Vice President Kamala Harris, Democratic candidate for the White House, on July 23, 2024 in Wisconsin. (Credit: Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP)
Will Kamala Harris really be “easier to beat than Joe Biden would have been,” as Donald Trump claimed on CNN on Tuesday?
After the current President of the United States withdrew from the presidential race on Nov. 5, the former Republican leader is taking victory for granted, stubbornly portraying the Democratic front-runner as a carbon copy of his 81-year-old former rival, who was battered in the polls after a campaign fraught with serious doubts about his fitness for office.
However, there seems to be some renewed enthusiasm for the current vice-president. In less than 24 hours following the announcement of Biden's withdrawal and his support for the Vice-President, more than $80 million was donated to the Democratic campaign, a record in this election, while the majority of the party's delegates gave her their backing.
In opinion polls, the gap is narrowing between the two camps. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll carried out earlier this week, Harris is even ahead of her rival by two points, with 44 percent of voting intentions versus 42 percent nationally. That's four points more than Biden was expected to score, just before he withdrew from the race.
A marginal lead, especially as this is the only poll to show such a trend reversal, but the momentum is clear: Harris is rallying more support than her White House boss. According to the latest polls conducted by the New York Times (NYT), the former prosecutor, although behind Trump, has gained an extra point over Biden's position in the race in the span of a few days. Another Marist poll on Monday had her just one point behind the Republican, at 45 percent to 46 percent. However, another poll carried out by CNN envisages a three-point gap between the two candidates, in favor of the Republican, previously forecast to be six points ahead of Biden.
The importance of swing states
Prior to the current president's withdrawal, many analysts pointed to anti-Biden rather than anti-Democratic sentiment as the reason for her lagging behind Trump. “Harris is new to the race, so it will take a little longer for her advantages to show up in the polls, which probably underestimate the demographics of Democrats likely to vote for her. She will probably do better in the elections than the polls show,” added Ernesto Castaneda, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at American University, who believes that Harris could do best in the ‘swing states’ that are decisive for winning an election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
In Pennsylvania, for example, which Biden struggled to win in 2020, Harris trailed by just one point in a hypothetical showdown with Trump, according to polls conducted in these key states before Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential race. She won by a more comfortable five points in Virginia, a state where 58 percent of Democratic voters wanted Biden to withdraw, reported the NYT. “Trump will have to focus more on all competitive states, which will weaken his campaign compared to when he focused mainly on a few key states when running against Biden,” Castaneda analyzed.
Harris has a long way to go in these swing states, where some indicators are not going her way. A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) survey of registered voters in the seven states from March 17 to 24 found that immigration was among the top two issues in each of these states, with at least 72 percent of respondents saying that President Biden's handling of border security was going in the wrong direction, compared to 65 percent of voters nationwide.
Harris, who carries Biden's record, had inherited the vast file of illegal immigration, which has tripled in the country over the last three years, when she became vice-president. This theme is the cornerstone of Trump's campaign and could put her at a disadvantage with “working-class whites in Pennsylvania and the Midwest,” pointed out Geoffrey Kabaservice, Director of Political Studies at the Niskanen Center. All the more so since Republicans are working hard to equate her with the President, even though her major asset is precisely that she is not Biden.
'Never Biden'
The current president's age was a real hurdle, with 85 percent of the population believing he was too old to remain in power for another four years. This was one of the reasons why he decided not to seek a second term. “Many voters disappointed by the choice between two old white men see Harris and say to themselves that there is someone like them, who reflects their experience of the world,” said Peter Loge, director and associate professor at George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs, while 60 percent of Americans also thought that Trump was too old to hold the reins of the country.
The candidacy of Harris, 59, could thus attract a younger electorate, as Barack Obama did in his time. Last June, 61 percent of voters under 30 said they would vote for the current president. These young voters had caused Biden's popularity rating to fall to an all-time low, according to an NBC poll conducted in November, due to his foreign policy in Gaza.“Harris will get the vote of many undecideds, many independents and many voters who wanted to vote Trump to protest Biden and what's happening in Gaza,” added Castaneda, pointing to the vice president's more critical attitude towards the Israeli government and Benjamin Netanyahu, whom she did not welcome to Congress during her speech on Wednesday, July 24, as is tradition.
In addition, Harris, whose mother is Indian and father Jamaican, could count on the support of ethnic minorities, a trend that gave her a particular advantage among Latinos in 2010 and 2014, in the elections for California Attorney General, where the candidate won the majority of the community's votes. “As an African-American and Asian-American candidate, Harris will almost certainly bridge the enthusiasm gap that has opened up among young people, African-Americans and Latinos, both men and women," said Geoffrey Kabaservice.
"This will make her job easier in swing states like Georgia, Arizona and perhaps North Carolina.” These are categories of voters traditionally aligned with the Democratic camp, though with some loss of momentum since the Biden presidency, particularly among young black voters. According to research conducted by the Pew Research Center last May, 29 percent of registered black voters aged 18 to 49 would currently vote for Trump, compared with 8 percent of black people over 50.
Harris, the anti-Trump
“It's hard to know whether she could win over these disappointed Biden voters: Yes, if they were disappointed by his age, probably not if they were disappointed by his policies,” argued Kabaservice.
However, the current vice-president will try to convince the undecided. As a former prosecutor, she intends to use her career to nail down the legal woes of her Republican rival, convicted in May of 34 counts of influencing the 2016 election by bribing a porn actress with whom he allegedly had an affair. “Harris presents Trump as the candidate of danger, division, chaos and uncertainty,” explained the political scientist and historian. The former president is accused of inciting an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2020 to challenge the results of the election he had just lost to Biden.
A staunch defender of abortion rights, she should also attract “suburban women who have been disappointed by Trump,” according to Kabaservice, the former president having installed conservative justices on the Supreme Court who recently reversed the Roe vs. Wade ruling protecting abortion rights at federal level.
“Biden's numbers have been falling steadily, but Democratic policies remain popular. Harris is shaking up the campaign, loosening it up,” said Peter Loge. But polarization, he believes, will remain the name of the game in a deeply divided America. Like Biden, Harris will probably position herself as a bulwark against a new Trump mandate, with the advantages she has on top of that. “Many of the Republican points of attack against Biden are no longer valid, which now brings the focus back to Trump's weaknesses,” concluded Castaneda.
This article was originally published in L'Orient-Le Jour.
