In the weeks since a group of secretive Democratic powerbrokers pushed President Joe Biden out of the race, the party as a whole has embraced Vice President Kamala Harris with astonishing speed. Now, on the eve of the first, and possibly only, debate with former President Donald Trump, Harris is still riding a seven-week “sugar high” of celebratory media coverage and polls showing increased Democratic enthusiasm for a race many once viewed with dread. Watch a Harris rally and you’ll likely see the audience chant a trance-like KA-MA-LA, KA-MA-LA. They’re in love — for the moment.
But it wasn’t too long ago that many Democratic insiders, and many in the party in general, considered Harris a failure at the job of vice president. Their unhappiness with Harris, which started with disappointment and evolved into something stronger, spilled into media reports and the general political conversation. There was broad agreement that Harris had just not been a very good pick for the nation’s second-highest position.
In February 2023, the New York Times published an article titled, “Kamala Harris Is Trying to Define Her Vice Presidency. Even Her Allies Are Tired of Waiting.” The headline was generous, given what followed. “The painful reality for Ms. Harris is that in private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and around the nation … said [Harris] had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country,” the New York Times reported. “Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.”
The New York Times went on to note that Harris’s vice presidency is notable largely because of her race and gender, as opposed to her accomplishments in office. “She has already made history as the first woman, the first African American and the first Asian American ever to serve as vice president,” the paper said, “but she has still struggled to define her role much beyond that legacy.”
Given all that, the New York Times reported that “a quiet panic” had “set in among key Democrats about what would happen if President Biden opted not to run for a second term.” Harris made the situation even worse by retreating to “a bunker” for about a year, the New York Times said, “after her disastrous interview with Lester Holt of NBC News.”
In November 2021, three months before the New York Times published the “lost hope” piece, CNN published “Exasperation and dysfunction: Inside Kamala Harris’ frustrating start as vice president.” CNN reported that “key West Wing aides” — meaning people close to Biden — were “worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus” from Harris. The aides, CNN continued, “have largely thrown up their hands at [Harris] and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now.”
In June 2021, Politico published a story headlined, “‘Not a healthy environment’: Kamala Harris’ office rife with dissent.” The vice president’s office, the article reported, was an angry and chaotic place. Some blamed her top aides, but other Biden administration officials blamed Harris herself. “People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses, and it’s an abusive environment,” said one person “with direct knowledge of how Harris’s office is run.” The person continued: “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s***.”
Those are just a few examples, but there were many more, all of which could be summarized by one, brief sentence: Kamala Harris made a mess of the vice presidency.
People got the idea. Harris came into office with a net favorable rating, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. By June 2021, less than six months in, Harris had turned that into an unfavorable rating. That rating stayed in the unfavorable range until this June. On the eve of Biden’s withdrawal from the race, Harris had a 53.8% unfavorable rating and a 38.4% favorable rating. Polls that specifically measured her job approval, as opposed to personal favorability or unfavorability, found about the same thing. Harris was unpopular, and voters did not approve of the job she was doing.
All this seems surreal in light of the last few weeks. Press coverage, some of it openly adulatory, has mostly memory-holed the deficiencies of Harris as vice president. With the exception of a 27-minute Q&A with CNN, Harris has largely ignored journalists and their questions. Even if reporters were determined to grill her on her record, they haven’t had the chance and might not get the chance anytime soon. Harris’s personal favorability rating has shot up in the absence of discussion about what she did and did not do as vice president.
It’s a bad situation. Despite all that, though, there are still nearly 60 days before the election, although early and mail-in voting begin soon. There is still time for the system to work as it should, even in a drastically shortened campaign, and give Harris’s time in office the scrutiny it deserves.
