Kamala Harris and the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

What if it's not a sugar high?

A coconut tree. Get it?! Photo by Georgia de Lotz on Unsplash

It’s been a whole month since Joe Biden stepped aside as the Democratic Party nominee. It would be safe to say that Kamala Harris has surprised an awful lot of pundits since then. Within 24 hours after Biden’s departure, Harris consolidated her support to earn the nomination. Her selection of Tim Walz as her vice presidential nominee went down well with the party. Her fundraising and organizing have been extremely impressive given the unprecedented nature of the transition.

All of this has been reflected in the polls. Biden was the decided underdog at the time of his departure; indeed, that was the primary reason party heavyweights forced his hand. Harris has reset the polling. While everything remains within the margin for error, she now has a lead in the national polling average, a similar lead in the key Rust Belt states, and is far more competitive than Biden in the Sun Belt swing states as well. When she entered the race, Nate Silver had Trump as a strong favorite to win the presidency; now, Silver has Harris as a slight favorite to win. That is a pretty big swing!

Perhaps the best way to demonstrate how well Harris has done the last month is to look at her favorability numbers. In the first half of this year Harris was polling as poorly or more poorly than Biden, hovering around twenty points underwater in favorability. Now? FiveThirtyEight conservatively has her halving that gap; other polls have Harris now breaking even or net positive — including in the swing states. That is extraordinary movement in so little time.

Now seems like a good moment for the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World to note something important: Harris has dramatically exceeded pundit expectations of how she would be doing at this point in the race. Back in May the New York Times’ Matter of Opinion podcast recorded an entire episode about Harris, and their take on her was pretty dismissive. When Biden dropped out, almost all of the Times’ opinion writers remained pessimistic. The NYT’s Ezra Klein earned plaudits as “perhaps the most influential Democratic media figure” for presciently wanting Biden to drop out in the spring. He too, however, noted “the Kamala Harris problem. In theory, she should be the favorite. But… Democrats don’t trust that she would be a stronger candidate.”¹ Even as pundits and pols wanted Biden to exit the campaign after the first debate, most of them also wanted an open convention or a “blitz primary” despite the obvious fact that Kamala Harris was the only viable alternative. More recently, Mathew Yglesias acknowledged, “relative to my expectations, she has over-performed.”

This raises an obvious question: why was the chattering class so low on Harris as a presidential candidate? To be fair, there was some evidence to draw on for some of their low expectations. Politico’s Christopher Cadelago wrote this in June, two weeks before the presidential debate:

With voter concern about President Joe Biden’s age haunting his chances of reelection, a new poll shows his next in line, Vice President Kamala Harris, facing serious doubts about her ability to win the presidency herself, or to perform the job well were she to inherit it.

The POLITICO/Morning consult poll reveals that only a third of voters think it’s likely Harris would win an election were she to become the Democratic nominee, and just three of five Democrats believe she would prevail. A quarter of independents think she would win.

That skepticism extends to her potential future role as the head of her party. Forty-two percent of voters described her as a strong leader, including three-quarters of Democrats but only a third of independents.

The poll shows that Harris shares the same poor ratings as Biden. Both are well underwater, Biden at 43 percent favorable and 54 unfavorable, Harris at 42 percent favorable and 52 percent unfavorable….

Overall, the findings suggest that Harris is unlikely to quell anxiety among voters about what would happen if Biden became unable to serve. Attitudes about Harris could play a more pronounced role in the campaign than with a typical vice president as voters assess handing another four-year term to the 81-year-old president.

The polling does not explain everything, however. Mostly it seems that observers clung to a few stylized facts:

1. Harris ran for president in 2020 and dropped out before the Iowa caucuses;

2. Harris’ first year as vice president was somewhat rocky;

3. Harris had a reputation for high staff turnover.

In retrospect, however, these wound up not being great arguments against Harris. Lots of presidents — Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Joe Biden — had failed presidential primary runs in their past before they won. Furthermore, as Jonathan Bernstein observed last month, Harris’ run did not deserve the “failure” label, given where she ended up. As for Harris having a rough first year as vice president, that is unremarkable. The vice presidency is a politically thankless role and difficult to navigate for the best of politicos. Furthermore, it overlooks her considerable on-the-job improvement after 2021.

My point is that pundits badly underestimated how well Kamala Harris would do at the top of the ticket. There were some plausible explanations for why Harris might have had faced challenges, but most of them were impressionistic at best. As a result, Harris has exceeded the expectations of those folks who attend New York Times dinner parties.

I have a theory as to why this is true: Kamala Harris has suffered from the soft bigotry of low expectations.