With the choice of Kamala Harris as his running mate, Joe Biden has taken another large step toward blowing the election.
To swing voters — suburban soccer moms turned off by President Trump, a swath of white laborers, family-oriented Hispanic women — Harris will prove to be anathema. Her crusading leftism, hard-edged personal style, and facial sneer will make her like 10,000 fingernails on 1,000 loud chalkboards, amplified by a boom microphone so strong it can be heard for hundreds of miles.
As my colleague Tim Carney noted two weeks ago, Harris “tanked in the polls as soon as she got national exposure during the Democratic debates. Throughout her presidential run, Gallup never found her to have higher favorables than unfavorables. … They’re still bad. Among independents in [a recent] poll, for instance, Harris was underwater with 33% unfavorable to 25%.” And even among Democratic voters, “in an April poll, Harris had the highest unfavorables of the potential running mates mentioned (20%) and the highest “very unfavorable” (7%).”
Biden didn’t need to animate his party’s leftist “base.” So-called “progressive” activists already despise Trump so much that they will turn out to vote against the incumbent no matter what. But those “swing voters” described above still are unsettled by the hard-left turn the Democratic Party has taken. Biden attracts them, to the extent he does at all, because he symbolizes a return to normalcy and safety. But the Democratic Party doesn’t look safe. The Democrats, so far, have utterly failed to separate themselves from the radical riots sweeping American cities. As every day goes by, the Democrats are associated less with reform, and more with revolution.
Harris exacerbates that problem. She is seen, quite rightly, as a crusading leftist. Her lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union is a radical-left three out of 100. From the leftist Americans for Democratic Action, the only reason she lacks a perfectly radical 100 rating is that she was absent for four votes. Since the riots began in recent months, Harris has repeatedly praised the “protests” but has ignored or excused the violent riots. Indeed, as Portland descended into chaos, she blasted the Trump administration for sending in federal agents but couldn’t seem to bother to condemn the protesters throwing the Molotov cocktails.
To the extent that Harris reinforces the impression that Biden either has embraced the radicals or is so weak that he has been co-opted by them, she exacerbates his potential election vulnerabilities. To the extent that voters are worried that Biden may not serve a full term, the prospect of Harris as president could be frightening to voters.
As Harris showed in the primaries, the more she campaigned, the more unpopular she became. The Trump campaign must be licking its chops over its chance to portray Biden as owned and controlled by the activists who are Harris’s natural constituency. A second term for Trump looks likelier by the day.
