It has become painfully apparent to many Americans that Vice President Kamala Harris is unfit to hold her current station and has absolutely no business being second in line to the presidency.
Nor is it just Republicans and independents who have reached that conclusion, but increasingly also a growing number of Democrats who have come to realize that Harris simply doesn’t have what it takes to effectively govern the country — if she could even win a presidential election, Fox News reported.
Some of those same Democrats, albeit mostly anonymously, are now skeptically evaluating the electoral prospects for their party in 2024 if Harris continues to be the running mate for President Joe Biden, much less if he chooses not to seek a second term and the nomination falls to Harris by default.
Harris has been “underwhelming” as VP
The Washington Post reporter Cleve Wootson wrote Monday about how “Some Democrats are worried about Harris’s political prospects” and that “many party activists are not sure the vice president has shown she is up to winning the top job.”
“People are poised to pounce on anything — any misstep, any gaffe, anything she says — and so she’s probably not getting the benefit of the doubt,” Jacquelyn Bettadapur, a former Democratic county party chair in Georgia, told Wootson. She added that many Democrats “don’t know enough about what she’s doing” and aptly noted, “it doesn’t help that she’s not [that] adept as a communicator.”
The reporter revealed that he’d heard similar assessments from more than a dozen Democratic leaders in various states, most of whom only shared their views anonymously, and wrote, “Harris’s tenure has been underwhelming, they said, marked by struggles as a communicator and at times near-invisibility, leaving many rank-and-file Democrats unpersuaded that she has the force, charisma, and skill to mount a winning presidential campaign.”
Harris “lacks the political skills to win”
To be sure, many of the Democratic activists, strategists, and elected leaders Wootson spoke with expressed that they personally like VP Harris and would support her if she were to be the nominee, but also expressed concerns that they wouldn’t get the chance to do so, potentially due to Harris herself.
The reporter noted that there were two main “categories” of concern in that regard, the first being the insinuation that a majority of the nation was still too racist and sexist to elect a black woman as president. However, he wrote, “Others worry that Harris herself lacks the political skills to win a national race. And given the increasingly hard-edge tone of the Republican Party, they add, few Democrats are willing to roll the dice.”
“Harris’s critics also question her basic political skills on the national stage,” Wootson continued at another point. “In 2016, she won her Senate seat against weak opposition, they say. In 2019, her presidential run ended before a single ballot was cast, doomed by an uneven performance on the campaign trail, weak support, faltering resources and turmoil among her advisers.”
Being selected as the VP was supposed to change all of that, he noted, but as everyone has witnessed over the past two years, that most certainly has not been the case, and the ready-made prior excuses of the COVID-19 pandemic or her tie-breaking responsibility in the Senate to explain her lack of visibility or action on various issues will no longer fly with most people.
Most Americans view Harris unfavorably
Vice President Harris has, quite simply, been an abominable failure in her current role, as has been reflected in countless polls to gauge the public’s opinion of her over the past two years.
To wit, the RealClearPolitics average of national polls currently places the favorability rating for the vice president at a meager 38 percent, nearly 14 points lower than the 51.8 unfavorability rating she has garnered.
Further, as if the mostly anonymous shots Harris received in that Post article weren’t enough, Fox News pointed out that the purported heir apparent to President Biden appeared to be rejected over the weekend by her personal friend and former colleague Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who had no problem endorsing a 2024 run for re-election by Biden but couldn’t bring herself to say the same for Harris in a local radio interview.
To be sure, after being called out by Harris supporters for that reluctance, Warren later reversed herself and insisted that she “fully supports” the re-election of both Biden and Harris and “never intended to imply otherwise” … but the damage had already been done and her initial reaction is what will be remembered and highlighted going forward.
