Harris has not been a great politician. But hopefully she’s good enough.

That’s understandable. We have little evidence that Harris is an excellent politician. But the case against Harris is also weak. Let me debunk some myths:

Myth: Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign failed largely because she was a terrible candidate.

Reality: Harris faced major challenges outside of her control.

I wrote about Harris’s potential presidential candidacy in 2018 and talked extensively to her staffers about it. I felt she would be a strong candidate. Her aides obviously did too. But we made a few wrong assumptions:

1. Biden would either not run or would make major gaffes, as in his previous presidential campaigns;
2. There was a big opening to be the favorite of African American Democrats;
3. Voters would care a lot about “electability” but be open to definitions of that beyond “White moderate male”;
4. Harris would be one of the strongest candidates on the trail in terms of connecting with and energizing voters.

As I went to events for various candidates in early 2019, I was surprised by how pervasive the feeling was, particularly among women, that Hillary Clinton had lost in 2016 largely because of her gender. Democrats therefore needed to nominate a man, these voters told me. They were even more skeptical of a Black woman winning the general election.

Many Black voters not only said Biden seemed most likely to defeat Donald Trump, but also they respected him from his time as vice president. Biden entered the race with a lot of support among older Black voters — and never lost it.

Finally, I didn’t know who the mayor of South Bend, Ind., was and had never seen a campaign aimed at progressives who loved policy details. Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren did a really great job running for president in 2019, wooing many of the liberal, college-educated White voters whom Harris needed to reprise Barack Obama’s 2008 primary victory.

I’m not sure Harris, because of her race and gender, and Biden’s strength with Black voters, ever really had a chance of winning the Democratic nomination. I still think Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) is a talented politician, even though he didn’t do well five years ago either.

Harris did struggle to articulate her policy stands at times. But during that same campaign, the eventual winner, Biden, defended his work with pro-segregation senators in the 1980s. (He backtracked after sharp criticism.) The withering critiques of Harris’s campaign back then reflected a complicated reality: A party that prides itself on diversity really wanted to pick a White guy. “Kamala Harris is a terrible candidate” was a much easier story for Democrats to tell themselves than, “She is not a great candidate and that saves us from having to say out loud that we really want to nominate a White man anyway.”

Myth: Harris was chosen to be Biden’s running mate mostly because of pressure from African Americans and White guilt after the killing of George Floyd.

Reality: Harris was chosen to balance the ticket, just as Biden had been 12 years earlier.

In a piece I wrote with some colleagues in March 2020, before any of us had heard of Floyd, we predicted Biden would choose Harris. Why? It seemed unlikely the Democrats in 2020 would run an all-White or all-male ticket. Biden had already promised to pick a female vice president. But even without that promise, he would have been under huge pressure to do that anyway. Harris was the most prominent Democrat who was both a racial minority and a woman. And that’s a credit to her pre-2019 political skills: Harris is one of only two Black women in U.S. history to be elected to the Senate.

There was another factor in her favor: ideology. Progressives would have been very frustrated if Biden chose Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) or another person who, like Biden, had spent 2019 distancing themselves from the party’s left. But centrists would have been opposed to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) or another strong progressive. So Harris’s positioning between the left and the center, not ideal in a very crowded presidential primary field, was a great fit for the vice-presidential nominee. She wasn’t hated by any faction of the party.

The selection process for Harris was not particularly unusual. Biden was also picked as vice president because of ideology and race — a moderate White politician who might reassure voters wary of electing a liberal African American from Chicago in Obama. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chose Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) in 2016 because of this same ticket-balancing dynamic.

Floyd’s death did affect the process. Biden had said he would pick a woman, and there was pressure to pick a Black woman. That led to the unusual consideration of people who had not served as governor or senator to be vice president, such as former National Security adviser Susan Rice and then-Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.)

Biden did actually promise to select a Black woman to the Supreme Court. I suspect the selection of Harris and the latter one of Ketanji Brown Jackson are being conflated in some ways.

Myth: Harris had a dreadful first two years as vice president because of her mistakes.

Reality: Harris didn’t fit Biden’s early-term strategy.

It is hard for me to imagine how Harris would have had a good 2021-2022. The ethos of the Biden White House back then (and really the president’s entire political career) was essentially, “Democrats succeed politically when they appeal to White moderate voters, and that’s done by talking mostly about the economy and not being too liberal on abortion, crime, immigration, policing and race.” The administration’s approach was not just a rejection of “defund the police” and the more leftist elements of the Floyd protests, but in some ways Obama’s administration and Clinton’s presidential campaign. It was an administration led by a moderate White man that intended to appeal to moderate White people.

Harris, a woman of color who rose to power in very liberal San Francisco and seems most passionate when speaking about civil rights issues, is not an ideal figure for such a strategy. When the administration deployed her to discourage migrants from trying to come to the United States, it was not playing to her strengths.

The conventional wisdom has now shifted on Harris, who is increasingly described as an asset to the Democratic Party and perhaps a superior candidate to Biden. But what’s really changed is the broader political climate and the Democrats’ strategy. Abortion and Republicans banning books by LGBTQ+ authors are viewed as favorable political terrain for Democrats. Fixating on infrastructure and praising the police constantly didn’t make Biden popular. Harris is well-positioned for a 2024 presidential campaign in a way that she wasn’t suited to be a great surrogate for the 2021 Biden White House.

Again, the narrative about Harris wasn’t totally wrong. It’s troubling how much staff turnover she had. But her mistakes were exaggerated.

The reality about Kamala Harris is that she is a decent-but-unspectacular politician … like the president. Biden and Harris both hail from states that used to be more politically divided but have become reliably Democratic. So they both rose without facing a lot of super-tough races after their early victories. Neither is a great orator, policy expert or visionary leader. Both ran lackluster presidential campaigns but then were vaulted to the vice presidency over stronger rivals for ticket-balancing purposes.

Biden became the Democratic nominee because of doubts about Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and because he was a well-known figure in the party from having served as vice president. Harris will likely become the party’s candidate because of concerns about Biden and because she is the sitting vice president. Harris is a historic and perhaps risky candidate because of her gender and race. But Biden’s age made him an unusual and risky candidate in 2020 and particularly this year.

My case for Harris is really a “case against the case against Harris.” With the Democratic National Convention looming and Trump leading in the polls, it makes sense that the Democrats seem to have coalesced around the vice president instead of leaving the party’s nomination up for grabs.

Perhaps Harris is a great presidential candidate in a way that she wasn’t five years ago, or she is more suited to a general election than a primary. But a party that had previously settled on 81-year-old Joe Biden wasn’t prioritizing having a great candidate in the first place. Based on what we know right now, Harris is a fine politician, and we have to hope that fine is enough to defeat Trump.

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