Vice President Kamala Harris is not popular. Polls repeatedly show the vice president with a negative approval rating, and some have even suggested that she is the least popular vice president in at least thirty years.
Some even say she faces the unthinkable: that Joe Biden could consider even dumping her from the ticket in 2024 – or at least he should.
According to an NBC poll from June, just 32% of Americans believe that Harris is doing a good job – a number that matched a poll from August 2022 showing virtually the same figures. The same poll found that 49% of Americans hold a negative opinion of the vice president, with some 39% telling pollsters that they have a “very negative” view of her. It gave Harris a net negative approval rating of -17 percent.
After years of worsening approval ratings and polls repeatedly showing Harris to be one of the least popular and most divisive politicians in modern American history, even White House strategists are reportedly worried that the vice president could tank Biden’s chances in 2024. It’s not just the White House and high-profile Democrats coming to her defense, though – the media’s doing it, too.
Is Kamala Harris the Least Popular in History?
In response to a wave of negative reports about Harris, even from left-leaning news outlets, fact-checkers came to the vice president’s defense to argue that she isn’t the least popular vice president…ever.
In one fact check from the Sacramento Bee, David Lightman noted that because Marist and Quinnipiac didn’t exist at the founding of the Republic, nobody will ever know. And that is certainly true.
Lightman also noted that former VP Dick Cheney had a bigger gap between his favorable and unfavorable ratings during his second term, noting that just 30% of adults viewed him favorably in the wake of the Iraq invasion.
Perhaps, then, Harris isn’t the least popular vice president ever – but her unpopularity is remarkable not just because it has remained consistently low for such a long time, but because she hasn’t, like Cheney, overseen the invasion of foreign country.
Is This Why People Don’t Like Her?
Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen offered his view months back on why the vice president is so unpopular among American voters, telling “Outnumbered” on that she talks to grown adults as though they are children.
“Why is she so unpopular? One may be that none of the issues she’s taken on, like the border or anything else, she hasn’t made any progress and so part of that is the failure of the administration. But the other thing is that she has this habit of talking about the most mundane things in this deeply profound voice,” Thiessen said.
“And when people hear that, when people hear her say, ‘Transportation is about getting people to the place they want to go,’ and says it in such a profound way, they think one of two things. Either they think she’s stupid or they think, ‘She thinks I’m stupid.’ People don’t like to be talked to like a child. And so either they just lose confidence in her or they think she’s talking down to them, and that makes her profoundly unpopular,” he added.
No wonder many on the right keep thinking Biden could turn to someone else as his running mate.
Jack Buckby is 19FortyFive’s Breaking News Editor. He is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society.
