Kamala Harris Isn’t as Unpopular as We Thought – Since assuming the vice presidency, Kamala Harris has proven herself to being mostly unsuitable to the position she was gifted, not because she was such an incredible talent, but because Joe Biden and the Democratic Party’s powerbrokers thought she would resonate with minority voters better than any other possible Biden running mate in 2020.
Yet, once ensconced in power, Kamala Harris has been a total letdown—and rich target for Republican Party attacks. Everything from her bizarre public speeches to her inability to handle any policy that she’s been given to deal with as vice-president has reaffirmed the GOP’s criticism of Harris.
A Generally Unpopular Vice-President
The vice president’s poll numbers have consistently shown just how deep her unpopularity is with most American voters.
Kamala Harris has the lowest approval rating of any vice president in recorded American history.
This claim is backed up by FiveThirtyEight which has aggregated multiple polls together which give a range of disapproval and approval ratings. According to FiveThirtyEight, Vice-President Harris has a whopping 51.2 percent disapproval rating and a meager 40.2 percent approval rating.
This has been Harris’ reality since the fall of 2021, according to the FiveThirtyEight aggregation of approval polls going back to the start of the Biden Administration in January 2021. For almost three years—the bulk of Biden’s time in the White House thus far—his vice-president has been underwater in terms of her popularity.
Everyone knows it, too. Which is why many conservative pundits have been left dumbfounded by Harris’ bizarre claim that in some polls she’s doing better than in others.
Where Kamala Harris Thrives
According to these pundits, who enjoy a brilliant sense of comedic timing on social media, there are “literally no polls” showing that Harris is popular. To reiterate: from a general perspective, Harris is deeply unpopular. But there is one area that Harris does resonate with key voting blocs (notably minorities, who are an essential voting bloc for the Democratic Party).
Whenever the otherwise shambolic vice president talks on matters related to race and/or gender, she comes across as a cogent and even articulate candidate.
For the Democrats, too, making everything about sex and race is their specialty. Identity politics has defined the Democratic Party for decades. Since the 2010s, it has only become more pronounced, as matters of police-minority relations have dominated the headlines as well as issues related to gender politics and reproductive rights.
In all three subfields, Harris manages to not only sound like she knows what’s going on, but she manages to attract the voters from those key minority voting groups that the Democratic Party needs to win over every election cycle.
The devil is in the details for Harris, who at first glance appears to be hopelessly drowning in bad ratings. To be clear, she is one of the worst vice presidents in our nation’s history. At the same time, however, many of the same polls showing her with awful approval ratings generally give deeper breakdowns along ethnic and gender lines.
For example, a May 2 The Economist/YouGov poll that showed Harris having a measly 41 percent approval rating among African-Americans at an astounding 64 percent. By the way, the consistently overwhelming support from African-American voters has often proven decisive for the Democratic Party during tight election years, such as 2024 will undoubtedly be.
Then there is the matter of the female vote.
Kamala Turns Out the Female Vote
In the 2018 Midterms, the 2020 Presidential Election, and the 2022 Midterms, the way women voted deeply impacted the outcome of these campaigns. Overwhelming numbers of educated and mostly single, young female voters living in urban or suburban areas voted overwhelmingly Democratic.
That’s because they were single-issue voters: they cared only for preserving the right to having access to a safe, legal, and free abortion anywhere in the United States. Since the conservative Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) overturned Roe v. Wade, the Democrats were able to gin up the female vote against the Republicans.
It was Vice-President Kamala Harris who led the Democrats’ push to galvanize the female vote. Her efforts worked.
Here again, the fact that Harris was a woman of color worked in both her favor and the Democratic Party’s favor in multiple elections. What’s more, Vice-President Harris has increasingly been deployed as a so-called “attack dog” by the Biden Campaign and it has been reported that the vice president is increasingly relishing that role.
Kamala Harris Becomes an Attack Dog
Indeed, Kamala Harris has been effective in this position—notably when attacking her political rivals on issues related to gender, race, and sex.
It has been equally disturbing and entertaining to see a woman, like Kamala Harris, who was so loudly trumpeted as the future of American politics become so wildly unpopular because of her own incompetence.
Yet, in specific demographics, she continues to be a driving force for the Democrats.
Further, Harris is increasingly finding her footing and is enjoying great success talking about identity politics. The Republicans would be fools to continue downplaying her importance to the Biden Campaign or her threat to the GOP’s chances of getting the White House back in 2024.
Whoever is the Republican Party’s nominee in 2024 should be prepared to deal with Harris’ obsession over identity politics. It is the only area where she dominates among key voting blocs when compared to her Republican rivals.
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (Encounter Books), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
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