On the menu today: I began this morning by contemplating the question of which figure was most likely to shape the future of Ukraine. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin came first to mind, of course, and then President Joe Biden. But beyond 2025, the person who is most likely to be shaping U.S. policy on this conflict, and everything else, is Vice President Kamala Harris. Right now, Donald Trump is beating Ron DeSantis, and Joe Biden is beating Donald Trump despite barely hanging on to the ability to perform his duties at age 80. This is a recipe for a President Harris to end up calling the shots in the coming years, and considering the consequences, it is remarkably under-discussed.
The Real Presidential Favorite
Right now, Donald Trump looks like a considerable favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination, with slightly more than half of GOP-leaning voters eager to nominate him again, and the other slightly less than half split among the rest of the field. Yes, Ron DeSantis has the largest chunk of that minority, but he’s well behind Trump and has a lot of work to do to regain momentum, consolidate support, and overtake the former president.
The national head-to-head polling numbers between President Joe Biden and Trump are closer than you might think. Right now, in the RealClearPolitics average, Biden is only ahead by half a percentage point. But we don’t select our president through a national popular vote, we do so through an Electoral College. And in those swing states, the early polling points to a tight contest.
In mid June in Arizona, Public Opinion Strategies (POS) found Biden beating Trump by two percentage points, while Ron DeSantis beat Biden by eight percentage points. The same firm surveying at the same time found Biden beating Trump by three percentage points in Pennsylvania, while DeSantis beat Biden by three points. In Georgia, POS found Biden beat Trump by two percentage points, while DeSantis beat Biden by three. In Michigan, the same firm found DeSantis beating Biden by two percentage points, while Trump trails Biden by a point. And in Nevada, POS found DeSantis beating Biden by two points, and Trump losing to Biden by four points.
Perhaps most surprisingly, in my home state of Virginia, POS finds DeSantis and Biden tied, while Biden is ahead of Trump by seven percentage points.
In fact, once you start looking at other states and other pollsters, you see a consistent pattern of DeSantis winning just a few percentage points more support than Trump does in head-to-head matchups with Biden. In North Carolina, Opinion Diagnostics finds DeSantis winning over Biden by five percentage points, while Trump beats Biden by three points. Over in Wisconsin, Marquette University polling found Biden beating DeSantis by two percentage points, but beating Trump by nine points.
These polls were conducted in June and July, and most of their results were within the margin of error. Voters’ preferences may well change between now and then, although both Trump and Biden are the ultimate well-established brands.
You can put as much stock in those polling numbers as you like. I see a Republican Party that has at least one candidate who has good odds of beating Biden in a bunch of key swing states, but appears determined to not nominate that guy. (The fact that DeSantis is beating Biden in so many of these swing states undermines the conventional wisdom that “no one likes DeSantis” and “Biden is in strong shape for reelection.”) The GOP appears hell-bent on nominating the guy who is trailing Biden in a lot of these swing states, and who in fact already lost these swing states in this exact same matchup three years ago.
Right now, Trump appears likely to beat DeSantis and everyone else in the 2024 GOP primary. Right now, Biden appears likely to beat Trump in the 2024 general election.
The good news for Biden is that back in April, a longevity-modeling firm told the Financial Times that its model calculated that Joe Biden will live until age 91, which would take him through a second term. The bad news is that the model only accounts for life expectancy, not quality of health in those final years. Dementia and cognitive impairment are common among those who reach old age, and the presidency requires a man to be at the top of his game, day after day, year after year.
On Tuesday, President Biden had a public meeting with Israeli president Isaac Herzog at the White House, and Biden did not look well. (You can watch the video and judge for yourself.) His head drooped down as he read prepared remarks from a notecard, and his voice was particularly soft and mumbled. (No, Biden did not fall asleep, as Monica Crowley tweeted.) There’s no need to exaggerate the reasons for concern; Biden looked exhausted and was almost inaudible, even though this was his first public event since the previous Thursday. He was not jet-lagged from some long foreign trip; He’d spent the weekend at Camp David. His only scheduled event on Monday was his daily presidential briefing from the intelligence community.
How much more energetic, sharp, and focused do you think Joe Biden will be in the years between January 2025 and January 2029? The likelihood that Biden will no longer be able to perform his duties as he approaches his mid-80s is considerable.
