The Republican messaging about Vice President Kamala Harris has been clear ever since the start of the Biden-Harris Administration: Harris is a uniquely terrible vice president, prone to gaffes, misstatements, intolerable laughing/giggling, and just all-around political incompetence.
Beyond that, the narrative goes, Harris is a major political liability for the Democratic Party, and that they are especially in trouble should President Joe Biden pass away or otherwise become unable to run for or serve as president.
Branding Kamala Harris
Is that narrative true? There are various reasons to believe that it is not – and two op-eds this week tried to make their case while explaining the vice president’s unpopularity.
Yes, Harris is unpopular – but that’s at a time when essentially all major American political figures have negative approval ratings. And the office of the vice president has a certain amount of indignity built directly into it – as viewers of the HBO series “Veep” undoubtedly remember.
Lauren Leader wrote for The Hill Thursday that Harris is “far from the worst vice president.”
Yes, per a recent Los Angeles Times poll aggregation, Harris has the lowest approval rating of any vice president in history at this stage of their term.
“This ignoble distinction raises important questions as the election season heats up: Is Harris really doing such a terrible job, so out of touch with the American people that she deserves this historic disapproval? Or as the first female vice president of color, is she on the receiving end of well-documented and deeply ingrained bias?” Leader writes.
Leader also sees historical parallels to another Democrat who was on the presidential ticket.
“Vice President Harris is not perfect — and she has sometimes been her own worst enemy, struggling to keep good staff and appearing stiff and scripted at public appearances,” she writes. “But it’s hard to square the outsized negative attention she receives with any rational critique, and impossible not to see parallels to the only other woman ever to come so close to our nation’s highest office — Hillary Clinton. She, too, endured years of disinformation and gendered attacks that affected the outcome of the 2016 election.”
The author went on to recommend that Kamala Harris and her supporters “actively and vocally fight back against negative, biased and simply wrong narratives,” and that she up her visibility heading into the 2024 campaign.
In another op-ed, in Politico by Marquette University political science professor Julia Azari, the argument is made that Harris is “a better VP than you think.”
“Since taking office, her vice presidency has been a much bumpier ride. There have been rumblings about Biden replacing her on the ticket in 2024, though this most likely amounts to the usual speculation among pundits while we wait for something real to happen during election season,” Azari writes. “According to a recent poll, only 13 percent of Democrats would want to see her run in 2024 if Biden were unable to run. And while Harris has struggled with higher net unfavorable ratings than some recent predecessors, no one is exactly sure why. What does political science have to say about this?”
She notes that while the vice presidency has become more powerful over time, the nature of the vice presidency doesn’t necessarily lend itself to widespread popularity.
“In other words, the vice presidency is two things at once — a party office, and also an executive branch office. And sometimes on top of that, it’s a third thing, too, which is a legislative office, as it was during Harris’ first two years when she was frequently needed to show up on Capitol Hill to cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate. It’s a lot to do at once,” Azari says.
The author also goes into why she believes Harris is so unpopular.
“In sum, Harris faces all of the usual problems that vice presidents do — a murky official role, with her personal political project subsumed by the administration’s goals, and no guarantee that loyalty to those goals will be rewarded with status or political clout,” she writes. “She inherits the baggage of the Biden administration, including its partisan baggage, but without the benefits or prestige of the presidential seal.”
Author Expertise and Experience
Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
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