The 2024 race for the White House is still too close to call, but the power of Vice President Kamala Harris is evident when you look further than the horse race.
Earlier this week, Harris’ candidacy surfaced for the first time since shortly after President Joe Biden took office.
“He gets a chance to write his story out there and at least he’s able to get a good message out about himself,” Kristen Soltis Anderson, founding partner at Echelon Insights, said in a press call hosted by AARP.
Soltis Anderson spoke about a survey the interest group commissioned, which found Harris had widened Biden’s slim lead among women 50 and older.
According to a FiveThirtyEight polling average, Americans now have a slightly more favorable opinion of Harris than they do unfavorably. This is a surprising turn of events, as Harris has previously polled so low that he has at times played with being the most popular vice president in recent history.
“He’s allowed to shine a little bit, which I think is very difficult to do when you’re No. 2. By definition, a big part of your job is to stand a few feet to the left and the feet of the president and support him,” Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics told Business Insider. “Unlike now the person is front and center and allowed to talk about who they are, what they want to achieve, and they are allowed to talk about their strengths and what they bring to the table.”
Tim Malloy, poll analyst for the Quinnipiac University Poll, said that acceptance is a broad umbrella that encompasses many of the opinions that voters have about voters. Likability also has a strange history when it comes to female candidates, as was well-described by Barack Obama infamously in 2008 that his Democratic senate colleague Hillary Clinton was “in love with enough.”
The change in Harris’ fortunes is a warning sign for former President Donald Trump’s campaign. Despite her and her allies’ best efforts, voters have not bought into Harris’ name as an unreliable progressive champion. Even top Republicans, including former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, have rejected Trump’s attacks, including questioning his wisdom.
Harris proposed an election that previously appeared poised to include the two most popular presidential elections since 1980, as Thirty-Eight was written earlier this year. His rise is all the more remarkable given the cynicism that has engulfed US politics to the extent that some even wonder if there will ever be hope for a celebrity-hopeful comeback. of the presidency.
As Gabe Fleisher wrote in his newsletter, Wake Up To Politics, the definition of change can be very simple. Poll shows Americans don’t form strong opinions of vice presidents. Now, reassessing his circumstances, Harris must, to borrow one of his lines, “be unburdened by what was.”
But Trump can still win this election.
The Harris campaign still sees itself as the underdog. Nate Silver’s popular forecasting model is back on the coin, however, and on Friday, it showed Harris with the first advantage in weeks in the race to win the electoral college. A former president has been here before. While it’s true that the most popular candidate usually wins, he emerged victorious over Hillary Clinton in 2016 (who was also unpopular, though not nearly as popular as he was). .
This isn’t 2016, though. Walsh said Clinton’s failure was a turning point for women in American politics, a trend she thinks will benefit Harris. More women are now running for office and getting involved in politics than ever before. There is now a greater proportion of women in Congress than at any other time in American history, according to the Pew Research Center.
Unlike Clinton, Walsh pointed out that Harris has not spent decades in the spotlight and does not face voters’ fears of a potential political dynasty. Clinton’s popularity, of course, took a different course than Harris’. Clinton was considered to be President Obama’s Secretary of State. However, that welcome faded as she prepared to become the first female presidential nominee of a major party and became “a caricature of who she was,” according to Walsh’s view.
“I don’t know if you remember, but you could buy a Hillary Clinton nutcracker at the airport,” said Walsh, who is based at Rutgers University. “It played out, a lot of it was based on gender, but it was compounded by all these other factors that went into his election and the public response to that.”
This is not just Trump’s fight
One of Trump’s allies, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, is continuing a hard-fought campaign for governor in a state the Democrats have carried only once this century (2008) but is now too close to call amid Harris’ rise. Robinson is trying so hard to destroy the background that he called himself a “Black Nazi” at a porn forum decades ago. (Robinson has denied that these were his words, although CNN has found plenty of evidence to the contrary.)
Trump’s partner, Sen. JD Vance, is still very unpopular. And by almost every account, Trump lost the first debate and probably only Harris. Democrats have also played down Trump’s economic advantage, a major issue of the campaign.
The best news he’s gotten all week is that Nebraska Republicans may try one last time to change state law to strip Harris of the Electoral College vote, which could derail his Great Lakes plan. Blue Wall”.
Trump is also enjoying a renaissance. Last year, he rose by about 6 points with an average of five thirty-eight positions. But most Americans still look down on him, which has been true since he walked down the street from Trump Tower nine years ago.
Worrying Trump even more, Malloy pointed to recent Quinnipiac polls showing Harris ahead in Pennsylvania and Michigan with a third key battleground, Wisconsin, up for grabs. He said the joint results should be warning signs for the former president’s campaign. Harris’ odds were slightly higher in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
“This is a canary in the coal mine for the Trump people, that’s a red flag for the Trump people because it means people are starting to get to know him as a person,” Malloy said.