She was supposed to be the one-term president’s successor. The vice president who would take the torch from a by-then-80-something Joe Biden and carry on the administration’s agenda while becoming the first woman and the first woman of color to capture the White House as the nation’s 47th president.
But as things stand now in November 2021, one has to wonder how Kamala Harris even remains on the ticket in 2024, regardless of who the nominee might be. A USA Today-Suffolk University poll finds that just 28 percent of voters — less than 3 in 10 — approve of the job Harris is doing. For context, that’s 10 points below her boss (38 percent approve, 59 percent disapprove). For more context, Harris was at 46 percent approval and 40 percent disapproval upon entering office, per USA Today-Suffolk.
Harris’s struggles are MANY but here’s a few:
Less than a month before California’s September 2021 recall election Gov. Gavin Newsom has asked that Biden NOT campaign with/for him and only reluctantly accepted a very, very limited role with the very toxic, polarizing Harris!
Back in August 2021 three polls combined to produce an unfavorable rating of 46% for Harris, according to an aggregate average compiled by RealClearPolitics. The Hill reported that the number is 3 points below Biden’s 43% unfavorable rating. An Economist-YouGov poll conducted July 24-27 found Harris’s unfavorable rating to be 48%!
This was entirely foreseeable with Harris who was so unpopular in the Democratic party that she dropped out of the 2020 Democratic primary before anyone voted are worrying that Vice President Kamala Harris could hurt their chances to retain power in the 2022 midterm elections “As of right now, I think she has the potential of doing more harm than good for some of these candidates,” said one Democratic strategist. “My sense is she’ll probably raise a lot of money and maybe she’ll go to some specific districts, but they’ll have to be really strategic with her.” “She doesn’t have the standing at this moment to go to a lot of these tighter districts,” the strategist added, where another political analyst who says this puts Democrats in a no-win position. If they use Harris to campaign for the midterms, she could do damage. If they don’t, it confirms that she is politically toxic!
Vice President Harris’s bad polls trigger have Democratic worries as they have much ground to make up in order to be perceived more favorably by the public, a complicating factor for the Biden administration as it maps out its midterm strategy.
Six months into office, polls indicate Harris is viewed less favorably than President Biden. She has also made some tactical missteps outside of the White House that Democrats say show she hasn’t quite yet found her bearings and her once historical Vice presidency has lost it’s luster, the bloom has fallen off the rose, as she has underperform as the future leader at the top of the ticket and her lower ratings haven’t gone unnoticed. “She doesn’t have the standing at this moment to go to a lot of these tighter districts,” the strategist added. “No one is coming out and saying she’s doing an amazing job, because the first question would be ‘On what?’” another person, identified as a “Harris ally” told the Hill. “She’s made a bunch of mistakes and she’s made herself a story for good and bad.”
VP KAMALA HARRIS HAS LOST THE SUPPORT OF White women who were forced to accept her as the “fake feminist” she is; White men did not previously support her despite her White arranged family financial/political/sexual “partnership/marriage”; Black women who championed her as their “Lord and Savior Soro Sister” KNOW WHO SHE REALLY IS NOW AND ARE EMBARRASSED AND OFFENDED BY HER UNTENABLE “POLITICALPORN STAR” ACTIVITIES THAT GOT HER TO THE Vice Presidency- and sadly that she was NEVER involved in the Sorority EVER, at Howard or since!; Black men have NEVER TRUSTED/SUPPORTED HER (outside of their/her mutual fetish fantasies); Latinas/Latinos/LatinX (Latin Women and Men) have NEVER supported her and those that did abandoned her after her recent immigration debacle at the border with “don’t come here, go home!!” as has ALL IMMIGRANTS; the LGBTQIA voter/donor block has long ago fought themselves to grasp the fact that she is a “fake rights” activist as with the feminist; she has appropriated the very limited Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community as their “Shri-Lakshmi” mother-goddess but this voter/donor block- though cash considerable, is just not that sizable to turn an election; unfortunately there are no more sizable groups of potential voters/donors that she can co-opt/appropriate to exploit.
She/Biden has told ALL Black Lives Matter, Social Justice Reformers, and Activist “YOU ARE NOT WELCOME AT THE WHITE HOUSE!” (but thank you for getting us elected); stated that “America is NOT a Racist Country”; told immigrants “don’t come here, go home!!”; they have FAILED to pass the long promised George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a sweeping police reform bill, which passed the House of Representatives in early March, but months later remains bogged down in the Senate; HR 1, or the For the People Act — that sets standards for voting and overhauls campaign finance and ethics law was defeated in the Senate. Another measure — dubbed HR 4, or the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, to combat brazen, destructive, partisan and discriminatory campaign of voter suppression silencing voters of color across the nation and threatens to erode our democracy. The Supreme Court’s disastrous decision in Shelby v. Holder opened the floodgates of voter suppression, allowing states with dark histories of bigotry and discrimination to pass hundreds of laws designed to keep communities of color from the ballot box! THIS TOO HAS FAILED TO MOVE; YET, in a bitterly divided, bipartisan gridlocked Washington, it managed to only take a few weeks for the Congress and Senate to pass the “STOP ASIAN HATE” bill, the “Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act”!!
