Can Kamala Harris Beat Donald Trump?

It finally happened. On Sunday afternoon, at 1:46 p.m., President Joe Biden caved to the pressure from his own party and announced on X that he was bowing out of the reelection campaign he was losing. Then, 27 minutes later, at 2:13 p.m., he endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to run in his stead. 

In normal times, such an endorsement would be expected. But ever since Biden’s disastrous debate performance last month, longtime Democratic strategists, including James Carville, have floated the prospect of a blitz primary—sending a not-so-veiled message that Harris is not up to the job of beating Trump in November.  

Well, Team Biden is not hearing that. A few minutes after Biden endorsed his vice president, the president’s former chief of staff Ron Klain took to X to urge his party to get behind the former senator from California. “Now that the donors and electeds have pushed out the only candidate who has ever beaten Trump,” Klain wrote, “it’s time to end the political fantasy games and unite behind the only veteran of a national campaign—our outstanding @vp.” 

Soon after, former president Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton endorsed Harris for president, along with Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and California governor Gavin Newsom.

But as of press time, four of the country’s most prominent Democrats—former president Barack Obama, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Representative Nancy Pelosi, and Senator Chuck Schumer—have yet to endorse Harris. Obama issued a statement Sunday praising Biden as “one of America’s most consequential presidents” that did not mention Harris once. Instead, he said, he had “extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.”

Twenty-eight days from the start of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Harris might be in the pole position, but she’s a long way from having it locked up.

The calls for an open convention haven’t abated. Vinod Khosla, the billionaire venture capitalist and donor to Democrats, tweeted that he wants an “open process at the convention and not a coronation.” And West Virginia senator Joe Manchin is reportedly considering rejoining the Democratic Party to challenge Harris for the nomination. However this plays out, it is going to be one of the most dramatic four weeks in any of our lifetimes.

Assuming that Kamala Harris does end up as the name at the top of the ticket, can she beat Trump in November? That’s the question on every Democrat’s mind.

She certainly stands a better chance than Biden, if only because she does not lose her balance on stairs. She may commit a few malapropisms and gaffes from time to time, but she hasn’t drifted into the scary, vacant pauses and incoherent ramblings that have afflicted the president. 

“The most obvious thing that a potential Kamala Harris nomination does is change the subject from the one anchor on the ticket—the age question,” Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi told The Free Press. 

What’s more, Harris shakes up a presidential race the Democrats were clearly losing; according to The New York Times, Biden was trailing Trump by six points among likely voters. Like introducing a new character in a poorly rated sitcom midseason, she could turn a dreary storyline into something exciting, getting voters to sit up.

“With Kamala leading a younger, fresh-faced Democratic ticket, I would expect enthusiasm to return to those disappointed ‘I’m anti-Trump, but Biden can’t do it’ voters,” Republican strategist Alex Castellanos told me.

The skeptics remain unconvinced that Harris is the best possible candidate. When The Free Press asked Khosla whether he had a preferred candidate, he said, “We need to win Michigan and Pennsylvania, so one of those governors would be a good choice to beat Trump,” referring to Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Governor Josh Shapiro—both of whom have been regularly touted as excellent candidates to replace Biden. In addition, Harris’s poll numbers against Trump have consistently been lower than Biden’s. (Polling data on Whitmer and Shapiro is so far insufficient.)

Simply because she’s been in the White House for the last three-and-a-half years, Harris enters the race with name recognition that no other potential Democratic candidate can touch. “Americans ultimately require some familiarity with the people they entrust with the future of humanity,” Castellanos said. “Totally untested, unknown politicians, out of the mainstream on economic, immigration, and safety issues, are the epitome of risk.”

On the other hand, Castellanos added, any initial bump in the polls Harris gets won’t last long if she can’t find a way to connect with voters in the coming weeks. Her past performance on the campaign trail doesn’t inspire confidence. The last time she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, she flopped miserably. As Bill Maher said on his HBO chat show, Real Time, this month, “You can count the number of delegates she won in the 2020 primaries on one hand. . . as long as that hand has no fingers.” 

If Harris is to gain any momentum as a candidate now, she’ll need to tackle the following three critical issues head on:

She must avoid the taint of a cover-up. As vice president, she had regular one-hour lunches with Biden as they watched a slideshow of their public events over salads and sandwiches. Harris is going to face the same question that brought down Richard Nixon fifty years ago: What did she know, and when did she know it? How could she have been unaware of Biden’s mental and physical decline, especially in the last month? And then she will have to account for her own assurances that Biden was fit to run, such as her post-debate cleanup on MSNBC last month, where she conceded that Biden had a “slow start” to the debate—but then defended his performance. She also rebuked Special Counsel Robert Hur for his report portraying Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”

“The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly politically motivated,” she said of Hur’s report. Now, Harris will have to find a way to walk back her comments at the same time that Trump will be sure to torment her for her past hypocrisies.

