Will Harris beat Trump? The case for and against

Vice President Harris is going to be the Democratic presidential nominee, barring a cataclysm.

Harris accumulated support Monday, one day after President Biden announced he would step aside.

Nearly all of Harris’s potential rivals have now endorsed her. The list includes Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. 

On Monday afternoon, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) also endorsed Harris, having not done so when issuing an initial statement marking Biden’s decision to abandon his reelection bid.

The biggest question now is simple: Will Harris beat former President Trump?

Here are the main arguments for and against:

Why Harris will win

Democrats are united and excited — finally

Democrats are in a rush to put weeks of division and despair behind them. 

The party was sent into a tailspin by Biden’s dismal debate performance in Atlanta on June 27 and then consumed by internal combat between the president’s critics and supporters.

The lightning-fast coalescing around Harris points to a frenzied desire to move on. The Democratic National Convention begins in Chicago in less than a month. The election is just a a little more than 100 days away.

There are specific reasons why Harris engenders excitement, of course. She is the first woman, Black person and person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president. Now she’s moving toward the biggest prize of all.

A deluge of donations is another marker of the enthusiasm for Harris.

The Harris campaign, the Democratic National Committee and related joint fundraising committees said Monday that they had raised $81 million — an astronomical sum — in just 24 hours.

The age issue has flipped to Democrats’ advantage

Concerns over age and acuity ended the 81-year-old Biden’s career. 

Harris is just 59.

At a stroke, a huge Democratic vulnerability has been moved off the table — and the 78-year-old Trump will come under greater scrutiny.

The former president has had his own slipups, including confusing Pelosi’s name with his erstwhile primary rival Nikki Haley, and referring on at least three occasions to former President Obama when he appeared to mean Biden.

An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll in the wake of the Atlanta debate found 85 percent of adults believing that Biden was too old to serve a second term. But 60 percent believed the same thing regarding Trump.

That’s a weakness Harris can exploit.

Reminder: Trump is unpopular

The long-standing media focus on the resiliency of Trump’s MAGA base has sometimes overshadowed the fact that he is quite unpopular with the nation at large.

According to the polling average maintained by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ), Trump is viewed unfavorably by roughly 53 percent of Americans and favorably by only 42 percent — and even those figures represent an improvement, perhaps a temporary one, in the wake of the assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pa., on July 13.

The former president lost the popular vote both in 2016 and 2020. Events since then include the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021; a civil trial in which Trump was found liable for the sexual abuse of writer E. Jean Carroll; and a criminal trial at which he was convicted of 34 felonies.

Put simply, Democrats fancy their chances if they can make November’s election a referendum on Trump.

That goal is more realistic with Harris as the nominee than with Biden.

Harris has led the charge on the Democrats’ best issue

Ever since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Harris has taken the lead in the Biden administration’s defense of reproductive rights.

That puts her at the tip of the spear on the Democrats’ single best campaign issue. 

The pro-choice side has yet to lose any statewide vote on an abortion-related ballot measure. The issue is widely cited — including by Trump — as the main reason behind the Democrats’ unexpectedly strong performance at the 2022 midterms.

Harris’s status as, potentially, the first female president makes the abortion debate even sharper.

Why Harris will lose 

Her favorability ratings are really bad

When the Biden crisis was at its height, some of his loyalists made a stark argument: Harris would not necessarily do any better.

Harris trails Trump by almost 3 percentage points nationally, according to The Hill/DDHQ polling average.

That’s not an appreciably better performance than Biden when he exited the race — though there was evidence his standing was eroding fast.

Harris’s favorability ratings are even worse than Trump’s. She is almost 20 points underwater in the DDHQ average, being seen negatively by roughly 56 percent of Americans and favorably by just 38 percent.

Those figures are a reminder that the evident Democratic enthusiasm for Harris is not at all replicated with voters in the center ground.

An Economist/YouGov poll released last week showed that she was viewed unfavorably by more than twice as many independents as those who viewed her favorably, 58 percent to 26 percent.

Her 2020 campaign was a bust

Harris skeptics often bring up her severely underwhelming 2020 campaign.

Harris launched her bid for the Democratic nomination in Janunary 2019 before a crowd of about 20,000 in her home city of Oakland.

That was as good as it got. Harris never really caught fire during the campaign — except, ironically, for a hit on Biden during a July 2019 debate when she jabbed at him for his opposition to school busing in the 1970s. 

Harris ultimately withdrew from the race before the Iowa caucuses.

Doubters worry that the same problems that bedeviled her 2020 campaign — including questions over authenticity, a failure to connect with voters, and rumors of staff infighting — could come back to haunt her this fall.

She might not overcome some voters’ biases

The most sensitive issue around Harris’s candidacy is whether she could be weighed down by voter prejudice.

The question, in short, is whether the nation will elect a Black woman as president.

Those who argue the answer is “yes” point to former President Obama having already broken the racial barrier, while the prominence of women at the highest level of politics has been transformed in recent years.

Still, major female figures — most famously Hillary Clinton in 2016 — have fallen short of expectations, raising questions about the degree to which misogyny remains an electoral burden.

Harris supporters also contend that many of the attacks on her — for everything from her laugh to her lofty rhetoric to her occasional dance moves — are evidence she is held to a stricter standard than her white or male counterparts.

Those attacks, fair or otherwise, have fed into her low approval ratings.  

She is identified with the Democrats’ worst issue

Immigration is probably the Democrats’ single greatest vulnerability heading into November — and Harris is closely tied to it.

Unauthorized crossings of the southern border have declined somewhat in recent months, but only after hitting an all-time high last December.

Trump told CBS News on Saturday that Harris was responsible for the “worst border ever” because of her role as “border czar.”

CBS fact-checked that claim, noting that there is no such official role as “border czar” and that the Department of Homeland Security is chiefly responsible for immigration matters.

Still, Harris was put in charge of tackling the root causes of migration from Central American nations under Biden. That’s a complicated, perhaps insoluble problem.

The bottom line is, Harris is strongly linked in the public mind with immigration; that’s a weakness; and Trump and the GOP will work hard to reap maximum advantage.