Will voters see Harris as a new candidate offering change, or as a continuation of an unpopular administration?
Joe Biden may have dropped out of the 2024 presidential campaign, but the role of the incumbent president is still the biggest question mark in this race.
Opinion polling throughout the 2024 cycle thus far has confirmed three strongly visible trends:
First, voters have an unfavorable view of Joe Biden, and an even more unfavorable view of his performance in office. Those views get even less favorable to Biden when you drill down to most major issues (the economy, national security, the border, crime, etc.).
Second, voters have the same unfavorable view of Donald Trump that they’ve had consistently for eight years, but there is some nostalgia for his performance as president, which looks better in retrospect as voters compare the pre-pandemic state of the economy, the border, the culture, and the global landscape to today.
Third, Trump has held a persistent lead over Biden in the national and swing-state polls, with strong leads toward winning states that Biden won in 2020 — Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada — and more modest leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
While there’s been some movement at the margins, all of these trends have been remarkably stable through Trump’s criminal conviction, Biden’s disastrous debate performance, and the assassination attempt on Trump. Kamala Harris is enjoying a surge thus far, but it’s too early to project either that she will erase Trump’s leads or that her improvement over late-stage Biden will be durable.
Trump is far too much of a known quantity for much to change beyond this point unless he has a dramatic health crisis, although Democrats still pin their hopes on his sentencing on September 18. He can do little to add to his positives, and his negatives are universally known already. His selection of J. D. Vance as running mate removed his last option to try to broaden his appeal.
Harris is not, by herself, a good candidate, given her unappealing personality and radical record. At every point during the Biden presidency up until he dropped out, she’s been more unpopular than Biden. Still, given how unpopular Trump remains and how much enthusiasm the press and the entertainment industry can generate for Harris over a shortened campaign, you’d have to consider this a brand-new race if she can convince Americans to give her a fresh look without the time to look very closely.
If.
That’s the big question: Will voters see Harris as a new candidate offering change, or as a continuation of an unpopular administration?
Harris’s task won’t be easy. Biden remains in office, which by itself presents challenges for her. If she endorses his actions and proposals, as she did with today’s push for Supreme Court term limits, she just draws closer to Biden. If Biden continues to decline in public, that, too, puts a continuing spotlight on the role Harris played in covering up his condition. And the nagging divide within the Democratic coalition caused by the war in Gaza isn’t going away, even as Harris tries to tilt more toward the side of pandering to the anti-Israel progressive base.
It will get harder at the Democratic convention. The smart play would be for the convention to leave Biden behind, the way Republicans did with George W. Bush in 2008 (his only remarks were from a remote video, and the whole convention focused on John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama). But Democrats are dug into arguing (as Biden did in his Oval Office farewell speech) that things are going great and that Biden’s presidency has been a historic success. Part of the implicit deal in getting Biden to step down has been that party bigwigs will continue to lavish praise on him. The convention is likely to feature big speeches by the president and the first lady. Harris herself has yet to show any inclination to turn her back on “Biden-Harris administration” branding, and she accomplished nothing of note in the Senate, so if she doesn’t run on the administration’s record, she’ll be reduced to glossing over what exactly she’s been doing for the past eight years. A convention that hails the Biden record will just emphasize to Americans that electing Harris will fix none of the things Biden has done wrong.
We’ve had seven presidential elections since the Second World War where the incumbent president was not on the ballot: Harry Truman in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower in 1960, Lyndon Johnson in 1968, Ronald Reagan in 1988, Bill Clinton in 2000, Bush in 2008, and Barack Obama in 2016. In only one of them (1988) did the incumbent party win, and that was behind a president whose final approval rating was 63 percent. Sitting vice presidents lost in 1960, 1968, and 2000. Before 2008, one must go back to Truman in 1952 to find an incumbent not running for reelection whose disapproval rating was over 50 percent.
This is a near-unique situation, however, not least because all of those prior administrations had held power for two terms; not since Grover Cleveland in 1896 has a sitting president not been on the ballot after his party held the White House for just one term (Democrats lost that one), and Cleveland was finishing his second nonconsecutive term. The last time before that was 1884, when Chester Arthur wasn’t nominated for reelection, and the Republicans lost for the first time in 24 years.
The reality is, we don’t know how voters will view Harris. If she is able to get out of Biden’s shadow and make her own impression on voters, she might still end up losing by a worse margin than Biden was on track to lose by. But at least that loss would be her own. Only once we are through the Democratic convention will we really be able to judge whether she’s being evaluated by the voters just on her own merits and not with the baggage of four years of the Biden-Harris administration.