Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks in the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on July 27, 2021, in Washington, D.C.
Vice President Kamala Harris has work to do to improve her favorable rating among voters, three recent polls have found.
The surveys’ results have created a dilemma for the Biden administration as it maps out its midterm strategy, The Hill reported Thursday.
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%.
Normally, a vice president travels to support the party’s candidates before a midterm election. Harris’ polling numbers, however, are making Democrats wonder whether she can help them retain majorities in the House and Senate.
“As of right now, I think she has the potential of doing more harm than good for some of these candidates,” one Democrat strategist told The Hill. “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.”
Even Harris allies are skeptical about her chances to support candidates before the midterms as 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:
“No one is coming out and saying she’s doing an amazing job, because the first question would be ‘On what?’” one Harris ally told The Hill. “She’s made a bunch of mistakes and she’s made herself a story for good and bad.”
Last week, a Trafalgar Group survey found that more than 60% of likely U.S. voters are not confident Harris is ready to be president.
A total of 58.6% answered “not confident at all” and another 5% said “not very confident,” in the survey conducted July 12-13 among 1,161 likely voters.
Harris has been criticized for several missteps during her first six months in office. She waited three months to visit the southern border after being named to take charge of the immigration surge, and recent reports have said her staff suffers from low morale.
She told asylum-seekers attempting to enter the U.S. “don’t come here” when she finally visited the border. That comment angered some progressives.
“I don’t think someone like [Sen.] Mark Kelly would want her anywhere around him,” the Harris ally told The Hill.
Kelly, D-Ariz., is seeking reelection in a state that Republicans have identified as a pickup opportunity.
However, some disagree, arguing that Democrats would be making a mistake to shy away from Harris ahead of the midterms.
“The reason that Harris is unpopular is that they haven’t been able to make headway against Joe Biden personally, so they really have switched their messaging strategy to focus on Harris and attack him indirectly,” political analyst Rachel Bitecofer told the Hill.
“If Democrats buy into the old-school political book and make the same mistakes that they’ve made in the past and try to shelf her, hide her, run away from her, all they’re doing is reasserting the right’s negative frame against her,” she said.
This is a short-term problem. The bigger, long-term problem for Democrats is figuring out what they’re going to do with Harris if Joe Biden can’t or won’t run in 2024.
Picking Kamala Harris has BACKFIRED on Democrats, as Leftists HATE Her and even Black Voters now say NO WAY! Republicans claim she is far left of the most liberal actual leftists and progressives claim she is right wing or centrist. Worse for Democrats still is that among black voters today, one third say they are now LESS likely to vote for Harris, while a third also said they’d be more likely to ultimately conclude picking her did nothing to help the black vote and only made the leftists angrier with the Democrats!
Kamala Harris struggles in the polls behind Biden amid border crisis and reports of ‘toxic’ office
Kamala Harris is facing a steep uphill battle if she wants to succeed her boss Joe Biden in 2024.
Recent poll numbers show the vice president – and Biden’s heir apparent – hovering at just 44.3 percent favorability, according to poll aggregator RealClearPolitics. Her unfavorability is slightly higher at 46.3 percent.
Plagued by years’ worth of accounts of a toxic work culture under her watch, as well as her very public missteps while handling the monumental task of fixing the border crisis, Harris’ weaknesses are even apparent to Biden’s supporters.
The same aggregator site showed Biden with 51.8 percent favorability against 42.8 percent, and almost one in five people who supported Biden last fall did not think highly of Harris or did not have an opinion of her.
Harris’ favorability is two points lower than her unfavorability, according to RealClearPolitics
A majority of people in almost every age group ranked the struggling vice president as ‘very unfavorable,’ according to a new YouGov survey. The exception was 18 to 29-year-olds, who mostly (32 percent) said their opinion of Harris was ‘somewhat favorable.’
Only 13 percent of the same age group showed stronger support.
Data shows Harris’ unpopularity is strongest among those aged 65 and up and white men without college degrees – with both numbers hovering above 50 percent.
The majority of both men and women surveyed ranked their opinion of Harris as ‘very unfavorable’ – 41 percent of males and 34 percent of females.
Less than half of Democrats surveyed (49 percent) found Harris ‘very favorable,’ while a whopping 87 percent of Republicans chose ‘very unfavorable.’
Harris is facing an uphill battle if she wants to succeed Biden in 2024
Suffolk University Political Research Center Director David Paleologos suggest Biden be ‘more supportive publicly and engage with Vice President Harris so that he can at least shore up his own voters,’ in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
The politics expert said it was clear that some people who voted for Biden in 2020 ‘thought there was a better pick or they’re not convinced that they like her.’
Harris has also reportedly been unpopular among her own staff. A damning Politico report from late June uncovered allegations of ‘an abusive environment’ they say ‘starts at the top.’
‘It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s—,’ a source with direct knowledge of how Harris’ office is run told the outlet.
A Harvard/Harris poll from June before Harris’ trip to the southern border showed voters’ discontent at her handling of the crisis, which Biden tapped her to lead the response to.
A Harvard/Harris poll from June 15 – 17 2021 reflected Americans’ discontent with the VP’s handling of the border crisis
People surveyed said Harris made no progress on her trip to Central America, before she traveled to the southern border
Harris’ trip to Guatemala to tackle the ‘root causes’ of the crisis was criticized when she bluntly announced during a speech ‘do not come’ to the US.
In a contentious interview with NBC’s Lester Holt during the trip, Harris appeared to dodge the anchor’s attempts to press her on visiting the border.
At one point Harris told Holt ‘we’ve been to the border,’ to which he pointed out she herself had not – prompting a somewhat confusing response.
‘And I haven’t been to Europe,’ Harris said. ‘And I mean, I don’t understand the point that you’re making. I’m not discounting the importance of the border.’
Biden’s approval rating on immigration comes despite apparent discontent in Harris’ handling of the border crisis, according to numbers from just before her southern border visit (pictured July 22)
The majority of Americans polled by Harvard at the time said Harris was doing a bad job handling the root causes of illegal immigration.
The vice president made ‘no progress’ on that trip, 40 percent said, and nearly three-quarters say she should have visited the border on the same trip.
The survey also showed Biden had more than 50 percent support on the topic of immigration in June 2021.
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