Harris couldn’t escape Biden’s unpopularity

President Joe Biden’s deep unpopularity was a major obstacle for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign.

Susan Walsh/AP/File

Kamala Harris’ advisors said she struggled to dig herself out of a hole.Joe Biden put Democrats in a difficult position entering the 2024 race.Harris couldn’t distance herself from from the deeply unpopular president.

President Joe Biden may have dropped out of 2024 race, but voters never forgot about their strong disdain for the his record.

“In general, for a Democratic candidate running in this environment, I think that would be challenging,” Doug Sosnik, a longtime advisor to Bill Clinton, told Business Insider. “Then, obviously, if you’re the vice president of the administration, that makes it even harder.”

There’s ample data Americans remain angry about the country’s direction. It was Harris who had to pay the bill for lingering frustrations over the COVID-19 pandemic and the high prices that came when the virus began to recede.

APVoteCast, a survey of over 120,000 voters nationwide, found that more than half of voters wanted to see substantial change. A CNN exit poll found that voters gave Biden a -19 point approval rating. Among those who didn’t approve of the president, Trump won 82% of them.

Harris had a much more manageable -5 point approval rating, but despite her campaign’s efforts to portray Trump as unelectable, he was just a couple of points higher at -7. Throughout the 2024 race, Trump posted some of his highest approval numbers since he launched his first presidential run in 2015.

“We dug out of a deep hole but not enough,” Harris senior advisor and Obama 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe wrote in a now-deleted post on X.

In the early recriminations about the 2024 race, there’s a sense that Harris struggled to distance herself from Biden — a difficulty best summed up by a moment during her appearance on “The View” that was quickly clipped by Trump’s team for its closing message.

“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris said when asked if there was anything she would have differently than Biden during his presidency.

Evan Roth Smith, the lead pollster at BluePrint, said there’s no doubt that Biden’s unpopularity impacted Harris.

“It is very clear that Kamala Harris’s association with Joe Biden and the Biden-Harris administration hurt her,” Roth Smith said. “It is less clear to me that even if she had erased all of that, she would’ve been able to win this election.”

Harris swam against a global tide.

This was an unusual race. Trump will soon become only the second former president to reclaim the White House. In an era of endless campaigning, Harris had barely over 100 days to wrap up a major nomination and reintroduce herself to the American people. Trump experienced violence unseen in the United States in decades as a would-be assassin’s bullet missed him by just inches.

And yet, the main storyline sounds strikingly similar. Throughout the Western world, incumbents have been unceremoniously booted from office by angry electorates. It happened to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Conservative Party. Even ruling parties that clung to power in places like South Korea and Germany suffered massive setbacks. Under this lens, Biden’s unpopularity made sense because his counterparts in the G7 were in the same boat.

Democrats didn’t have a competitive presidential primary.

Biden didn’t debate until he entered the general election. As leader of the Democratic Party, Biden used his perch to fundamentally reshape the nomination fight — pushing out the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries, the former of which had embarrassed him multiple times over his long career.

Unlike his predecessors, Biden never squarely confronted the type of midterm shellacking that would have further pressured Democrats to address the future of the octogenarian in the Oval Office. In retrospect, the 2022 midterms — when fears of a “red wave” never fully materialized — gave Democrats some false hopes. Biden then seized the opportunity to abandon his commitment to serve as a bridge to the next generation.

Entering the campaign, Biden had much more in common with presidents who were voted out from office than those who were able to win reelection.

A pre-election Gallup Poll showed how dour Americans’ moods were when asked the question, “Would you say you and your family are better off now than you were four years ago?” More than half of adults (52%) said they were worse off, even greater than in September 2020, when the pandemic raged. The last time it was that bad was in 1992, when incumbent President George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton.

After his disastrous debate performance, Biden tried to position his decision to step aside amid a concerted pressure campaign as an act of selflessness. Instead, he will likely be dogged by questions about why he insisted on hanging on for as long as he did.

It wasn’t just Biden’s past that haunted Harris.

Harris’ record, namely the progressive positions she took during the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, came back to bite her. She struggled to explain how she could change her views so drastically on fracking, immigration, and on Medicare for All as she sprinted toward the center.

“People went on record saying all sorts of things on the advice of activists, advocates, pundits, and sometimes pollsters, that catered to the left-wing of the party, the base of the party,” Roth Smith said. “And guess what? Voters didn’t forget. The Trump campaign didn’t forget.”

Republicans say it wasn’t just Biden’s record or Harris’ past that turned the race. Voters across the country and demographics showed a dramatic openness to the GOP.

“It was a historic victory, and it was a complete and utter repudiation of both Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party’s platform and positions,” Ryan Ryan Williams, who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, told Business Insider. “Voters simply are not buying what they’re selling. They don’t want it.”