She must unify the party behind her. Harris will need to cajole the rising stars in her party to rubber-stamp her presidency rather than opting for an open convention. The last time the Democrats picked their candidate at the convention was 1968, also held in Chicago, when Hubert Humphrey was the nominee. That election ended with the Democrats in tatters and Richard Nixon on his way to the White House. Harris can make the argument that an open convention in 2024 could also be bitter and unpredictable—and put the party in an even worse position after the convention in late August, with less than three months before Election Day.

She must shore up Pennsylvania. With “Scranton Joe” off the ticket, winning the president’s birth state could be Harris’s biggest hurdle. In 2020, Biden beat Trump here by just one percentage point. In 2016, Trump took it from Hillary Clinton by the same margin. Now, the state’s 19 electoral votes are up for grabs and any slim advantage matters.

One big play Harris should consider: Naming Pennsylvania governor Shapiro as her running mate. One survey last week showed a potential Harris-Shapiro ticket beating Trump-Vance 47 to 46. Since that poll was taken, Shapiro’s standing has only risen, thanks to his compassionate remarks in the wake of an assassination attempt that failed to kill Trump but ended the life of Corey Comperatore, a firefighter who died shielding his family from the bullets. 

Assuming that Harris can gain voters’ trust, unify the party, and prove she can compete in Pennsylvania—once she has done all that—she still has a steep hill to climb. One of her biggest weaknesses is that she doesn’t seem to have any principles. Her stance on criminal justice reform is a key example. Is she soft or tough on crime? Looking at her record as a prosecutor, it’s nearly impossible to say. 

Back in 2004, when she was San Francisco’s district attorney, she supported a pilot program giving mentorship to nonviolent first offenders in lieu of jail time. She also declined to seek the death penalty for a man who killed a police officer, earning a rebuke from the late Senator Dianne Feinstein. 

But after she became California’s attorney general, Harris did an about-face. In 2014, she argued in favor of California’s right to issue the death penalty. By the time she ran for a Senate seat in 2016, she was referring to herself as the “top cop from the biggest state in the country.” 

Then came the riots that followed the killing of George Floyd in 2020—and another politically convenient flip-flop. Harris urged supporters on her Facebook page to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which posted bail for those arrested during the riots. In 2022, that fund helped release a repeat felon charged with murdering a passenger on a light-rail platform in St. Paul, Minnesota. 

Meanwhile, America has had almost four years to witness Harris as vice president, and her record is not good. She holds the dishonor of being in charge of the Biden administration’s border policy. Illegal border crossings at the end of 2023 hit an all-time high, and the border is now the signature issue of the Trump-Vance campaign. Harris was also the White House point person in 2022 on voting rights legislation—which failed to get out of Congress. 

She also suffers from an unpopularity problem, known for her bad habit of laughing at inappropriate times in a cringe-inducing cackle. “When I talk to voters, they all say she is hated, but then they pause and say, ‘I don’t really know why, though,’” James Johnson, cofounder of the polling firm J.L. Partners, told me.

People who know her best also seem to consider her a terrible boss. In June 2021, White House staffers told Politico that people in the vice president’s office “are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment.” By early 2022, four of her most senior advisers had bolted for the exits, prompting The Washington Post to report that many of her critics and supporters “worry that her inability to keep and retain staff will hobble her future ambitions.” 

For now, despite all her many handicaps, Democrats are hopeful that Harris can unify the party and reset the race. She will most likely inherit Biden’s $96 million war chest, and Jon Vein, a Democratic donor who is close to Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff, told The Free Press, “Democrats will 100 percent support her. There’s of course a division on whether people think she should be anointed or whether there should be a mini primary to make sure we pick the best ticket, but people will support her without reservation once it's confirmed she’s the candidate.”

Other observers are not so sure. Castellanos said that Harris still “has to prove something she has yet to demonstrate: that she is a serious leader.” He added, “The women who succeed as presidents and prime ministers have shown they are tough and strong because it’s a tough job, and Kamala Harris has not done that yet. Margaret Thatcher didn’t cackle or giggle.”

Rupa Subramanya contributed reporting to this piece. Eli Lake is a Free Press columnist. Follow him on X @EliLake, and read his piece, “Trump Did Everything Wrong. So Why Did It Work?”

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