Back in March, I hopped a flight to Phoenix to interview Vice President Kamala Harris for my Snapchat show, Good Luck America, after she headlined an abortion rights rally in the swing state. It was the first time I’d been with Harris up close since her listless presidential campaign in 2020 and, like many people, my impressions of her had been shaped by the sometimes Veep-like viral clips and memes that came to define her during those first years as Joe Biden’s number two. She was cautious, mistake-prone, a little goofy, and tripped up by issues like immigration that were outside her comfort zone. Her struggles were magnified by the fact that the vice presidency is a thankless job. The press only covers a V.P. when they screw up, not when they cut a ribbon in Raleigh.
I’d written about Harris’s struggles, both as a political figure who never seemed to live up to the sky-high expectations placed upon her, and as a merciless boss with a roster of aggrieved former staffers in California and Washington. But in Arizona, I encountered a more impressive figure than the Selina Meyer caricature on social media. Harris had grown. How could she not? Three years of media glare, a relentless onslaught of speeches and policy briefings, meetings with over 150 world leaders—she was bound to improve.
Harris was more confident and relaxed, which made sense, since the Biden campaign had detailed her to focus on abortion rights and shoring up Democratic support among young and Black voters. Unlike in 2020, when her primary campaign confused progressive Twitter for real life, Harris now mostly understands the id of the Democratic base. At her rally in Phoenix, she pumped up a crowd of mostly Hispanic and Black party loyalists with her attacks on Donald Trump. This was when the Biden administration was taking heat from young progressives over its support for Israel’s war in Gaza. In our interview, Harris gave a pained and heartfelt answer on Gaza that was more sympathetic to the Palestinians than anything Biden had said. It made sense that her approval ratings among younger voters were a tick higher than Biden’s.
I wrote that “my biggest observation about Harris after leaving her in Arizona was that—as a politician—she’s better than she’s ever been.” I’m not a total bozo. I’ve been hanging out with pols for 17 years now. Still, I got some snickering texts from Democratic friends, no fans of Harris, teasing me about my Kamala flip-flop. But the text that stuck with me came from a Republican operative not far removed from Trump’s reelection campaign. This person had been feasting on Harris gaffes for years—her loopy word salads, her elementary school observation that “Ukraine is a country in Europe,” etcetera. But this Republican told me I was correct. Maybe the bar was low, but Harris was getting better as a politician. Over the last year, she’s been giving Republicans much less to work with.
I thought about this over the weekend as I watched a lot of Democrats and Never-Trump warriors slobber all over Harris’s appearance at the Essence Festival in New Orleans, where she lashed Trump and made the campaign’s case to Black voters simply by doing what the aging Democratic nominee cannot do—talk in complete sentences. Thanks to Biden’s dismal debate performance and the apocalyptic panic it’s unleashed among Democrats, a universe of people who considered Harris an afterthought have joined the KHive, rooting for her to replace Biden on the top of the ticket as their last best option to beat Trump. (Her new fans on Twitter are also claiming to be “coconut-pilled”—I’ll let you Google that one.)
Tim Miller, the Bulwark writer who’s lately been among the most outspoken Never-Trump voices calling on Biden to step aside, said that putting Harris on the ticket would make the race about Trump once again. “The vice president is already on that ballot because of Biden’s age, so why not get the benefits that could come with it?” he said. “She can at least offer a coherent contrast message, which would be a welcome shift. It could be ‘prosecutor vs. felon’ or ‘next-generation leader fighting for individual freedoms versus the old white fatso trying to take them away.’ Those are much better elevator pitches than whatever the current message is. What is the campaign’s current message, exactly?”
He has a point. As long as Biden is enduring public and private Democratic anguish, slipping poll numbers, and a ravenous media feeding frenzy—the campaign’s message is a mess. In Washington and Wilmington, his team is playing defense on questions about his old age and frailty. The presidential campaign is not currently about Trump at all. It’s a referendum on Biden. That’s never where you want to be as an incumbent—especially when your approval rating is 37 percent, the lowest of Biden’s presidency.
On Monday, Biden sent a letter to Democrats in Congress as a preemptive strike against any planned revolt, and he dialed into Morning Joe to assure the gang that he isn’t just the “presumptive Democratic nominee”—he is the nominee. Biden has promised more energy and more excitement since the debate. But in his interview with George Stephanopoulos on Friday, his campaign stop in Pennsylvania over the weekend, and his chat with Mika and Joe, Biden didn’t sound much more vigorous or lucid than he did the week before, or the month before that. Politically, it’s hard to see how he climbs out of this hole—which is why the talk of replacing him on the ticket, however fantastical, isn’t going to suddenly disappear anytime soon. And so here we are, with six weeks until the Democratic Convention in Chicago, talking about whether Kamala Harris can beat Donald Trump in November.
The Harris Bull Case
Last week, I asked a prominent Democrat in Wisconsin if Harris would be measurably better or worse than Biden as the nominee in the Badger State. My hunch was that while Harris might juice some flagging enthusiasm among Black voters in Milwaukee and libs in Madison, she’d probably lose some of Biden’s relative strength with older voters. This Democrat mostly agreed. “I think it probably wouldn’t make a difference,” he said. “Maybe she’d do worse, though. I don’t know. It’s all a fucked-up situation.” That about sums up the risk-reward analysis when it comes to swapping out Biden for Harris. No one is thrilled about it, exactly, and there’s no guarantee she would beat Trump—or be able to replicate the coalition that got Biden elected in 2020.
