Kamala Harris is the underdog 

As Democrats unite around Vice President Kamala Harris as their likely new nominee, their public mood is absolutely jubilant. Now, they hope, the party has a nominee who can take the fight to Trump — and win. These hopes are not yet supported by polling data, which currently shows Harris on track to lose. Harris’s […]

As Democrats unite around Vice President Kamala Harris as their likely new nominee, their public mood is absolutely jubilant. Now, they hope, the party has a nominee who can take the fight to Trump — and win.

These hopes are not yet supported by polling data, which currently shows Harris on track to lose.

Harris’s approval rating is not good (38 percent approval, 50 percent disapproval in FiveThirtyEight’s average). She trails Trump by about 2 points nationally, on average, and the few public polls pitting her against Trump in swing states nearly all show her behind, sometimes behind by a lot.

Now, maybe those polls aren’t worth much since voters haven’t truly gotten to know Harris. Maybe she’ll wage a smart, vigorous campaign and win them over. Maybe the excitement her selection brings to the ticket will supercharge enthusiasm.

Maybe.

But Harris also has some very real weaknesses as a candidate that could turn things the other way.

Namely, she will be attacked as a San Francisco liberal elite. She will be held responsible for the Biden administration’s record rather than being able to have a clean slate. And her stint at the top of national politics has had its fair share of gaffes and reported staff turmoil.

(Her race and gender will also be factors shaping how she is perceived, but they are not reasons to assume that she cannot win. And it’s worth evaluating her record, as well as her political persona, on their own terms.)

Trump has his own serious weaknesses, and it’s certainly possible that Harris could win. But she doesn’t start off as the favorite, and she has some real work to do.

Harris will be attacked as a San Francisco liberal elite

Biden’s withdrawal and endorsement of Harris was met with tremendous excitement from Democrats’ donor base, with $81 million pouring into the campaign’s coffers in less than 24 hours. Anecdotally, I’ve heard tremendous optimism from people in my (educated coastal urban) circles that Harris will be a far superior candidate to Biden. 

Indeed, if the presidential election was conducted among educated coastal urbanites, Harris would surely win in a walk. But in reality, a winning candidate needs the votes of other demographics too, including from some people who don’t like educated coastal urbanites very much. 

Perhaps the biggest electoral story of the past decade has been the phenomenon of education polarization, in which college-educated voters have been trending increasingly toward Democrats while non-college voters have been moving more toward the GOP. These shifts were arguably decisive in tipping key Midwestern swing states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan — toward Trump in 2016. Biden — “Joe from Scranton” — reversed them a bit in 2020, just enough to eke out an Electoral College win. Notably, Trump made significant gains among voters of color without degrees that year, and 2024 polling has suggested these trends could continue.

Part of the reason for this, some Democrats have argued, is that their national party has lost the ability to communicate to non-college voters, that the party’s donor and staffer class are so dominated by the educated coastal elite that they no longer speak the same “language” as swing-state voters and their values have dramatically diverged from them. 

Harris is extremely good at speaking the language of Democrats’ upscale voter base. That is how she rose in blue San Francisco and California politics, and that is why there was initial enthusiasm for her 2020 presidential campaign. It’s also a main reason why, after that campaign flopped, she still got picked as Biden’s running mate (Biden’s campaign was similarly flooded with donations after her selection). 

But can she convince Midwestern swing voters she’s on their side, that she doesn’t view them as “deplorables,” that she’s not some out-of-touch San Francisco liberal extremist? Can she “speak” swing voter in a convincing way? We simply don’t know yet. While she has made some campaign appearances in swing states, doing so as the nominee means she’ll be in the spotlight in a new way, with much higher stakes.

Harris will have to defend the Biden administration’s unpopular record

It’s probably unfair to put too much blame on Harris for her low approval numbers when their main cause is likely that she is part of the Biden-Harris administration.

And if most Americans are not happy with the administration Harris has been a part of, that will be a problem for her candidacy.

In the effort to push Biden off the ticket, there’s been a tendency among Democrats (who generally believe Biden has done a good job) to blame his political woes on his age rather than his record. They theorize that the policies have been good but there’s been a communication problem in explaining how good they are.

