AS SOON AS Joe Biden announced that he would no longer seek re-election, attention turned to his replacement. Mr Biden endorsed Kamala Harris, his vice-president and running-mate, and dozens of Democratic lawmakers and governors have followed suit. With the groundswell of establishment support behind her, she is likely to be chosen as the nominee at the Democratic convention next month.
It is highly likely that switching from Mr Biden to Ms Harris improves Democrats’ chances of retaining the White House. For most of his presidency, Mr Biden’s poll numbers have exceeded hers. Since his disastrous debate on June 27th, however, that gap has vanished. In polls taken before the debate, Mr Trump led Mr Biden by a margin of 45% to 44%, whereas he beat Ms Harris in a hypothetical race by 48% to 42%. Since then, she has cut this deficit to 48% to 45%, roughly matching Mr Biden’s shortfall. A recent survey by YouGov found that Ms Harris’s net favourability rating was minus 15 points, worse than Mr Trump’s, at minus 10, but better than Mr Biden’s, which was minus 20.
Mr Biden struggled with young and non-white voters. Democrats hope that the first black female and first Asian presidential nominee, who is 18 years younger than Mr Trump, will re-energise these parts of their base. However, the one bright spot in Mr Biden’s campaign was his resilience with older and white voters, who are particularly prevalent in Midwestern battleground states. Ms Harris might struggle to win the electoral college if she cannot match Mr Biden’s showing with these groups.
Polls asking respondents how they would vote in hypothetical contests are often poor predictors of survey results once nominees are chosen. And voters’ views on candidates can change sharply once a campaign gets under way. But there are other reasons to consider Ms Harris an upgrade on Mr Biden. Weeks of paltry fundraising, shaky public appearances and demands from fellow Democrats for him to withdraw had all called his campaign’s viability into question. At the very least, Ms Harris should be able to conduct energetic campaign events and get the money flowing—ActBlue, a left-leaning online contribution platform, announced that small donors had contributed more than $50m within hours of her announcement that she was entering the race.
Whether Ms Harris is in fact the Democrats’ most electable candidate is far harder to assess. Only a handful of hypothetical polls have been taken pitting a wide range of potential Democratic candidates against Mr Trump, and they generally show all of them losing save for Michelle Obama. Ms Harris’s past electoral record is underwhelming: she won California’s attorney-general race in 2010 by less than a percentage point, a tiny margin compared with the performances of other Democrats in the state that year. In 2014 she performed roughly in line with fellow California Democrats, and she ended her disappointing campaign for the 2020 presidential race two months before the primaries began. She had been polling in the single digits.
But as with hypothetical polling, there are reasons to be cautious about extrapolating statewide electoral performances to presidential elections. Split-ticket voting is higher in midterm elections, like those in which Ms Harris previously ran. Her Republican opponent in 2010 was a moderate who had already won an election in populous, heavily Democratic Los Angeles.
Ms Harris will probably look for a running-mate who can shore up support among demographic groups, and in states, where she lags. Among the rumoured possible contenders are Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of Pennsylvania, which is also the largest swing state. In one poll nearly 30% of Republicans approved of his performance as governor, though how those voters will feel about him if he competes alongside Ms Harris and against Mr Trump is another matter. Other possibilities include Roy Cooper, the governor of North Carolina, and Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, a deep-red Appalachian state. Mark Kelly, Arizona’s astronaut-turned-senator, has also been name-dropped.
Without a competitive Democratic primary, it is difficult to know how these politicians might fare on the national stage and under the stress of a presidential campaign. While a strong vice-presidential candidate can help, the fate of Ms Harris’s campaign will rest mainly on her own shoulders. And despite her national profile, Ms Harris still has room to rise—or fall. Some 7% of respondents tell pollsters at YouGov that they do not have an opinion about her, a far larger margin than what she would need to beat Mr Trump. ■