Behind the public jubilation over Vice President Harris’s swift rise to become their party’s likely nominee for president, Democratic lawmakers are privately anxious about her prospects of defeating former President Trump, acknowledging she is largely untested as a candidate and faces serious challenges.
The anxiety, for the most part, has been set aside out of a deep sense of relief that President Biden decided to drop his reelection bid. After months of unease over the 81-year-old incumbent, Democratic lawmakers are glad to rally behind Harris in hopes she will rev up Democratic donors along with young and minority voters.
But concerns are already bubbling up over Harris’s ability to connect as well as Biden did in 2020 with white working-class and union voters in three states that were critical to defeating Trump: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“She wasn’t a great candidate,” one Democratic senator said of Harris’s performance as a presidential candidate in 2020, when she pulled out of Democratic primary before the Iowa caucuses.
“And she may not be as a political campaigner as good as Biden was in his prime,” the senator added.
The lawmaker argued Harris’s pure political skills won’t be as crucial to her success now that almost the entire Democratic Party is rallying behind her and now that she has a clear path to the nomination when the Democratic National Committee holds virtual proceedings early next month.
“She’s not campaigning in a primary. She is the candidate, she’s got thousands of people working for her, and she’s got a team of the smartest people, many of whom have worked with her over the years,” the senator said.
But the senator warned that Harris won’t have an easy path to victory.
“We need to be very clear-eyed, and it’s going to be brutally tough,” the lawmaker said.
An Emerson College poll of registered voters in swing states conducted July 22-23 found Trump leading Harris 46 percent to 45 percent in Michigan, and 48 percent to 46 percent in Pennsylvania, while the two candidates tied at 47 percent in Wisconsin.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and his allies say Harris needs to do a lot more to win over blue-collar voters in these states. They weren’t happy that Biden got shoved off the ticket after working closely with his top advisers to craft a progressive economic plan for the first 100 days of his second term.
“For her to become president, she’s going to have to be talking about issues that impact the 60 percent of Americans, working people who are living paycheck to paycheck,” Sanders told The Hill last week.
A Democratic strategist allied with Sanders said it’s not clear Harris will be a stronger candidate than Biden in November. And the source noted she was more associated with defending abortion rights and voting rights than tackling economic inequality during her three and a half years as vice president.
A major cause for concern among Democrats is that third-party Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could wind up sucking up the votes of a lot of culturally conservative, union-aligned working-class voters in the industrial Midwest.
Stronger than Biden
A second Democratic senator who requested anonymity acknowledged Harris isn’t perfect but argued she’s a lot better than Biden would have been, citing broad pessimism about Biden’s chances of victory after his disastrous debate performance and flailing attempts to right his campaign.
“Democrats were in a depression,” the senator said of the mood in the caucus after the debate. “Behind the scenes … almost everyone was pushing hard to say, ‘Gosh Joe, we love you, but go.’”
“It’s not as if there was a perfect vision of, ‘Oh we have the best candidate in the world [in reserve],’” the senator added.
But the source said Harris doesn’t have much time to win over voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the three most critical states to winning the White House.
“She’s just getting started. That challenge is not something she’s blind to in any way,” the senator said of the work Harris needs to do to appeal to voters in those battlegrounds.
One Democratic strategist based in Pennsylvania said Harris doesn’t have any special relationship with the Keystone State. That’s nothing like Biden, who was born in Scranton and represented neighboring Delaware for 36 years in the Senate.
“What I find surprising is how few relationships she has here,” the strategist said. “California is very far away. It’s seen as very foreign, culturally.
“Everything I’ve always heard is she doesn’t have that many relationships in Pennsylvania, and she hasn’t established any kind of identity here,” the source said. “Obviously, it’s a very big difference with Joe Biden.”
Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), who’s locked in a tough reelection battle, said Harris has a lot of work to do in his home state.
“Her campaign is not even a week old. There’s an obvious need to be able to get her message out,” he said. “I think by the end of it she’ll win, but we have a lot of work to do.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s presence on the ticket could change things, and the Democrat is seen as a top contender to becoming Harris’s running mate.
During the fierce debate within the Senate Democratic Conference earlier this month over whether to push Biden off the ticket, the president’s allies told their colleagues Harris would almost certainly take his place as the nominee — making the implicit argument that she would have her own flaws as the party’s standard-bearer.
One source familiar with the internal discussions about replacing Biden said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) was initially “lukewarm” about Harris taking over as the party’s nominee.
On Wednesday, however, Schumer gave the vice president a ringing endorsement and seemed elated by the huge outpouring of Democratic support for her candidacy since Biden announced his decision to end his campaign.
“Boy oh boy, are we enthusiastic,” Schumer declared at a press conference with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.).
Clear strengths
To be sure, Democratic senators say Harris has clear strengths.
As only the second woman to be nominated by a major party for the presidency, they view her as an ideal candidate to deliver their message on abortion rights, which is seen as the party’s strongest issue in the 2024 election.
And they think she will rev up enthusiasm among minority voters, who were critical to Barack Obama winning the White House in 2008 and 2012, and to Biden’s victory in 2020.
And they believe her background as California’s attorney general, her four years in the Senate and her four years as vice president make her clearly well-qualified to run the country.
They say she can claim credit for Biden’s major accomplishments, such as reducing child poverty by 20 percent by expanding the child tax credit in 2021; making the largest investment ever in renewable energy; enacting a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package; capping seniors’ out-of-pocket prescription drug costs at $2,000 a year and capping insulin costs at $35 a month.
But Democratic senators warn Harris is well behind Trump — and even behind where Biden was earlier this summer — in defining herself as a leader who would successfully manage the economy, which a plurality of voters say is their top priority.
But they hope she can run on Biden’s economic record, even though his administration struggled to sell “Bidenomics” to voters.
A third Democratic senator said Harris is in a somewhat difficult position, because she let Biden soak up all the credit for the strong economy under his administration.
“She’s got to define herself,” the senator said. “She’s done a good job of being loyal and letting Biden soak up the limelight.
“She doesn’t have the brand on the economy but she’s got the chops, and Biden has the record,” the lawmaker said, pointing to the latest Commerce Department report that the economy grew 2.8 percent in the second quarter, exceeding economists’ expectations.
Even Democratic lawmakers who pushed hard to replace Biden as the nominee acknowledge they don’t have much of a clue about how Harris, 59, will perform as a candidate, but they are optimistic that her personal charisma and freshness as a candidate will compare favorably to Trump, a 78-year-old three-time presidential nominee whom 51 percent of registered voters view unfavorably.
A fourth Democratic senator said Harris needs to pick a running mate with a strong reputation on economic issues and touted Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a leading Senate proponent of investing in the domestic semiconductor manufacturing industry, as a good choice.
The lawmaker argued that no candidate is fully tested before they run for president but said Harris is better prepared than when she ran more than four years ago.
“No one’s fully tested when you get into a presidential campaign,” the senator observed.
The senator conceded that Republicans will try to hit her on some of the far-left positions she took in 2019, such as signing onto Sanders’s Medicare for All proposal or suggesting private health insurance might be abolished in a few years.
“People in the primary said all kinds of things,” the lawmaker noted of the mad scramble in 2019 and 2020 to appeal to the party’s liberal base.
The senator questioned the wisdom of Harris supporting the Green New Deal, the bold proposal launched by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in 2019, which failed to get a single vote on the Senate floor that year.
The lawmaker said Trump and Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) have also said plenty of things in the past to cater to the Republican base that will come back to haunt them in the general election.