Since Joe Biden was taken off the ballot, things seem to be going well for Kamala Harris. She formally secured her presidential nomination from the Democratic National Committee with minimal fuss. Other party faithful quickly lined up behind her. Mainstream media outlets have offered overwhelming upbeat, glamorizing and uncritical coverage of Harris since her predecessor stepped aside. Celebrity endorsements have flowed like wine. So have campaign donations. Folks who has been jaded about the race when it was Trump v. Biden are now looking with new eyes at the contest, leading to a solid bump in the polling.
It might be tempting to think Donald Trump is toast. The race is all buttoned up. Democrats are back to being on the “right side of history.” For better or worse, it’s are not that simple.
2024 is a major outlier, almost any way you slice it
In 2016, mainstream analysts were virtually certain that Trump could not win the GOP nomination. After he defied the expert consensus and won that nomination, it was nonetheless viewed as nearly impossible that he could win the presidency. As a person who studies knowledge, I grew interested in this high level of certainty and consensus among scholars and pundits. Especially because there seemed to be all sorts of evidence that the cycle was highly unusual and, as a consequence, many of the indicators conventionally relied upon to forecast races may be less predictive than usual. At the time, people were broadly unwilling to acknowledge this point. They were eager to believe that they could see the future – a destiny where Democrats would indefinitely enjoy decisive electoral majorities.
These days, although the desire to know the outcome of the race before it happens hasn’t gone anywhere, people are much more alive to the possibility that conventional wisdom might not apply to highly unconventional cases. This is good because, in many respects, the 2024 cycle is far more unusual than race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton eight years ago – making it much tougher to predict how things will shake out and how to interpret the eventual outcome.
This was true even when the race was still Trump versus Biden: it had been more than a century since we had a race with a former president squaring off against a sitting president (in 1912), and nearly 70 years since the last time two presidential candidates had a rematch. Both Trump and Biden were unprecedentedly old for presidential contenders. Both candidates were deeply unpopular, with Trump underwater in favorability polls the entire cycle so far, and Biden’s approval consistently hovering near the lowest of any president on record. There were very few precedents to turn to in order to calibrate expectations for a race like this.
However, even with Biden out of the running, it’s still an extraordinarily weird contest.
For example, candidate substitution – party leaders replacing their presumptive nominee mid-cycle in order to field a more competitive alternative (as happened to Biden) – this is virtually unheard of in U.S. presidential contests. Precedents from abroad suggest that, because this is a tactic parties rely on near-exclusively when they are headed for certain defeat, although candidate substitution typically does improve a party’s performance, it’s often not enough to change the overall outcome of the race. But sometimes it does.
It’s also unclear how to think about incumbency in this cycle. As a result of various psychological tendencies, incumbents are often strongly advantaged in electoral contests. However, this benefit does not seem to transfer to vice presidents or other chosen successors. In this race, then, Kamala is not an incumbent. Yet, although Trump is not in the White House currently, he has been president of the United States before. It’s hard to know what to make of that. In previous cases where former presidents (Grover Cleveland, Teddy Roosevelt) have run for reelection after a spell out of the White House, they were running against direct incumbents – currently sitting presidents — so the advantage of their presidential experience likely washed out. In this case, Trump is running against someone who has never served in this role. Hence, if there is an incumbency advantage this cycle, it likely favors him. But folks should bear in mind that Trump was the direct incumbent in 2020, and he lost anyway (the only time since 1980 where there was a partisan shift in the White House and the winning party failed to stay in power for at least 8 years).
Moreover, beyond the idiosyncratic structural nature of the race, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are highly unusual contenders.
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are not like other historical candidates
The 2024 Republican nominee is a twice-impeached former president who recently survived an assassination attempt.
Since the last time Trump was on the ballot, he has also been convicted of multiple felonies with myriad other criminal and civil cases pending. The last time a major presidential candidate was in a remotely similar position of legal jeopardy was when socialist candidate Eugene Debs ran for office from prison during the 1920 election.
With respect to the Democrats, Kamala Harris’ candidacy marks only the second time in U.S. history that a woman (following Hillary Clinton) or a non-white person (following Barack Obama) was at the top of the ticket for one of the top two political parties (and 2024 marks the first time in U.S. history that someone who is both non-white and a woman received a nomination). However, this is also the first time since 1968 that a U.S. presidential candidate has been awarded a major party nomination without winning a single primary vote in that cycle.
It’s likewise been more than a half-century since an eligible sitting president has declined to stand for reelection. However, the very fact that Democrats actually dumped their unfit and unpopular leader while the Republicans aggressively rallied behind theirs may buoy perceptions among moderates and independents that the contemporary GOP is a cult of personality built around an authoritarian huckster. Democrats, meanwhile, can paint themselves as committed to putting the wellbeing of the country, and the preferences of the American people, above their own personal ambitions (even when it hurts).
