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Democrats rejoiced Sunday, after President Joe Biden announced that he would not seek election and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination in this year’s presidential election.
Praising Biden for his "selfless" and "patriotic" decision, which reports suggest was driven more by highly unfavorable polling than civic responsibility, those on the left also celebrated Harris not merely as the best candidate to replace him but as the leading candidate who can defeat former, and perhaps future, president Donald J. Trump on Nov. 5, just over 100 days from now, at the time of this writing.
They are delusional.
Democratic enthusiasm notwithstanding, Harris is a terrible candidate whose chances of besting Trump are at least as slight as Biden’s.
This could be why Trump has said he prefers to face off against her rather than the incumbent president this fall, but hard data also bear out the vice president’s challenges.
It's far from certain that Harris will be the nominee.
While she picked up a flood of endorsements from Democratic politicos and an impressive volume of contributions in the hours after Biden’s announcement, it's unclear whether Biden, who won this year’s Democratic primary elections, in which over 14 million voters participated, can simply reassign his delegates to another candidate.
Some leading Democrats and allies called for a process to allow Democratic voters to choose Biden’s replacement.
Disallowing that process feeds the narrative that Biden was forced out in a coup and mocks persistent Democratic claims that they are protecting "our democracy" from Trump.
If Harris subverts a more open selection process, she's vulnerable to damaging allegations of hypocrisy.
If she prevails, she will have to waste crucial weeks of campaign time attempting to "earn and will" the nomination, as she pronounced herself ready to do.
Neither scenario is promising for a brand new presidential campaign, but Harris also faces major polling challenges.
Her approval rating is abysmal, equaling Biden’s terrible numbers at 38%.
Last year, she was rated the worst vice president in recent American history.
In one survey, only 29% of Democrats identified her as their first choice to run if Biden were to drop out of the race.
A YouGov/Economist poll released last week found that she would lose to Trump by five points (44%-39%), outside the margin or error, while Biden would only lose to the former president by two points (43%-41%), within it.
Other polls, including those taken in crucially important swing states, report similar results, often outside the margin of error, with apparently no polling showing Harris leading over Trump anywhere.
And this is before Trump’s campaign has devoted any significant attention to Harris.
Harris’s record has yet to be explored at the presidential level, but there are no indications that the results would favor her.
As vice president, her only significant responsibility was to serve as Biden’s "border czar."
Yet the southern border, which is at or near the top of voter concerns, has been one of the administration’s most humiliating failures, with over 7.2 million migrants illegally entering the country.
Meanwhile, Harris has done virtually nothing to solve the problem.
Also, reports suggest that her administrative skills are bad, and that her office, despite doing little, is plagued by chaos.
Harris’s previous bid for the Democratic nomination, in 2020, was one of the worst performing campaigns and ended in her humiliating withdrawal for lack of funds before any primaries took place.
Her four-year Senate career registered no significant achievements beyond pushing a now-overwhelmingly unpopular Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) agenda across American life.
Her nomination as Biden’s vice president came as the result of a race-centered deal whereby a struggling Biden plucked her from near-obscurity and added her to the ticket in return for a pledge of Black support in South Carolina’s crucially important Democratic primary.
As California attorney general, and previously holding that office in San Francisco, Harris hails from one of America’s worst jurisdictions for crime and urban blight.
Even there her record is checkered.
More than 600 convictions obtained by her office were later overturned amid allegations that prosecutors withheld evidence, while she jailed over 1,500 criminal suspects for marijuana-related crimes before flipflopping to embrace marijuana legalization.
Harris’s lack of accomplishments, combined with the essential DEI component in her political rise, will mean that her only talking points will involve attacking Trump, while also having to defend Biden’s many failures, to which she is fully party as his vice president.
Worse, if Biden remains in office, as he says he plans to do through the remainder of his term, Harris will have to campaign in the shadow of continuing crises foreign and domestic, none of which show any sign of relief.
Trump’s campaign has understandably been Biden-focused up to this point.
But while Biden has been able to plead age and infirmity and rely on media spin promoting his administration’s supposed accomplishments, Harris has no excuses, no substance, and nothing recommending her other than convenience and enthusiasm for her race and gender among people who insisted until recently that Biden was perfectly fine.
He wasn’t, and neither is she.
Paul du Quenoy is President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute.
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