The vice president’s numbers keep rising. One new survey puts her ahead of the Republican—and in a better position to beat him than Joe Biden.
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event at Resorts World Las Vegas on July 9, 2024, in Las Vegas, Nevada.(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
Kamala Harris has made no effort, whatsoever, to suggest that she should replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president. But if the switch were to be made, polls now suggest that the vice president would be a particularly strong candidate against Republican Donald Trump.
In fact, several recent polls point to Harris as a potentially stronger candidate than Biden or other Democrats who have been mentioned as possible nominees. One of those surveys, released Thursday by ABC News and The Washington Post, put the vice president several points ahead of Trump in a head-to-head matchup.
Harris’s surge in the polls is not a development that either the president or the vice president is rushing to discuss. And the mere mention of it angers Biden’s most diehard loyalists, who dismiss any talk of replacing the president at the top of the ticket—even as there continues to be widespread speculation about whether Biden has the capacity to mount a winning campaign this fall, and serve a second four-year term in the White House.
Ironically, the fact that Harris is going from strength to strength in this volatile moment also angers Trump, who is suddenly ramping up his criticism of the vice president; at a rally this week in Florida, the former president attacked Harris as an advocate for “California socialism” and The New York Times reported Thursday that next week’s Republican National Convention would focus much of its vitriol on Harris because his team is “eager to define the vice president and drive down her approval ratings in case President Biden drops out of the race and she becomes the nominee.”
Harris’s approval ratings are strong among Democrats. The vice president’s personal loyalty to Biden, along with her willingness to take on many of the toughest assignments in the White House, to travel widely to advance the administration’s agenda, and to mount robust defenses when the president has come under attack, has earned her high marks from the Democratic base.
That has been especially true since the June 27 presidential debate between Biden and Trump, in which even the president acknowledges that he had a “bad night.” Within minutes of the end of the debate, there was Harris on CNN, highlighting Trump’s lies and arguing in an intense interview with Anderson Cooper,
“What we saw tonight is the president making a very clear contrast with Donald Trump on all the issues that matter to the American people. Yes, there was a slow start, but it was a strong finish. And what became very clear through the course of the night is that Joe Biden is fighting on behalf of the American people. On substance on policy on performance, Joe Biden is extraordinarily strong[.]”
Even on Thursday, as Biden prepared for the high-stakes press conference at which he sought to counter a chorus of calls for him to exit the race, Harris was rallying the base on the president’s behalf. “He is a fighter,” Harris said during a Democratic rally in North Carolina. “He is the first to say, ‘When you get knocked down, you get back up.’”
Harris’s advocacy—not just on behalf of Biden but also on behalf of the party and its down-ballot candidates—has been duly noted by grassroots Democrats. So, too, has a steady schedule of appearances nationwide, where her ardent championship of abortion rights, voting rights, and labor rights has identified the vice president as an essential Democratic campaigner.
“VP Harris is on fire. She’s vetted, tested, and has been Democrats’ strongest messenger throughout this campaign,” US Representative Jared Huffman (D-California) said Thursday. “She’s next up if we need her, and we might.”
That sentiment helps to explain why, as polls suggest that most Democrats would prefer that Biden quit the race, Harris tops the list of potential replacements. But there is another factor that’s worth noting: many of the most recent polls suggest that the vice president would be a stronger 2024 Democratic presidential candidate than Biden or any of the other prospects to replace him.
At this point, of course, a Harris-Trump race is hypothetical.
Biden’s still very much in the running. Despite mounting pressure from congressional Democrats, grassroots activists, and Hollywood stars who raise big money for the party, the president has steadfastly refused to even entertain the idea of standing down as the party’s candidate. During Thursday night’s press conference, he praised Harris but also announced, “I think I’m the most qualified person to run for president. I beat [Trump] once and I will beat him again.”
