are going to impute misogynistic motives or underlying values to him. If Kamala Harris does it, nobody is going to think that. But some people will find it refreshing.

If nominee Harris says abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” are feminist groups really going to torch the potential first woman president?

If Kamala Harris says — as she wrote in her book on crime — that “virtually all law-abiding citizens feel safer when they see officers walking a beat” and liberals need to “get past biases against law enforcement” and embrace “an unequivocal No Tolerance strategy” for street gangs, is she going to get denounced as racist? I doubt it. And it will reassure people who believe, without any specific evidence, that she’s some kind of super-leftist. In the not-too-distant past I thought Biden had a good pathway to reassuring people about his age. But it turns out that’s not the case — he really does now struggle to engage in crisp, real-time conversation. There’s no such thing as a perfect politician. But there’s a huge difference between a politician who can address voters’ concerns and one who can’t.

Harris has been in a bad situation

It’s been hard to avoid noticing that Harris is in the unusual position where her being more popular would be a significant threat to the president’s aspiration to be renominated. Any time I mention that it would be relatively easy for Harris to moderate her image, someone tosses at me, “Well, why hasn’t she done it already?” And one possible answer is that she’s being loyal to a White House that doesn’t particularly want her out there talking about how the streets in San Francisco were safer when she was District Attorney.

Given the thankless border portfolio early in Biden’s term, she delivered a strong moderate message on asylum, warning Central Americans “do not come.”

Rather than making that a consistent message, she seemed to lose that portfolio, and the administration dithered on asylum policy for years. When they eventually got their act together with a bipartisan border deal and tough executive actions on asylum, she was nowhere to be seen. But was that her fault or the White House’s? I can’t say for certain, but I have some doubts about the Biden operation’s good faith at this point.

More broadly, she caught a bit of world-historical bad luck in that she happened to run for president during literally the only political cycle in history where a track-record as a tough on crime prosecutor could possibly be construed as a weakness. I do not think she handled this situation correctly, but it was an honest-to-God weird situation. In the political context of 2024, she has a much more straightforward story to tell about herself as someone who spent years putting criminals behind bars, while also thinking about ways to make the criminal justice system more cost-effective. She supports abortion rights and doesn’t think we should explode the deficit cutting taxes for the rich, or feed Eastern Europe to the wolves.

She is a prosecutor, and her opponent is a felon. If handed the nomination, she might screw it up (anyone might), but I think everyone in the anti-Trump camp could hold their head high supporting her and feel like they gave it a real shot. I’m all for an open convention and consideration of which ticket might be truly optimal, but realistically, if the president steps aside the nominee is likely to be the vice president. Fear of that outcome and reluctance to advocate for it has paralyzed Democrats for weeks, if not months or years.

But the fact is, Harris is more popular than Biden, her polling against Trump is stronger than Biden’s, she is a more effective messenger for the administration than Biden, and she has dramatically more upside than Biden.