But for the Tim Millers of the world, Biden is slouching toward an Electoral College landslide loss in November. That’s what polls currently indicate, including the internal Democratic polling from OpenLabs I reported last week, which showed Biden bleeding support in every battleground state and possibly losing states thought to be safe a few weeks ago, like Virginia, New Hampshire, and Maine. Would Harris be doing much better?
She’s outrunning Biden narrowly in hypothetical matchups against Trump, and her approval ratings have ticked up a few points, even outpacing Biden’s at one point last week. But overall, her approval ratings are equally dismal at about 39 percent. Harris, too, would own the doubts about Biden’s economy and immigration policies. And she would have to prove herself in a debate against Trump—all while trying to become the first Black and Asian American female president in a country that at times still seems hostile to the idea.
The main argument for Harris replacing Biden is that she would be a reset button. After that, she would have to convince the rest of the country of what I saw in Arizona. One former Harris advisor I spoke with today—not one of the bitter ones—said that the expectations game would play to her benefit if she eventually wound up replacing Biden atop the ballot. “If and when she were to become the nominee, I think people would be pleasantly surprised. And I think, candidly, that’s because the bar has been set so low for her over the last few years. But I do think she could beat Trump—but only because it’s Trump.”
“Big League Pitching”
Democratic voters have been musing about replacing Biden on the top of the ticket for a couple years now. As much as the Biden campaign denies it, the appetite to replace the president has been a long-running theme in polls, especially among younger voters. But now that the conversation about replacing him is real and the subject of intense conversations among senior Democrats, the Harris hypothetical should be taken seriously as well.
The conversation I do find silly is the ongoing West Wing fanfic about a Democrat other than Harris—Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, J.B. Pritzker, whoever—leapfrogging the sitting vice president and becoming the nominee. Several notable Democrats, including the fellas over at Pod Save America, Rep. Jim Clyburn, and strategist James Carville, have advocated for some kind of semi-open nomination sprint in which Harris and the rest would compete for the affections of the 3,000+ delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Harris, they argue, would be a great option, but she shouldn’t be handed the job. “We need to move forward,” Carville wrote in The New York Times on Monday. “But it can’t be by anointing Vice President Kamala Harris or anyone else as the presumptive Democratic nominee. We’ve got to do it out in the open—the exact opposite of what Donald Trump wants us to do.”
I have a hunch that Carville, LSU-clad centrist that he is, harbors doubts about Harris’s political chops and her ability to win over moderate whites—or even suspicious Black men. Or maybe he’s calculating that a Whitmer-Shapiro ticket would guarantee wins in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and a clean Dem victory in November. But cutting Harris completely out of the campaign she’s been helping run and raising money for over the last year? That’s, well, complicated. “Kamala is not a choice. She’s the choice,” said Bakari Sellers, the Democratic lawyer and longtime Harris loyalist. Sellers believes Biden is still the horse for now, but if not: “She has the record, the money, the infrastructure, and something the rest don’t have—my momma and her friends, a.k.a. the base of the party.”
Yes, there is that. Passing over Harris for a white woman nicknamed “Big Gretch” could definitely risk wounding Black women. Harris struggled to connect with Black voters in 2020, especially in South Carolina, where she ran an explicitly identity-focused campaign. But since then, as vice president, she has developed a deeper connection with women of color, especially younger ones. It’s on display at the rallies she’s hosted on college campuses, especially HBCUs. But she still has work to do. Her approval rating among Black voters, you may or may not be surprised to learn, remains lower than Biden’s.
Harris has been loyal to Biden throughout his crisis of confidence. She has a vanishingly small group of trusted advisors, and relies on her family more than any political aide. Yes, some donors are moving around documents and theories to prop Harris up as the nominee. But as far as I can tell, Harris and her confidants aren’t doing anything of the sort, or indulging in the chatter. It would be suicidal to maneuver toward the nomination while her boss is sitting in the Oval.
I can channel what I think a Harris loyalist would say to a reporter right now: Unlike all the other possible Biden replacements, Kamala Harris is vetted. Democrats know her upsides and her downsides. The American public doesn’t hold her in particularly high regard, as with Biden and Trump. But at least they know her. Most voters don’t know a single thing about Josh Shapiro. And learning to be a presidential candidate on the fly is a dangerous thing, especially when you’re running against a wily Donald Trump.
Harris, meanwhile, has endured the national and global spotlight for years now, and would be a much safer plug-in option than any of the Democratic governors who think they’ve been playing in the major leagues but actually haven’t. Among them, only Newsom has come close, with his Fox News pop-ups and his tête-à-têtes with Trump when he was president.
As the former Harris advisor told me, “She has faced big league pitching before. A few of the governors have had their moments. But she has been in there three and a half years now. She has taken her lumps, but she is still standing.” The pressure cooker of a national campaign is far more intense than anything a new-to-the-scene governor has faced, even those from populous states. Harris can grind out three or four speeches a day, do the rounds of press, make the donor calls, sleep a few hours, and do it all over again the next day. As hyped as those other Democrats are, no one knows if any of them could slip right into Biden’s preexisting campaign infrastructure, with an enormous staff that has already been working for her, and hit the ground running.
Back in March, Harris told me she’s ready. “I’m the 49th vice president, the first one that looks like me, so maybe people are trying to wrap their heads around that, too,” she said. “But every vice president understands the seriousness and the significance of this position, which is to be ready. The president can be in one place at one time doing many things, certainly. But the vice president is there to serve, as somebody who can be there when the president can’t.”
