U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris takes the stage as she attends the 30th annual Essence Festival in New Orleans, La., on July 6.Edmund D. Fountain/Reuters
Update: This columm was written before Joe Biden dropped out of the U.S. presidential race on July 21. Read more here.
Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
After U.S. President Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate performance on June 27, Democrats have been scrambling. An interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, ostensibly to dissuade public anxieties about Mr. Biden’s capacity to be president for another term, did the opposite; Mr. Biden came across as a stubborn old man as he intoned that only an act of God would remove him from this race. This week, he defiantly proclaimed that anyone who wanted him to drop out would have to challenge him at the Democratic convention next month in Chicago, although on Thursday The New York Times reported his campaign had begun discreetly surveying how Vice-President Kamala Harris would fare in a match-up with Donald Trump.
There are good reasons to be gravely concerned. Mr. Trump has a lead in national polls, and in the seven swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin). Though anything could happen in the next four months, it’s beginning to look like a lose-lose situation for the Democratic nominee. Should Mr. Biden remain the candidate, there’s a very real chance he’ll lose (incumbency advantage, decent track record from the past four years of his presidency, and the fact that his opponent is a convicted felon be damned); if Mr. Biden steps aside, it is late in the election season to galvanize support around another candidate.
It shouldn’t be this complicated. Ms. Harris is a logical choice to replace Mr. Biden as the Democratic nominee for president of the United States, but she is not. And this makes the Democratic Party’s attempt to retain control of the presidency seem, for lack of a better word, doomed.
Recent polling puts Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris on fairly equal, unfavourable footing, with Mr. Biden at 54 per cent unfavourable and Ms. Harris following close behind at 52 per cent. A CNN poll from July 2 suggests that both Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris would lose to Mr. Trump, but Ms. Harris is within “striking distance” of two points, compared with Mr. Biden’s six. Tricky campaign-finance laws mean that Ms. Harris is also the only candidate who could use the hundreds of millions of dollars raised for Mr. Biden’s re-election for her own bid.
So why is there a lurking concern among Democrats and a dogged public perception that Ms. Harris is a weak candidate for president?
Some of this blame lies at the feet not of the Vice-President, but of the vice-presidency itself. Beyond the responsibility for casting tie-breaking votes in the Senate (which Ms. Harris has done 33 times, the most since vice-president John C. Calhoun, who left office in 1832), the role of the vice-president is constitutionally vague. The vice-president shares executive power with the president, but it’s not constitutionally clear what that means in practice. And so, in a counterintuitively macabre way, the vice-presidency is only the clearest line to replace the president in the most extraordinary of circumstances – that is, a president’s untimely demise.
Informally, over the past few decades the vice-president has been a link between the president and Congress, responsible for forging deals, navigating tricky political and personal terrain, and using established relationships to forge intraparty or (once upon a time) bipartisan diplomacy. Mr. Biden and former president Barack Obama operated as a governing team, with Mr. Biden using years of established political capital on Capitol Hill to push forward Mr. Obama’s policy agenda. The same was true for Mike Pence, who was a more rational and politically seasoned counterweight to Mr. Trump’s erraticism.
Herein lies the first of Ms. Harris’s problems: She is a recent admit to the U.S. Senate, having served for just two years before announcing her campaign to become the Democratic presidential nominee in 2019. She simply does not have the connections to successfully forge or sustain these relationships in Congress.
Without this key piece to her portfolio, Ms. Harris was left to take on – or be voluntold to take on – difficult, long-standing or controversial policy files with no easy answers: immigration (a wicked problem if there ever was one); voting rights (with legislation that was sentenced to death by filibuster in 2021); and most recently, after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, a spokesperson for the political flashpoint of abortion and women’s reproductive rights. These would be intractable issues at any point in American history; in today’s political climate, they are nearly insurmountable. This, again, frustrated Ms. Harris’s ability to define and enact a clear vision for her vice-presidency.
But Ms. Harris herself is not entirely blameless. Her first real introduction as vice-president to the American public, during an interview with Lester Holt, was widely viewed as a public-relations disaster that has haunted her ever since. Other communication gaffes over the years have surely been exacerbated by the media, but nevertheless always seemed uncomfortably reminiscent of quotes from the fictional vice-president Selina Meyer, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in HBO’s Veep. (A Daily Show montage from 2022 explicitly compares Selina Meyer’s line, “Well, we are the United States of America because we are united … and we are states” to Ms. Harris’s “I’m talking about the significance of the passage of time; right, the significance of the passage of time. So, when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time.”)
Ms. Harris just doesn’t do well at communicating Big Ideas. She’s not, as a 2023 profile of the Vice-President in The Atlantic argued, a “performance politician.” While Mr. Obama preached for a more perfect union in order for America to live up to its democratic ideals and Joe Biden epitomized the roll-up-your-sleeves attitude of working-class America, Ms. Harris rose to national prominence because of her sharp interrogations of Brett Kavanaugh and Jeff Sessions during Senate hearings. This is a valuable skill set for a prosecutor or state attorney-general; it does not readily or easily translate into a marketable public image as the second-in-command of the government of the United States.
This is a particularly consequential issue for Ms. Harris as the first Black person, the first South Asian, and the first woman to hold the office of vice-president. She’s under pressure to define a legacy that goes beyond this set of firsts, even as it most certainly was her gender and race that catapulted her above other potential running mates for Mr. Biden’s ticket in 2020. Some of this – and the double-bind of racism and sexism – is undoubtedly part of the perception that Ms. Harris is a weak contender as the presidential nominee.
But nuance is important, too. Ms. Harris’s nomination as the vice-presidential candidate in the summer of 2020 was a product of a particular moment of political and social mobilization around progressive politics, especially those that advanced racial justice. The forces that made a Harris vice-presidency possible were also laser-focused on the singular task of preventing another four years of the Trump administration. Ms. Harris was put in place as a candidate who might be able to reignite the fabled Obama coalition of racialized minorities, young voters and college-educated women, and keep those who believe in the multiracial future of the Democratic Party committed to the cause.
It turns out that racialized voters don’t simply vote for racialized candidates just because they’re racialized. Identity politics, affinity voting and partisan realignment in the United States are much more complicated than this. For the first time in recent memory, Democrats are losing ground among Black and Hispanic adults, the precise demographics that Ms. Harris was supposed to solidify for Mr. Biden. More importantly, Ms. Harris’s track record as a “smart-on-crime” prosecutor was never going to fly with the super-progressive left in the post-Black Lives Matter era.
Regardless, the moment that made Ms. Harris a formidable choice as Mr. Biden’s running mate has long passed. The fact that Americans are even contemplating a second Trump presidency demonstrates a bewildering political amnesia about the utterly insane, reckless, anti-democratic things Mr. Trump supported, attempted or accomplished between 2016 and 2020, including his many attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Now, four years later, Ms. Harris has proven to be less of an avatar for the inevitable multiracial future than a cipher of a left-of-centre politics full of ideological chasms (climate change, COVID-19, crime, the economy) and political landmines (DEI, the war on Gaza) that Democrats have not been able to successfully manage, contain or navigate.
The excitement over Ms. Harris’s candidacy in 2020 is long gone and, unfortunately, so is the urgency of defeating Mr. Trump. Is Kamala Harris more qualified to be president of the United States than Donald Trump? Undoubtedly. Would she win an election about the fate of American democracy? Dubious.