Despite Democrats’ misgivings about President Joe Biden’s age and desire for a fresh face in 2024, the party has more or less rallied around his reelection bid. No serious challenger to Biden has emerged, saving Democrats from a drawn-out and damaging primary process.
Even so, there is still a colossal elephant in the room as Biden begins his campaign in earnest: Vice President Kamala Harris.
Although an incumbent vice president doesn’t generally garner much attention in a reelection campaign, Biden’s age, at 80 years old, ensures that Harris will be at the center of the political debate in 2024 and a target of Republican attacks.
Based on Harris’s lackluster polling numbers and the intensifying effort by Republicans to capitalize on her unpopularity, she could become a drag on Democrats’ chances next year, absent a robust effort to redefine her public persona.
Further, if Biden were to ultimately decide not to run, as is at least possible, given his age, this decision would be made during an election year, as he is likely to remain an active candidate for at least the remainder of this calendar year. It is difficult to imagine a scenario where Harris could reasonably be denied the party’s nomination for president if that were the case, further underscoring the importance of the White House working assiduously now to improve her positioning.
Indeed, the vice president is deeply unpopular: Only 37 percent of voters approve of Harris’s job performance, per a recent Monmouth University Poll, and her approval rating has dipped as low as 28 percent while in office. Harris’s favorability rating is also far lower than those of the four previous vice presidents at this point in their respective tenures, and she is viewed much more negatively than the president she serves under.
The most apparent explanation for Harris’s low ratings is that she was tasked with handling an essentially unsolvable problem, the southern border, which she lacked the experience, the know-how and the power to address. After a series of public flops, including one awkward interview with Lester Holt where she could not explain why she had not visited the border, the administration sidelined her for the following year, sealing her fate as the face of the border crisis. Harris was given a few other pet issues, including national voting reform, which realistically had zero chance of becoming law in a split Senate.
Republicans recognize that Harris is a vulnerability for Democrats, and many are already going on the attack against her. Some in the GOP are implicitly making the case that she is an 80-year-old’s heartbeat away from the presidency, while others have been blunter in insisting that a vote for Biden in 2024 is a vote for Harris.
In a Fox News interview, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley took the latter approach: “If you vote for Joe Biden you really are counting on a President Harris, because the idea that he would make it until 86 years old is not something that I think is likely,” she said.
While this may present as a crude and morbid argument for a political campaign, it’s more or less the same one that Democrats used in 2008 — successfully — against the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his running mate, Sarah Palin (R-Alaska), who proved herself to be wholly unsuited for the job.
To be sure, Harris isn’t Palin and does have both the capacity and an opportunity to come into a new role during the 2024 campaign. As a young woman of color, she can take the lead on abortion rights messaging at the national level, while also engaging in get-out-the-vote operations to energize core Democratic constituencies, particularly women and Black voters.
The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has made abortion one of the most potent political issues, one that works to Democrats’ advantage. This fight will likely stay at the forefront of the national conversation throughout the presidential campaign, with the high court set to hear arguments in a case involving the most commonly-used abortion pill, which Harris should capitalize on.
In recent months, the vice president has seen a slight uptick in her favorability ratings as she has become a more visible advocate for abortion rights, and she should continue doing so. On the day Biden announced his reelection bid, Harris was headlining a rally for reproductive rights at her alma mater, Howard University, one of the five largest HBCUs in the nation.
To that end, Harris can also play a key role in Black voter outreach by traveling to urban centers like Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. Even though Democrats overperformed in the 2022 midterms, Black voter turnout, particularly with young Black voters, was way down. While overall turnout in 2022 was down by 4.4 percent compared to 2018, Black voter turnout was down by 9.7 percent.
Black voters are a core consistency in a number of key states — including Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania — that are each crucial to winning 270 electoral votes. In 2016, lower-than-expected Black voter turnout — resulting from the Clinton campaign’s failure to engage these voters — was one of the reasons Hillary Clinton lost the presidency.
While Harris’s ratings have improved slightly over the last few weeks, it is not an exaggeration, at this point, to suggest that she is a political liability for The Democratic Party. But by engaging her on issues that play to her advantage, like abortion rights, the Biden campaign can turn her into an asset — or at the very least, a net neutral.
Douglas E. Schoen is a political consultant who served as an advisor to President Clinton and to the 2020 presidential campaign of Michael Bloomberg. His new book is: “The End of Democracy? Russia and China on the Rise and America in Retreat.”