Kamala’s candidacy has also completely inverted the influence of candidate age on the race. Previously, clear signs of physical frailty and cognitive decline led voters to be deeply concerned about Biden’s age in a way that advantaged Trump. Sensing an opportunity, Trump oriented his whole strategy around exacerbating voter concerns about age and fitness. And it seems like this was a grave miscalculation in retrospect.
Now, that Biden has dropped out, Trump is the oldest candidate to run for the presidency. His opponent is roughly two decades younger than him. His running mate is half his age. Voters are now deeply concerned about Trump’s age, health, mental acuity, and likely viability in office – concerns that are especially salient because his VP choice is one of the least popular picks in modern history. No one wants J.D. Vance to be President of the United States of America. Even Trump isn’t prepared to say his running mate is well-suited for the job.
Finally, Harris’ history as a prosecutor, which was a deep liability in the 2020 Democratic primaries, presents her with an advantage in the current cycle wherein the “Great Awokening” of Democratic voters has run its course, public concern about crime and safety is high, and her opponent has recently been convicted of multiple felonies. For better or worse, Kamala can lean into security or “law and order” frames with abandon. She’s already been piloting this with great success, declaring in recent speeches that, over the course of her time as a prosecutor and district attorney, she “took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.” She continued, “hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”
However, despite the obvious virtues of Harris as a candidate (in this moment, against this opponent), her appointment also entails significant risks and liabilities. These vulnerabilities would likely have hampered her prospects in an open primary. They may yet pose a problem in the general election.
Kamala has many genuine weaknesses (conditional on competent opponents)
Much like Biden and Trump, Harris has been consistently underwater in terms of both job approval ratings and general favorability.
Harris is also (in)famous for serving up incoherent word salads when speaking without a script — a tendency that will likely draw unflattering headlines and viral clips as she does more media interviews and public forums.
More broadly, Kamala’s political instincts leave much to be desired.
In 2019, her crass attempts at identity politics led Harris’ own father to publicly condemn her for trafficking in stereotypes.
In the 2020 Democratic primaries, Kamala managed to get brief attention by insinuating that frontrunner Joe Biden overly cozy with racists and racist policies (at the height of the post-George Floyd “racial reckoning”). In the process, however, she raised the salience of her own greatest political liability in that cycle. She subsequently got absolutely torched by a candidate who was, herself, barely registering in polling, effectively destroying Harris’ 2020 electoral prospects. The money began drying up quickly, and Kamala ended up dropping out before a single vote was cast.
In terms of substantive policy positions, Kamala seems far out of step with the median voter. In virtue of trying to represent the will and interests of her constituents in California, her record in the Senate has consistently been among the most liberal in the country, especially on cultural issues. In terms of economic policy, however, she is the favored candidate of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Big Law. This puts her decisively in the ideological sector of America that has the least popular support – the “woke capitalism” contingent.
Harris has been reversing course on her previous issue positions in recent weeks to try to get ahead of this problem. However, this flip-flopping, especially when paired with the important role she seemed to play in covering up and outright denying Biden’s clear cognitive decline, and her ongoing attempts to distance herself from failures of the Biden Administration — could render Harris vulnerable to perceptions that she is untrustworthy and non-genuine.
Yet, the biggest wildcard for Harris’ nascent campaign is her leadership style.
Over her time in California politics, Kamala faced scandals related to perceived nepotism and alleged financial improprieties. She also earned a reputation of being a cruel boss whose organizations operated in a dysfunctional way and with unusually high turnover. In one striking instance, she forced an employee who resigned due to this toxicity to sign an NDA agreement in order to receive a severance package, despite having been publicly opposed to this practice on the stump.
Much like her offices when she was a prosecutor and district attorney, Harris’ 2019 run for the Democratic nomination was marked by nepotism, brutal infighting, a toxic organizational culture, and many abrupt high-profile departures.
Her tenure as Vice President has also been marred by vicious struggles among her staff, alleged mistreatment of employees, alongside apparent mismanagement and blame shifting. She continues to face extraordinary levels of staff attrition. Over the last four years, Harris had markedly higher levels of turnover than Trump did over his tumultuous first term. The problems in the VP office have been so persistent and severe that the White House has even been forced to publicly address them.
Among beltway insiders, this chronic dysfunction has sown doubts about Kamala’s ability to successfully spearhead the Democrats’ 2024 presidential campaign, or to effectively govern should she win.
As a CNN report described, Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate in large part to reduce the likelihood that her 2024 presidential campaign would implode:
“Asked how he saw his role as VP, Walz said he would perform the job however Harris wanted him to. Asked if he wanted to be the last person in the room before Harris made a decision, Walz said only if she wanted him to be there. Asked if he had ambitions to run for president himself one day, Walz said he did not, a point that sources said was not lost on a team looking to minimize the potential for any internal drama in a future Harris administration… Walz was seen as a pick that would come with less drama and palace intrigue – both on the campaign trail and, if they win in November, at the White House… Walz’s deferential style was a huge factor in his appeal with Harris, sources said.”
