The New Hope, and New Worry, of Kamala Harris (2024)

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From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

[THEME MUSIC]

Today —

— as Democrat after Democrat races to anoint Kamala Harris as President Biden’s replacement —

— it’s become clear that, much like Biden himself, Harris will face no real competition in her path to the Democratic nomination, despite polling that shows weaknesses in her candidacy. I spoke with my colleagues Nate Cohn and Reid Epstein about why that is and what it may mean for her campaign.

It’s Tuesday, July 23.

Nate, I just want to begin by welcoming you back from paternity leave. As they say, out of the frying pan and into the fire.

[CHUCKLES]: Thanks, Michael.

So as we speak with you, Nate, the Democratic Party is in the process of putting almost all of its political support and its financial muscle behind Kamala Harris as the nominee to replace Joe Biden, led by Biden himself who endorsed her. And the collective message that this has been sending is that Democrats, especially the party brass, believe Harris can win, that she has a better chance than Biden of defeating Donald Trump.

And so we want to fact check that with you. Is Kamala Harris a strong nominee in the race against Donald Trump? And is coronating her, as the party seems to be doing, a wise decision based on the numbers?

Well, you laid out three facts for me to check, and I think that two of them check out. One thing that checks out is that Kamala Harris enters the race as a stronger candidate than Joe Biden was as he exits. His favorability ratings and approval ratings were in the 30s. He trailed Donald Trump by a wide margin in the national and state polls. Kamala Harris, in the early polling, looks a little stronger than that.

The second thing that checks out is that Kamala Harris can win. She starts out a little bit behind in the polls, but not by a lot. And frankly, there’s a whole campaign ahead of her. It’s not clear that we should read a ton into her initial standing. She’ll have every opportunity to improve and persuade the public that she should be her party’s nominee. The third thing you said, though, is that Kamala Harris is a strong nominee, and I’m not sure that is as easy to defend.

OK. Walk us through why that’s not a defensible claim.

I think the simplest way to demonstrate that is just to look at her favorability ratings. And that’s a jargony term for whether Americans say they like Kamala Harris or not. And for years, pollsters have found that a majority of Americans do not have a favorable view of Kamala Harris. Another way you can look at it is in terms of the race against Trump. Kamala Harris may be running a little bit better than Joe Biden, but Kamala Harris has trailed Donald Trump in almost every national and battleground state poll this cycle.

I want to make sure everyone absorbs that. Kamala Harris has trailed the man that she is now being set up to run against in this general election in almost every national and battleground state poll that you have seen this year.

That is correct.

Wow.

And we should put the big caveat out there, which is that Kamala Harris has not been a candidate for president in any of those polls.

Right, people have been asked to contemplate her as that thing in those polls, but she wasn’t that thing.

Exactly. We’re asking voters to consider a hypothetical. And Kamala Harris is a well-known candidate. She’s run for president before. She’s the vice president. Voters aren’t coming to this question with no information about her at all. So I think that it’s reasonable to read something into the polling we’ve seen at this point. But on the other hand, it’s worth noting she’s going to reintroduce herself to the public. And maybe she’ll come out of that stronger. She might also come out of it weaker. Republicans will attack her, and voters haven’t heard that either.

Right.

But the point is that as she enters the race, she does so behind and without a tremendous amount of goodwill from the voters in the middle of the electorate, who will likely decide the election. In the most recent Times/Siena poll of Pennsylvania, which is probably the single most important state in this election —

Right, the swingiest of the swing states in this election.

— only 42 percent of likely voters said they had a favorable impression of Kamala Harris, and 55 percent said unfavorable. That makes her less popular than Donald Trump, who had a 46 percent favorability rating in our poll. And it makes her a lot less popular than Joe Biden was four years ago when he won the state with a 51 percent favorability rating. And he only won narrowly, of course.

And how do we, Nate, account for that, why Harris is trailing Trump so consistently and struggling in a make-or-break swing state like Pennsylvania. How do you understand that?

One way to think about it is to think about how Democrats have handled every election, really since 2016. Beginning as soon as the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats committed to nominating relatively moderate, well-liked, broadly acceptable candidates, who had the potential to appeal to almost any voter who didn’t like Donald Trump or his MAGA allies. The 2018 midterms, they nominated political newcomers who were military veterans, who were blank slates on the issues and were moderates.