So in the coming years, the person who may well have the biggest role in shaping the U.S. economy, the ongoing U.S. response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the rise of an aggressive China, the nominations to the Supreme Court, and the fentanyl and border crises is . . . Vice President Kamala Harris.
Not many Americans have great confidence in that scenario. As of July 5, 41 percent of registered voters had a favorable opinion of Harris and 53 percent had an unfavorable opinion. A recent NBC poll found just 32 percent of respondents have a favorable opinion of her, the lowest score for any vice president in the poll’s history.
The argument from some Harris fans is that this reflects systemic racism and sexism and “gendered disinformation.” Today in The Hill, Lauren Leader contends, “It’s hard to square the outsized negative attention she receives with any rational critique, and impossible not to see parallels to the only other woman ever to come so close to our nation’s highest office — Hillary Clinton.”
(If you’re Harris, you would probably prefer not to be compared to Hillary Clinton.)
The problem with this counterargument is, you don’t get a record-low approval rating just because of conspiracy theories and criticism from the opposition. Ask Joe Biden if he feels like the opposition is fair to him and his family. Everybody in politics gets this to some degree, and there are just as many left-wing loons spinning conspiracy theories and mean memes about Republicans as right-wing loons doing the same to Democrats.
As this newsletter has mentioned a few times, it isn’t just Republicans who have no faith in Harris; quite a few Democratic officials will say, on background or off the record, that they no longer believe she will ever have “the force, charisma and skill to mount a winning presidential campaign.” This is why you have not seen a single prominent Democratic official or left-of-center columnist calling upon Biden to limit himself to one term and for Harris to be the Democrats’ 2024 presidential nominee. There are reports that even President Biden is disappointed in her performance.
Right now, 17 percent of Democrats have an unfavorable opinion of Harris. I doubt that is driven by right-wing criticism or “gendered disinformation.” Right now, 59 percent of independents feel unfavorably about her, and only 30 percent of independents feel favorable.
We are getting some “Kamala Harris has turned a corner” pieces again, a political tradition as predictable as the biannual “this is the year Texas Democrats win some key statewide races” pieces.
Democrats convinced themselves that Harris was a political superstar, just waiting to burst onto the stage.
Let’s put aside her bizarre rambling for a moment. Harris had arguably the best debut in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary in June 2019 — iironically because she took on Joe Biden over forced-busing policies in the 1970s and landed the line, “That little girl was me.” On paper, Harris did have everything a presidential candidate would want — a unique profile as a minority woman with prosecutorial experience, an extensive fundraising network and base of support in the country’s most populated state, and relative youth and energy compared to bigger names like Biden and Bernie Sanders.
But by November 2019, Harris was ending her campaign before any votes were cast, and a devastating profile in the New York Times pulled back the curtain on her dysfunctional campaign, full of infighting, disgruntled staff, furious managers, finger-pointing, and botched decisions, all presided over by an indecisive candidate. Between that and the rotating carousel of staff coming in and out of Harris’s office during her time as vice president, the evidence is clear: Harris is a lousy manager. The Biden team only allowed her to bring over a handful of her Senate staffers, and it’s been near-constant friction ever since. Even worse, almost every staffer who has a bad experience with her has no fear of crossing her, and is eager to blab about how lousy the experience was to outlets such as the Washington Post and the New York Times. As I wrote back in late 2021:
This illuminates one of the great contrasts between the hype and mythology surrounding Kamala Harris — “Making History,” smiling on the cover of Vogue, etc. — and the mundane reality. A surprising number of people who have actually worked with and for her not only don’t see her as a legend, an icon, or an inspiring leader, they walk away from their experience with her not thinking all that highly of her. She may well have been a talented prosecutor, but in a lot of ways she’s just a standard-issue pol who figured out how to climb the ladder of interest-group dominated California politics. She’s in over her head, her political instincts are terrible, and that’s even before the uniquely challenging dynamics of this particular presidency — unfamiliar staff, old president, few real friendships on Capitol Hill, and an unclear sense of priorities.
Anyway, right now, Harris is the person most likely to be sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office sometime after January 20, 2025.
Good luck, America.
ADDENDUM: Our Christian Schneider notices that Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, “created a new law that had neither been contemplated nor voted upon by the Republican-controlled legislature,” and “locked in an enhanced level of school spending for the next 400 years.”
Forget dying in darkness. Sometimes democracy dies right before our eyes, with the lights on and everybody watching.