Perhaps the last bulwark standing between Joe Biden and a mob of petrified Democrats demanding his ouster is the general perception that his most likely successor, Kamala Harris, would underperform even the incumbent president in a general election against Donald Trump.
CNN’s post-debate polling has thrown cold water on that assumption:
CNN poll:
Trump 49
Biden 43Trump 47
Harris 45https://t.co/KN58sTDKQm— Conor Sen (@conorsen) July 2, 2024
In this survey of registered voters, Harris outperforms Biden among women and independents, which is only likely to cement the impression among a majority of registered Democrats (56 percent in CNN’s survey) that the Democratic Party has a better chance of winning in November if Biden isn’t on the ticket. This is not, however, reflective of a shift in how the public views Harris. With a pathetic 29 percent favorability rating, the vice president remains deeply unpopular.
Interestingly, CNN’s pollster also tested how Trump would perform against some other potential Democratic presidential nominees, including Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, and Gretchen Whitmer. Harris outperformed them all, though Donald Trump’s share of the vote improved only marginally in a contest against Newsom. But as CNN’s write-up of its poll observes, Harris is the best known to potential general-election voters, and her performance is likely attributable to widespread name recognition alone. If someone other than Harris was plucked from the Democratic bench to stand in for Biden, their relative obscurity would be swiftly remedied.
Still, the sequence of events that would yield a Democratic nominee other than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris is hard to imagine. The conditions that would give way to Biden’s decision to bow out of the 2024 race were always far easier to envision. Harris’s viability as a potential alternative nominee only makes it easier still.