Right, we spoke to a lot of them on “The Daily” in that period. I’m thinking about Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, Mikie Sherrill in Virginia.

Great example. Mikie Sherrill, Abby Spanberger, Jason Crow. I mean, we can go on. In almost every district, it felt like the Democrats plucked someone who Republicans just weren’t going to have much to say against. And that made it a pretty simple election in these districts, right?

Voters knew they didn’t like Trump and the Republicans, and the Democrats put forward someone with a smile. They didn’t necessarily have enthusiastic bases of support, but they were acceptable to an electorate that did not want to support Republicans. We saw the same thing in 2020 with Joe Biden.

Joe Biden is a perfect example of someone who wasn’t exactly loved by the Democratic base. But was he acceptable to a Republican moderate in the suburbs? Yeah, he was a relatively moderate, elder statesman.

Right.

And they did it again in the midterms in 2022, where they ran well-liked incumbents — Mark Kelly in Arizona, Raphael Warnock, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro. These are broadly appealing candidates who didn’t come with a lot of baggage and made it easy for voters who didn’t want to vote for Republicans, who didn’t want to vote for MAGA, to vote against MAGA and to vote against Republicans, because there wasn’t much that Republicans could put forward to argue against those Democrats.

Right. So how much of Harris’s problem, based on the data you cited a few moments ago, can be traced to her falling outside of that broadly acceptable, moderate archetype that you just described that has defined the post-2016 Democratic playbook? And if so, why doesn’t she fit in to that mold?

I don’t think she fits neatly into that mold. And she brings a bit of baggage to the election that might make it challenging for her to put herself back in to that bucket. Going all the way back to the beginning of her political career, this is someone who rose in politics in the San Francisco Bay area, one of the most liberal places in the country. And to win politically there, she had to win among Democrats and among liberal Democrats.

It’s not necessarily something that sets her up to be popular among swing voters nationwide. To become a US senator, she didn’t necessarily even have to beat a Republican. She did have to beat a Republican to become attorney general in 2010, and to win re-election in 2014. But the critical political challenge that Kamala Harris built her career around was overcoming the opposition of other Democrats in one of the bluest states in the country.

When she ran for president in 2019, I think it revealed that that experience brought with her a series of political instincts that didn’t necessarily map neatly onto the demands of national politics. She ran to the left on Medicare for all, on whether she would ban fracking, and on other issues that made it challenging for her to look like the kind of broadly acceptable candidate and will give Republicans many opportunities to attack her in the course of the general election.

In fact, they’re already doing that. Trump and his allies are already calling Kamala Harris a left-wing figure. And based on everything you’re saying, she is vulnerable to that line of attack and to that perception.

Yeah. And in general, her campaigns have not always been characterized by tremendous political acumen. Her 2019 campaign really struggled. And she was out of the race long before Iowa. Her campaign was widely viewed as mismanaged.

She struggled to find an authentic political message in that campaign. And she seemed to be chasing the electorate, chasing the Democrats who seemed to be moving to the left, and so she followed them there. But she wasn’t really especially authentic at that either. And now she may be in the position where she needs to try and chase the electorate back the other way in the general election.

Right. I remember an episode we did during this period when Kamala Harris was running for the Democratic nomination in 2019. It was literally entitled, “What Does Kamala Harris Stand For?” And it came on the back of an interview that our colleague, Alex Burns, did with then Senator Harris, in which he talked to her about how hard it was to put any kind of an ideological label on her in that period.

Exactly. And her tenure as vice president hasn’t necessarily been marked with distinction either. She was put in charge of handling the border by President Biden at the beginning of his administration. The border is now one of the biggest political liabilities that the Democrats bring into this election.

And collectively, all that we’ve been talking about, the sense that it’s not clear what she stands for and that many of her campaigns and her tenure as vice president have been marked by question marks about her effectiveness as a manager and as a leader, have added up to the electorate not having a terribly favorable impression of her at the outset of this campaign.

Of course, what this doesn’t account for is Kamala Harris’s strengths, right? Her searing interrogations of Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing, which thrilled liberals. Her ability to speak powerfully about abortion rights. And the reality that with her as a potential nominee, Democrats can make this race about what they always wanted it to be about, which is Donald Trump, rather than an aging nominee struggling to communicate from the debate stage.

