The narrative has been set: Democrats are uniting behind Kamala Harris. They are energized! She will save the election for the Democrats.
What a cute story.
The media are all too willing to help push this narrative. Yes, they're the same media that spent the past four years covering up Joe Biden's cognitive decline, and they're the same media that were "shocked, shocked" after Biden's disastrous debate performance. And yes, they're the same media that, less than a year ago, were calling on Joe Biden to dump Kamala Harris from the ticket to save his election because she, not Joe, was the drag on the ticket!
As early as the fall of 2022, comedian Bill Maher was calling on Joe to ditch Kamala.
“It’s very hard to take the nomination away from the president,” Maher said. “What I could see is replacing the vice president because she’s not very popular anywhere. And it didn’t seem to work out. And I don’t know. That’s been done before in a ticket.”
A year ago, Newsweek editor-at-large Tom Rogers also argued that the key to saving the 2024 election for Democrats was ditching Kamala.
“These disastrous polls have some arguing for ditching President Biden and mounting a serious alternative candidate. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s name has been floated in this context. But this would be a mistake,” Rogers says. “The Democrats shouldn’t replace President Biden; they should replace Vice President Kamala Harris, who is even more unpopular, and who would replace President Biden in the event of an unfortunate circumstance related to his age and capabilities.”
In September of last year, Eric Levitz wrote a piece for New York Magazine called "The Case for Biden to Drop Kamala Harris," in which he cited her dismal approval ratings and the similarly negative public perceptions about her competence. He even posited that her numbers would only get worse in the presidential limelight. "Hillary Clinton boasted a 65 percent approval rating as secretary of State, then went on to become one of the most unpopular major-party nominees in history."
More critically, we’ve already seen Harris wither in the spotlight of a presidential campaign. When she entered the 2020 Democratic primary, she boasted a strong fundraising base and a bevy of high-profile endorsements. Her campaign launch immediately propelled her to 15 percent support in the polls, putting her in second place behind Biden. Yet by the time she dropped out in December 2019, she was polling at under 4 percent nationally, just a smidge ahead of novelty candidate Andrew Yang. In theory, Harris was supposed to have special appeal to African American voters; in practice, when she exited the race, she was polling behind Pete Buttigieg in South Carolina. Further, her oratory as both a candidate and vice-president has been infamously awkward and unassured.
In an article for the Washington Post the same month, columnist David Ignatius wanted neither Biden nor Harris to run but suggested as a backup plan that Biden should ditch Harris.
Because of their concerns about Biden’s age, voters would sensibly focus on his presumptive running mate, Harris. She is less popular than Biden, with a 39.5 percent approval rating, according to polling website FiveThirtyEight. Harris has many laudable qualities, but the simple fact is that she has failed to gain traction in the country or even within her own party.
Journalist Josh Barro similarly called on Biden to pick a new running mate for his 2024 campaign. "Even despite all the (very real!) voter concern about Biden’s age and stamina, she is a much worse national candidate than he is," he wrote. "This shouldn’t be surprising, because there is little in Harris’s pre-vice presidential career to suggest that she would be a strong national candidate."
Usually, the case for Harris’s electoral appeal is built around her race and gender: That as a black woman, she improves the Democratic ticket’s appeal to black voters and to women. But Harris’s role as a draw for black voters is more theoretical than demonstrated. She has never had a core political base among black voters because she has never been elected in a jurisdiction with a large black population.
The calls for Biden to drop Harris were far-fetched in that Biden was never going to ditch the "first black woman vice president." As terrible as she has been as vice president, dropping her would have caused major backlash. It should come as no surprise that Barro now claims that "she stands a decent shot of beating Donald Trump in November." Rogers, to his credit, still thinks that Harris is the weakest alternative to Biden.
In the end, I expect that most of the liberal pundits who recognized Kamala's weakness on the ticket will flip-flop and praise her for giving the Democrats a chance. That doesn't change the fact that the liberal media is now hyping as the party's savior the same woman that Biden supposedly needed to jettison last year to save his chances.
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