Harris could not escape Biden’s unpopularity

• Kamala Harris’s advisers said she was struggling to dig herself out of a hole.

• Joe Biden put Democrats in a difficult position entering the 2024 race.

• Harris could not distance himself from the very unpopular president.

President Joe Biden may have dropped out of the 2024 race, but voters have never forgotten their strong disdain for his record.

“Overall, I think this would be a challenge for a Democratic candidate running in this environment,” Doug Sosnik, a longtime adviser to Bill Clinton, told Business Insider. “Of course, if you are the vice president of the government, it becomes even more difficult.”

There is plenty of data that Americans remain angry about the direction of the country. It was Harris who had to foot the bill for ongoing frustrations over the COVID-19 pandemic and the high prices that followed as the virus began to recede.

APVoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide, found that more than half of voters wanted to see substantial changes. A CNN exit poll showed voters gave Biden an approval rating of -19 points. Among those who did not approve of the president, Trump won 82% of them.

Harris had a much more manageable approval rating of -5 points, but despite her campaign’s efforts to portray Trump as unelectable, he was only a few points higher, at -7. The 2024 race saw Trump post some of his highest approval ratings since launching his first presidential run in 2015.

“We dug from a deep hole, but not enough,” wrote David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Harris and Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, in a now-deleted post on X.

In the early accusations about the 2024 race, there is a sense that Harris was struggling to distance herself from Biden — a difficulty best summed up in a moment during her appearance on “The View” that was quickly cut short by the team from Trump because of the closing message.

“There’s nothing that comes to mind,” Harris said when asked if she would have anything different than Biden during his presidency.

Evan Roth Smith, the lead researcher at BluePrint, said there is no doubt that Biden’s unpopularity had an impact on Harris.

“It is very clear that Kamala Harris’ association with Joe Biden and the Biden-Harris administration has hurt her,” Roth Smith said. “It’s less clear to me that even if she had erased all that, she could have won this election.”

Harris swam against a global tide.

This was an unusual race. Trump will soon become only the second former president to regain the White House. In an era of endless campaigning, Harris had barely more than 100 days to wrap up a major nomination and reintroduce himself to the American people. Trump has seen decades of unprecedented violence in the United States, when a would-be assassin’s bullet missed him by just inches.

And yet the main storyline sounds remarkably similar. Throughout the Western world, incumbents have been unceremoniously removed from office by angry voters. It happened to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Conservative Party. Even the ruling parties that remained in power in countries such as South Korea and Germany suffered enormous setbacks. Under this lens, Biden’s unpopularity made sense because his counterparts in the G7 were in the same boat.

The Democrats did not have a competitive presidential primary.

Biden didn’t debate until he entered the general election. As leader of the Democratic Party, Biden used his position to fundamentally reshape the nomination fight — sweeping the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries, the former of which had embarrassed him several times during his long career.

Unlike his predecessors, Biden has never directly faced the kind of midterm bombardment that would have further pressured Democrats to bring up the octogenarian’s future in the Oval Office. Looking back, the 2022 midterm elections — when fears of a “red wave” never fully materialized — gave Democrats false hope. Biden then took the opportunity to abandon his promise to serve as a bridge to the next generation.

When Biden entered the campaign, he had far more in common with presidents who were voted out of office than with those who could win re-election.

A Gallup poll before the election showed just how gloomy the mood was among Americans when they were asked the question, “Would you say you and your family are better off now than they were four years ago?” More than half of adults (52%) said they were worse off, even more than in September 2020, when the pandemic was raging. The last time it was this bad was in 1992, when incumbent President George HW Bush lost to Bill Clinton.

After his disastrous debate performance, Biden tried to position his decision to step aside, amid a concerted pressure campaign, as an act of selflessness. Instead, he will likely be dogged by questions about why he insisted on hanging on as long as he did.

It wasn’t just Biden’s past that haunted Harris.

Harris’ record, namely the progressive positions she took during the 2020 Democratic primaries, came back to bite her. As she sprinted toward the center, she struggled to explain how she could so dramatically change her views on fracking, immigration and Medicare for All.

“People were saying all kinds of things on the advice of activists, advocates, experts and sometimes pollsters, targeting the left wing of the party, the base of the party,” Roth Smith said. “And guess what? The voters have not forgotten. The Trump campaign has not forgotten.”

Republicans say it wasn’t just Biden’s record or Harris’ past that changed the race. Voters across the country and demographics showed dramatic openness toward the Republican Party.

“It was a historic victory, and it was a complete repudiation of both Kamala Harris and the platform and positions of the Democratic Party,” Ryan Ryan Williams, who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, told Business Insider. “Voters simply don’t buy what they’re selling. They don’t want it.”

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