Absolutely. Kamala Harris will have a tremendous opportunity to redefine herself and reintroduce herself to the public. She will have many people who really want to support her. They will be open-minded to her pitch in the weeks ahead. And I think a lot of Democrats are going to learn just how down in the dumps they’ve been over the last year, when they hear someone capable of making a vigorous and energetic case against Donald Trump.

That said, the reality is she enters this race as a relatively unpopular candidate who isn’t the broadly appealing, acceptable Democrat that the party has turned to in election after election to make contests a simple up or down referendum on Donald Trump and his allies. And despite that, Democrat after Democrat after Democrat has come out and endorsed her candidacy, making it much harder, maybe even impossible for there to be any serious contest for the Democratic nomination.

[WHIMSICAL MUSIC]

Well, Nate, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thanks for having me, Michael.

After the break, politics reporter, Reid Epstein, on why nobody in the Democratic Party is challenging Harris.

We’ll be right back.

When do you want to start?

As soon as humanly possible.

Oh, you there?

Yeah, I’m here.

OK, I am walking up the stairs with my headphones. And I’m going to plug the —

What a champ.

— microphone in. And how about that? Now can you hear me?

Yes

Yep.

Great.

Reid, we just spoke with our colleague, Nate Cohn, about the strength or the lack of strength of Kamala Harris’s very likely Democratic nominee candidacy. And his conclusion is that she’s not all that strong at the moment. Yes, she’s stronger than Biden was vis-a-vis Trump, but still trails Trump in almost every poll that was done over the past year. So our question for you is pretty simple, why do you think that so many Democrats are lining up so quickly behind Kamala Harris, within the past hour or so, that now includes former House speaker, Nancy Pelosi? And why is there no real challenge to her, given all that information?

Well, there’s no challenge to her because Joe Biden made it practically impossible to challenge her. There was a brief window of about 20 minutes after Biden withdrew from the presidential campaign and before he endorsed Harris for someone else to run against her.

Twenty minutes?

I don’t remember exactly how long it was. But it was after I saw that he had dropped out and before I got home from the pool that he had endorsed Harris. And when he did that, he didn’t just transfer political support to her. He also transferred the $96 million that his campaign had in the bank. And he transferred the 1,300 people who worked for the campaign for him to her.

And so for anyone to run a truncated campaign that was going to take place in just a couple of weeks, targeting the 4,600 delegates to the Democratic convention, $96 million to $0 is a tough place to start. And so it did make it practically impossible for anyone else to challenge Kamala Harris.

But practically impossible doesn’t mean impossible. So what’s your understanding of why the prominent Democrats, whose names have been kicking around for a few weeks now since the debate, since it occurred to many people that Biden might drop out, why have none of those names indicated any interest in challenging Harris?

Well, the prospect of any of these people, and we’re talking about a field of white men mostly, seeking to oust a Black woman vice president who is literally next in line is politically untenable in today’s Democratic Party, a party that is increasingly dependent on women and people of color, that the argument that any of those people that we’re talking about would have needed to make really would have been built around her competence. And I don’t think any of them were prepared to make that argument.

You’re saying that even if these potential Democratic challengers had doubts, they would have been extremely loathed to run against Kamala Harris and be seen as trying to derail a historic nomination and, in the process, potentially alienating these key Democratic voting blocs that you just mentioned.

That’s correct.

These are understandable political reasons for potential rivals to sit on their hands, stay out of this race. They come on top of the argument that Biden just handed his entire political apparatus to Harris. But there is another argument for competition that, I think, is worth exploring. And it’s the argument made as recently as 24 hours ago by Congressman Dean Phillips, a Democrat who challenged Biden in the primary, who says basically any competition, even if it’s weak competition, does Harris favors because it forces her to become a stronger, more battle-tested candidate in a way that she wouldn’t be if she simply coronated in a matter of days.

Yeah, I mean, that sounds right if you were writing it script for a television show, you would want there to be competition. But here in real life, Democrats are petrified of Donald Trump winning the election again. And they are eager to move forward with a candidate who they can unite behind and make the case that Donald Trump should not be elected.

