Pollster Nate Silver says Vice President Harris missed a major chance to pick up voters in the center when she passed over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) as her running mate.
Harris “blew one big opportunity to tack to the center with her selection of [Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D)] rather than Josh Shapiro: that a tiny minority of progressives objected to Shapiro was an argument in Shapiro’s favor, if anything,” Silver wrote in a post on his website.
Shapiro and Walz, alongside Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly (D), rose to the top of the “veepstakes” as Harris weighed who to bring on to her fast-tracked bid after President Biden dropped out of the race.
Walz, who snagged viral clips labeling Republican rivals as “weird,” has been looked at as a boost to Harris in reaching the Midwest and the middle class. The pick has also energized progressives, after Walz shifted to the left during his governorship.
But Silver argued that Shapiro, who has faced criticism from progressives, could have been a help to Harris, who the pollster contended is “limited by her own past progressive policy positions.”
Nearly half of voters in a new New York Times/Siena College poll, he noted, said Harris seems “too liberal/progressive.”
Picking Walz showed the vice president’s “counterproductive tendency toward risk aversion,” Silver said.
“I think Walz was a decent enough pick on his own merits, but given an opportunity to offer a tangible signal of the direction her presidency was headed, she reverted to 2019 mode,” he wrote, referring to Harris’s campaign in the 2020 cycle, during which she notably backed several progressive policies.
She’s faced scrutiny about reversals on issues including “Medicare for All” and banning fracking, both of which she no longer supports. The shifts have come into the spotlight as she courts moderate voters in a close race with former President Trump.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said over the weekend that he still considers Harris a progressive, despite her pivot toward the center on some issues. He argued they still share the same goals, such as reaching universal health care and addressing climate change.
Silver’s latest commentary comes just after the Times/Siena poll found former President Trump up 1 point over Harris among likely voters, within the poll’s 3-point margin of error and largely unchanged from a survey taken right after the Democrats’ ticket switch up.
Harris has enjoyed a surge of Democratic enthusiasm since launching her bid just weeks ago, and she closed some of Biden’s gaps in key polls. Silver’s polling averages also show Harris roughly 2 points ahead of Trump nationally — but the pollster now predicts she has a 20 percent chance of winning the popular vote and losing the Electoral College.
Harris and Trump are set to face off in their first debate Tuesday. The former president already debated Biden, whose poor performance at the podium was seen as a reason behind his exit from the race. The scheduled showdown will be high-stakes for both candidates, just weeks out from Election Day.