“George Floyd was murdered almost a year ago,” Biden said. “There’s meaningful police reform legislation in his name … legislation to tackle systemic misconduct in police departments, to restore trust between law enforcement and the people they’re entrusted to serve and protect. But it shouldn’t take a whole year to get this done.” Biden PROMISED that this act would be in the books by Floyd’s birthday- that has LONG since passed!
Biden acknowledged the role that Jim Clyburn played in his election, credited with reviving Biden’s struggling campaign and thanked him when he said, “I would never be in this position, but for you,’’, “You’re quite welcome,’’ Clyburn answered. In regards to his humble acceptance of his debt to Blacks, Biden said “You’ve always had my back, and I will have yours.” So he said that as well. And I think he knows how important this vote is to the Black community.
Jim Clyburn has taken Biden to task over administration appointments, saying the president-elect is falling short when it comes to naming Black figures to top positions, expressed disappointment that African Americans — a voting bloc crucial to Biden’s presidential victory — have not featured more prominently among the early picks to fill out senior administration posts next year. “But so far it’s not good.”
She’s practically invisible.
It’s been 153 days since her last sit-down interview with a major broadcast news entity, in the form of NBC’s Lester Holt. You may recall that was the beginning of the end of the administration’s confidence in her abilities to handle even the most basic of questions.
“Do you have any plans to visit the border?” Holt asked.
“At some point, you know, we are going to the border,” Harris replied, before oddly repeating herself as if a short-circuit had occurred. “We’ve been to the border. So, this whole thing about the border — we’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.”
“You haven’t been to the border,” Holt correctly noted.
“And I haven’t been to Europe,” Harris snapped before laughing. “And, I mean, I don’t understand the point that you’re making.”
Since then, the only interview Harris has granted was to “The View” on ABC. Her own staff couldn’t have provided a gentler platform.
The vice president has yet to do a solo press conference. Out of sight, out of mind. And when judging Harris solely on the primary task she was given by the president, 23 percent approve of the administration’s handling of the U.S. border, or less than one-quarter.
Harris was never liked much to begin with.
Harris has been dubbed a 2020 presidential candidate. But that’s a misnomer, because she never even got to 2020 as a candidate. Never got to Iowa or New Hampshire. She was polling lower than even Andrew Yang in her home state of California in December 2019, prompting her to drop out while seeming to blame Democratic voters for misogyny and racism.
Harris told Axios at the time: “I have also started to perhaps be more candid talking about what I describe and what I believe to be the elephant in the room about my campaign.”
Axios: “What is that?”
Harris: “Electability.”
Axios: “What do you mean?”
Harris: “Electability. You know, essentially, is America ready for a woman and a woman of color to be president of the United States?”
Yet, Barack Obama was twice elected president as a person of color, while Hillary Clinton captured 3 million more votes than Donald Trump in the 2016 general election. So there’s that.
Overall, the USA Today-Suffolk poll has some disturbing numbers for Biden-Harris. Consider the answers to the question, “What is the one thing Americans want President Biden to do in the next year?”
— Resign/retire/quit: 20 percent
— Economy/jobs: 11 percent
— Unite/help the country: 8 percent
— Immigration/border control: 8 percent
— COVID/mandates: 6 percent
— Infrastructure bills: 5 percent
— Inflation: 4 percent
— Health care: 3 percent
— Climate change/environment: 3 percent
— Bipartisanship: 3 percent
That’s right: The top of the list is Americans wanting the president to resign or quit.
Even more revealing: 64 percent of Americans (nearly two-thirds) don’t want Biden to run again, including a whopping 28 percent of Democrats.
Can the administration turn this around? Perhaps. But some shake-ups will be needed. Some accountability. A pivot to something resembling the middle. But we’ve seen no inclination to make such a pivot, to make staff changes.
Republicans now lead Democrats by 8 points on the congressional ballot, per USA Today’s survey. Just four seats need to be flipped for Republicans to take control of the House, just one net overall in the Senate. President Obama lost 63 seats in 2010 before losing the Senate in 2014. Donald Trump lost 43 seats in 2018 before losing the Senate in 2020.
Harris was supposed to represent the next generation of Democrats. She was Plan B for an aging president. At 28 percent approval, it’s hard to see how the VP ever takes the next step to the Oval Office.