And the problem with Biden over the last three and a half weeks most acutely, but more broadly since the beginning of his campaign, was that Democrats and the Biden campaign could not convince voters that Biden was up to the job of being the president again for another four years. And if you couldn’t get voters to buy into that, you couldn’t get to the second point, which was that Donald Trump is a threat to X, Y, and Z. And so that was really the problem with Biden.

And they think that Harris is going to be able to prosecute the case of all the things that they want voters to worry about with Trump in a way that Biden could not. And the first order of business on that is abortion, an issue in which she is far more comfortable talking about than Biden is and a far more adept messenger to make the case about Trump and abortion rights than Biden ever has been.

So that’s an area where you’re looking for early signs that Kamala Harris, the likely nominee, is truly able to distinguish herself and prove herself, perhaps a possessor of greater political skills than she is by reputation.

Yeah, and I think her political skills are better than her reputation, frankly. She ran a lousy campaign for president in 2020. And then after Joe Biden was elected, she was handed a portfolio of impossible issues. She was given the border. She was given voting rights. But really, since the Dobbs decision two years ago —

Overturning Roe v Wade, yup.

— she’s been a much more capable public performer. And my guess is that people for whom the image of her was cemented early in her vice presidency, may wind up being surprised at how she performs under the bright lights of being the nominee herself.

Right. We talked about this with Nate. It’s extremely possible that Kamala Harris will be a successful Democratic nominee. She’s already clearly energized many Democrats who were totally crestfallen over what happened with Biden. But if it turns out that her short general election campaign doesn’t go well and if she doesn’t beat Trump, how much of the blame will belong directly to Joe Biden for putting the party and Harris in this situation by discouraging anyone else from running against him, by snuffing out any whiff of competition?

I mean, he changed the primary calendar to favor him and him alone. He ditched Iowa and started the primaries in South Carolina, a state he knew he would win. I mean, how much of this is going to be on him if Harris loses?

Well, you should be clear that Biden made a choice to seek re-election, but it was the rest of the party, with the exception of a little known Congressman from Minnesota, who made the collective decision not to challenge Joe Biden for re-election. I remember having conversations with people before Biden formally entered the race that there would have been tens of millions of dollars available for a candidate in the mold of Bernie Sanders to run from Biden’s left. There was talk of billionaire candidates like JB Pritzker getting in the race and self-funding.

But I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to blame Biden for the lack of competition. It’s the rest of the party that covered their eyes and told everyone that Biden would be fine, that bear more the responsibility on this front.

And that makes me wonder, as a concluding question here, do you think that the Democratic Party needs to just have a bigger conversation about competition and about more people entering into these races? I mean, there’s no absence of competition on the Republican side, despite the huge way in which Donald Trump looms over that party. You had multiple governors running against him this year, despite his obvious strengths. And nothing on the Democratic side. And so is that a conversation you expect the Democrats to start having, really, no matter how this turns out?

Michael, this is less a story about competition, as it is a story about the elites of the party not listening to their own voters. There was ample evidence, over years, that large percentages of Democrats did not want Joe Biden to run for a second term. But when he did, they all stepped aside and gave him a glide path to the nomination anyway. And the result that they got was a deeply-flawed nominee who couldn’t make it to the finish line. And now it’s so late in the game that there’s no time to have a real competition to replace him.

[WHIMSICAL MUSIC]

Reid, thank you very much.

Thank you, Michael.

On Monday night, a majority of Democratic delegates endorsed Vice President Harris as Biden’s replacement. And she moved quickly to assert herself as the de facto Democratic nominee. Harris asked former attorney general, Eric Holder, to oversee her choice of a running mate and persuaded the current leadership of Biden’s campaign to remain in place and run her campaign against Trump.

Finally, in her first campaign speech, Harris took Trump on directly, invoking her history as a lawyer and a prosecutor.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today.

During a heated congressional hearing on Monday, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle faced angry questions about her agency’s plan to protect Donald Trump on the day when he was shot. But she repeatedly declined to answer basic inquiries about his security.

As a result, lawmakers from both parties told Cheatle that she had lost their confidence.

Today’s episode was produced by Eric Krupke, Diana Nguyen, Claire Toeniskoetter, Lynsea Garrison, and Mooj Zadie. It was edited by Patricia Willens and Paige Cowett, contains original music by Marion Lozano and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.