Polling, though, has been pretty consistent that the American public believes the administration has handled major issues poorly — most notably the economy, immigration, and foreign policy, with voters consistently saying Trump would do a better job on all three issues.

Harris was not personally responsible for policy on inflation, the border, the Afghanistan withdrawal, or the Israel-Gaza war. (Republicans have falsely called her the “border czar,” when Harris was in fact tasked with the much more limited role of addressing “root causes” of unauthorized immigration abroad.) 

It’s true that Harris has staunchly defended the administration’s policies on these issues. It will be tough for her to criticize any decision (since doing so would raise the question of why she didn’t criticize it earlier). And it will be hard for her to make the case that she’d do things all that differently from Biden, considering she’s already been vice president for four years. 

Typically, when a new nominee runs for president, they get to offer idealistic promises of change and break with how the incumbent has been doing things in areas where the public wants change. That will be difficult for Harris. She does not start with a clean slate; she is burdened by what has been. And the public is not happy with how things have been under Biden.

Harris has had a tumultuous political history in national politics

Finally, there is the question of whether Harris will be able to run an effective and successful presidential campaign. There’s an idealized, meme-worthy image of Harris’s political appeal that has spread among Democrats eager to turn the page on Biden, but her track record at the top of national politics has been more mixed.

That began with her 2020 presidential campaign, which actually ended in December 2019. There is no shame in running in your party’s presidential primary and losing. Not every defeat is the candidate’s “fault” rather than a reflection of larger circumstances. A loss can position a candidate well for success next time. 

But Harris’s campaign was chock-full of public missteps and reports of behind-the-scenes chaos.

She had one viral moment in which she confronted Joe Biden about his historic opposition to busing policy on the debate stage, but days after, she acknowledged that her views on what busing policy should currently be weren’t any different from Biden’s.

Harris also struggled to answer questions about her health care policy, at times seeming to support a version of Medicare-for-all that eliminates private health insurance and at other times saying she supported no such thing. 

Internally, her campaign “became a hotbed of drama and backbiting,” according to CNN, with finger-pointing leaks from rival factions constantly spilling out. She gave her sister Maya a key role, and the New York Times reported that “one campaign strategist said it was impossible to tell if Maya Harris was speaking for herself, as an adviser, or as her sister’s representative.” But in both of those stories, sources argued that the candidate’s own strategic indecisiveness was perhaps the campaign’s biggest problem.

None of this prevented Biden from picking her as his running mate in 2020. Then, early in his term, a similar story unfolded in the vice president’s office. In a high-profile interview with NBC’s Lester Holt in June 2021, Harris struggled to answer questions about the administration’s border policy, and claimed “we’ve been to the border” even though she had not. Afterward, she clamped down on her interview availability, reportedly for fear of making further gaffes. (Amid all the scrutiny on Biden for doing few high-profile interviews, it’s worth noting that Harris hasn’t exactly been ubiquitous either.)

Meanwhile, story after story told of staff chaos in and departures from Harris’s office. A former aide offered scathing comments to the Washington Post: “It’s clear that you’re not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work. … With Kamala you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you’re constantly sort of propping up a bully and it’s not really clear why.”

To be sure, Donald Trump’s staff drama in his campaigns and White House was far more intense (and it didn’t prevent him from winning in 2016). And reports of feuding in Harris’s office have lessened in the past year or so; perhaps Harris has found advisers with whom she is more comfortable. But now she’s suddenly back in the spotlight, and the pressure is on. So now the question is will she rise to the challenge, overseeing and implementing a strategy and team that can win?

Harris is the underdog — but she could win

None of this means that Harris absolutely cannot win. 

The problems above may be serious challenges for her campaign. And yes, she currently trails in the polls. But challenges can be addressed and polls can change. The election is more than three months away.

Harris’s opponent, Donald Trump, is also unpopular. Democrats hope she can lean on her past as a former prosecutor to “prosecute” the case against him. Trump’s performance in the first debate was no great shakes; he may compare unfavorably to Harris in another — if he agrees to do it (and if he doesn’t, she can criticize him for that).

Harris will indeed energize the liberal base, and perhaps she’ll be more appealing to young voters and Black voters, who Biden has struggled with. She clearly has more energy and ability to campaign than Biden has had to this point. 

And if the past month should tell us anything, it’s that the future of politics is never set in stone.