Nonetheless, there is a high probability of conflict between Harris and other subordinates in the coming months, or between Kamala’s drama-ridden team versus Walz and his more tight-knit staff.
In any event, the internal chaos that has so far followed Harris in every organization she’s been part of in her public life suggests deep problems with who she surrounds herself with and/or how she chooses to lead them. The antecedent (and any subsequent) drama could provide fertile soil for her opponents to sow doubts about whether she has what it takes to run the White House.
So far, however, Harris has benefitted from Trump’s lack of substantive knowledge about his opponent, her background, her positions, or her liabilities. Rather than focusing on any of the genuine weaknesses described above, he’s tried to portray Kamala as unintelligent, weak, and not black enough. Other Republicans have called Harris a DEI hire (under an implicit and false assumption that diversity considerations are incompatible with hiring based on “merit”). J.D. Vance, meanwhile, has previously referred to Kamala as a “childless cat lady” (a remark that his wife, Usha, recently walked back on his behalf).
These kinds of attacks are unlikely to resonate with persuadable voters. Instead, they exemplify what huge shares of Americans (including in his own party) have consistently found unpalatable about Donald Trump: his pettiness, his lack of basic decency, his apparent inability to conduct himself in a manner befitting the presidency.
Worse, these lines of attack simultaneously echo the very approach to politics that has been alienating prospective voters from the Democratic party over the past decade: a focus on identity B.S. and “very online” discourses over the bread-and-butter issues that voters actually care about.
One striking recent example of this dynamic at work:
At a recent campaign event in Ohio, J.D. Vance mentioned that he drank a Diet Mountain Dew the preceding night. He then asserted that the “woke” left would probably declare this as “racist” somehow. It seemed like this was intended to generate laughter or applause. Instead, he was met with silent blinking and confused stares among the normies who’d assembled to hear him talk about solving actual problems. This is not what the median voter is into.
Put simply: no one should underestimate Trump and Vance’s ability to snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory. However, it’s also the case that Harris probably won’t be able to rely on her opponents’ incompetence forever. More broadly, it’s not enough for Kamala to coast on the current positive shifts. If she wants to win, she needs to continue making gains.
A lot could change between now and November
At present, most election prediction markets continue to project Trump as the likely winner in November — although the high volatility in these estimates over time is also worth noting. Again, it’s a tough race to call!
Nate Silver’s electoral forecasting model (which outperforms markets) paints the race as essentially a toss-up, although the trendline suggests Kamala may take a lead soon. Although he emphasized with respect to that trend, “this is a somewhat challenging time from a forecasting standpoint. There’s been a lot of huge political news that’s piled on top of itself. I’m not sure that the polls have yet entered some sort of steady state.”
One thing that’s critical to note about these probabilistic portraits is that, while they aren’t terrible for Harris, they aren’t particularly spectacular either. As Matt Yglesias aptly put it, “Current polls have her doing slightly worse than Biden did in 2020 and a lot worse than Biden polled in 2020. Which is to say, it’s fine if the polls are right, but if we see the same kind of polling error that we saw in 2016 and 2020, then she’ll lose. Another way to say it is that the oddsmakers and the modelers have her favored, but very narrowly.”
In evaluating the trends, it’s also critical to bear in mind that these may be Kamala’s finest moments in the entire electoral cycle.
In the coming months, Republicans will likely sharpen their attacks and recalibrate their campaign around their new opponent(s). And while she’ll probably receive another boost after announcing her running mate this week, the honeymoon phase of Harris’s candidacy will likely taper off among voters (and in polls) sometime after the Democratic National Convention. So far Harris has done almost no unscripted events or interviews, and has released very little in terms of substantive policy positions (she’s benefitted from being the “generic Democrat” alternative to Trump or Biden). But eventually, she’ll probably be forced to do both — likely generating controversies in the process. The media may grow more critical as the race continues too (although their hostile obsession with Trump is unlikely to go anywhere). Meanwhile, Harris’ organizational efficacy will be acutely tested as a likely brutal campaign wears on — even as challenging world events, like the ongoing Israeli offensive in Gaza, lead people to pay closer attention to her leadership style. And there are worrying economic rumblings that threaten to sour voters on the legacy of the Biden/ Harris Administration at a super inconvenient moment in her candidacy.
All to say, no one should take Democrats’ current gains in the polls as evidence that the election in the bag. The 2024 U.S. Presidential race will probably continue to be volatile all the way to the finish line. Indeed, if the aftermath of the 2020 election was any indication, there could be chaos all the way through Inauguration Day. We seem condemned to live in interesting times. Adjust your expectations accordingly.