With that said, note what The New York Times reported shortly before the press conference: “Under siege from fellow Democrats, President Biden’s campaign is quietly testing the strength of Vice President Kamala Harris against former President Donald J. Trump in a head-to-head survey of voters.”
No matter who the Democratic nominee is, that candidate will begin from a place of relative strength. Opposition to Trump is robust, and it could well grow, as Americans focus on the prospect of handing the presidency to a 34-times-convicted felon who has expressed an interest in serving as a dictator, and whose allies and aides have developed a Project 2025 scheme to turn the federal government into Trump’s political fiefdom.
But there is mounting evidence that Harris could be the Democrat who is best positioned to mount a winning race against Trump and MAGA Republican extremism. “Every Democrat I spoke with agreed that Harris now delivers the party’s key messages on rights and values more cogently and crisply than Biden,” veteran political journalist Ron Brownstein explained Thursday.
That matters. It’s clear that Americans are looking for an alternative to Trump, even as they say Biden should stand down. According to the ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos Poll released Thursday, two weeks after Biden’s miserable performance in the first presidential debate, 47 percent of all potential voters said they favored Trump over Biden. Among registered voters, the split was a 46-46 tie. So, as bad as things have gotten for Biden, he is still in the running—in no small part because Trump is broadly unpopular, personally and politically. The best measure of the disdain for Trump is found in the fact that, while just 14 percent of those surveyed said Biden possesses “the mental sharpness it takes to serve effectively as president,” almost half of those surveyed would still back the Democrat. Sixty-two percent of Democratic voters and voters who lean toward the party say Biden should quit the 2024 race, yet 91 percent of these same voters say they would back the incumbent in a fall race against Trump.
But what happens when Harris is swapped in as the Democratic nominee? She pulls the Democratic total among all adults up to 49 percent, while the Republican total slips to 46 percent. And the former prosecutor, US senator from California, and contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination holds her lead among registered voters, who give Harris 49 percent to 47 percent for Trump.
All these numbers are within margins of error, but Harris’s position is consistently better throughout the poll. Indeed, the vice president has secured some of the best Democratic numbers in months. For instance, while she fares three points better than Biden in post-debate polling, she fares five points better than Biden’s pre-debate numbers from April.
Among women, in the current matchups, Biden and Trump are essentially tied, with the Democrat at 47 and the Republican at 46. Harris beats Trump 52-44.
The ABC survey is not the only one where Harris runs better than Biden. A CNN poll from last week had Trump beating Biden 49-43, while Harris narrowed the gap to 47-45. How? By running way better among women (who favored Trump 47-44 over Biden, but who backed Harris 50-43) and people of color (who favored Biden 54-33, but backed Harris 58-29). Harris also ran better than Biden among Democrats and independents, and among liberals, moderates, and conservatives. These differences may not seem huge, but they matter in an election that will likely be decided by the tiniest of margins.
CNN also polled Trump against two other potential Democratic replacements for Biden: California Governor Gavin Newsom and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Neither ran as well as Harris. The same was the case with a Reuters poll from last week, which also polled for Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. Notably, in the Reuters poll, only Harris (and former first lady Michelle Obama, who has shown no interest in running) ran better than Biden.
When the ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos team asked an open-ended question of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents about who they were prefer as a Biden replacement, they found that “Harris leads in preference to replace Biden across groups — named, for example, by 27% to 34% of men, women, Black people, Hispanic people and white people alike.” Only 7 percent mentioned Newson, while Whitmer and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg were at 3 percent. Two percent backed independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. One percent favored Beshear, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, or other prospects.
Democrats are far from united on whether Biden should stand down or whether Harris should replace him. But there is considerable evidence to suggest that the most substantial number of partisans share the view Huffman expressed when, on Thursday, he announced, “Let me be very clear. If/when President Biden passes the torch, I’m all in for Kamala Harris!”
John NicholsTwitterJohn Nichols is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation. He has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on topics ranging from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyses of US and global media systems. His latest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Times bestseller It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.