Vice President Kamala Harris made history again recently but not just because she cast more tie break votes than any previous vice president. She became the most unpopular vice president in recent history.
According to new aggregate polls from the LA Times, Harris’s unfavorable rating is higher than at any point since she became vice president and her popularity is as low as or lower than every previous vice president of the last 30 years during similar stages of their terms — including Dick Cheney (R) and Al Gore (D), both of whom struggled with popular opinion throughout their terms.
This ignoble distinction raises important questions as the election season heats up: Is Harris really doing such a terrible job, so out of touch with the American people that she deserves this historic disapproval? Or as the first female vice president of color, is she on the receiving end of well-documented and deeply ingrained bias?
The vice presidency is a notoriously difficult and vague job. John Adams called it “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” But for Harris, insignificance is not an option. Like all high-profile firsts, she carries not only the weight of her job but the expectations, hopes and dreams of those who will follow her. She must forge new norms and standards for women leading at the highest levels and redefine the role, while also succeeding in it. She must be both a loyal cheerleader and supporter of the president, while also serving as a role model and mentor to future women leaders everywhere.
Vice President Harris is not perfect — and she has sometimes been her own worst enemy, struggling to keep good staff and appearing stiff and scripted at public appearances. But it’s hard to square the outsized negative attention she receives with any rational critique, and impossible not to see parallels to the only other woman ever to come so close to our nation’s highest office — Hillary Clinton. She, too, endured years of disinformation and gendered attacks that affected the outcome of the 2016 election.
The parallels are hard to miss. Impossible expectations and double standards for women — sometimes called the double bind — have dogged the vice president from the start. Just as they did with Clinton. President Biden did her no favors in trying to shape her agenda in his image, giving her a bound-to-fail portfolio at the outset, including immigration reform, which has been stalled for decades.
But for those of us who work to support women advancing to elected leadership, the challenges facing the vice president are very familiar. Women in positions of power, especially Black women, face ingrained bias at every turn — they are routinely labeled as unlikeable, angry, aggressive and more likely to be subject to online hate. In fact, recent studies have shown that women of color are twice as likely to be the subject of harassment and disinformation. Many female candidates of color feel the abuse and mis- and disinformation they face is specifically meant to push them out of politics.
The problem is so severe that in 2021 researchers at Brookings labeled gendered disinformation a national security threat and called on the Biden-Harris administration to prioritize combatting it. In the high-stakes world of presidential politics, disinformation and distrust can quickly metastasize into a political liability.
Attacks on the vice president from the right are not especially new but they are increasingly misinformation laden. In 2020, President Donald Trump pushed a racist conspiracy about her eligibility to be president — as he did with President Obama. But recently, there has been a coalescing among other Republicans who are pushing the false narrative that Harris is actually the president and running some kind of puppet regime. On Fox News, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley called her “President Harris” and has referred to her and President Biden as “co-Presidents.”
Obviously in an election year, exploiting weaknesses in the opposition is fair game, but the gendered conspiracy-laden misinformation can be especially damaging. It’s easy to see how that kind of rhetoric creates a double bind for the vice president and may be weighing down her consistently poor polling.
The outcomes here are not inevitable, and both Harris and the president need a real strategy to bolster the vice president heading into the 2024 election to help the president’s own prospects. In the last year, she seems to have zeroed in on a better, more comfortable portfolio of abortion rights in the post-Dobbs world, serving as an ambassador to world leaders and, of course, as a surrogate to the legions of Black voters who helped assure the Biden/Harris victory. But more focus is required. Harris already broke the mold once by winning in 2020, and she can use that experience and key learnings from the first term to win again in 2024.
Here, the experiences of other women of color who have successfully won races despite relentless attacks serve as a template for turning around the vice president’s prospects.
First, she and her supporters must actively and vocally fight back against negative, biased and simply wrong narratives. That means calling it out regularly and publicly on social and traditional media. The administration has been very effective in pointing out Republican hypocrisy on infrastructure and student debt. They should deploy the same tactics to combat attacks on the vice president. They will be getting help from Emily’s List, which has pledged millions to support the vice president’s reelection bid.
Second, the vice president needs to be a more visible and active campaigner heading into 2024 — her low poll numbers are not a reason to sideline her. On the contrary, getting her off the sidelines has the potential to bolster her numbers as she defines herself to the public rather than allowing her to be defined by others.
Finally, Kamala needs to be Kamala; when she’s free to be herself — to connect with people around her and be human and real — she is at her best. Authenticity both makes better leaders and winning campaigns. When Harris shattered the second-highest glass ceiling in 2020, she inherited the traditional norms of the role, which were defined by all of the straight white men who preceded her. Breaking free from the ghosts of vice presidents past and leading as she truly is is the strategy for success.
If Harris can turn around her polls, and she must, she not only helps the Biden ticket and her own political future but paves the way for the generation of women leaders who will follow her. For their sake let’s hope she succeeds.
Lauren Leader is co-founder and CEO of All In Together, a nonprofit women’s civic education and leadership organization. She tweets @laurenleaderAIT.