Bye-bye Biden; Hello Harris – who’s lining up for the Oval Office

Alameen Templeton

The spotlight has swung onto US President Joe Biden’s vice-president Kamala Harris after he pulled out of the US election and endorsed her, revealing a chasm of concern among Democrats because she’s never polled well with voters.

Harris has been Biden’s ever-present shadow, hovering hawklike at his elbow during his Vice-President days under Barak Obama, as the duo salted the Ukrainian battlefield in preparation for a war with Russia. They orchestrated a coup, supported neo-Nazis in their takeover of the country and led the vilification campaign against Russia while cheerleading Ukraine into Nato membership.

But, while her loyalty has cemented her career with Biden, it’s done little to warm her to the electorate.

She’s never polled well with black voters, so her “blackness” has never been a drawing card for Democrat support.

The issues crumbling her credibility among black voters are well-known – she headed up an “anti-truancy law” while still a prosecutor in South Carolina that resulted in thousands of black parents being arrested, black children being separated from their parents and thousands of other arrested. Overall, the programme was eventually cancelled, but not after the damage had been done, creating dent in her credibility with the black vote.

She played up to black voters, bragging that as an undergrad she had smoked marijuana, adding “I did inhale”, but then later led a bill outlawing the drug and leading to thousands of black men being arrested, the Miami Herald noted in 2019.

During the last election, Politico magazine noted: “Harris has placed no higher than third among black voters in POLITICO/Morning Consult polls since August 2019, behind Biden and Bernie Sanders, and she trailed Elizabeth Warren in fourth in more recent surveys, including a Quinnipiac poll out of South Carolina…

“That led to wide concern on the ground in key states like South Carolina that black candidates were not authentic enough in their petitions for black support.”

It’s a credibility problem that has not gone away. The New Yorker in February, when assessing her chances of taking over mid-term if an ageing Biden were re-elected, noted she was not polling well among voters.

“Should Biden win again, a Harris Administration is not out of the question and, with more than half of Americans viewing her unfavourably—her ratings are even lower than Biden’s, according to FiveThirtyEight—Harris has work to do.”

But while her numbers don’t poll well with ordinary people, Harris is definitely a “system’s man”, particularly on the foreign front, hovering hawklike over all Biden’s ventures on Ukraine, Gaza and Taiwan.

While that endears her to donors, it does little to warm voters’ hearts. Even now, she’s polling far behind other Democrat contenders for the presidential ticket.

Blue Labs analytics, a Democrat polling firm, says five candidates outperform Harris in against Donald Trump, the Daily Telegraph notes today.

• Gretchen Whitmer is setting pulses racing. The governor of Michiganholds the honour of being personally vilified by Trump as the Democrats’ “woke” mascot – his supporters regularly chant “lock her up” at his rallies.

Her “true-blue policies” in Michigan has made her the darling of many east and west-coast donors and progressive activists.

And they remember she made short work of a Trump-backed rival when re-elected as governor in 2022.

But she has remained non-committal on the Gaza genocide and that could hurt her. Dearborn, Michigan, has the highest concentration of Muslims in the country.

They’ve sworn to spoil their votes in the election over Biden’s unquestioning support for Israel. Whitmer recently refused to describe the extended atrocity as “genocide”, saying she wished to “avoid terms that are designed to divide us”.

The 52-year-old mother of two and stepmother of three was last week named as one of four prominent Democrats to out-poll Mr Biden by five percentage points in key battleground states.

Crucially, this is a greater margin than Harris, The Telegraph notes.

Whitmer has refused calls for her to enter the race with statements of staunch loyalty to Biden

• On the face of it, Gavin Newsom has all the assets an elite politician could want.

He’s photogenic, a good debater, and he appears to have that critical instinct for putting himself in the spotlight.

However, the father of four polls behind Harris, Whitmer and Michelle Obama to replace Mr Biden.

As a Democratic governor since 2019, with supermajority California, he has introduced woke policies other parts of America “can only dream of”.

That could be a weakness against Trump who specialises in “woke backlash”.

Trump could emphasise the decline of San Francisco , the homelessness and fentanyl crises, the high cost of living, or California’s broken education system.

But he does have a national profile, and profile matters in America.

Six in 10 adult Americans felt familiar enough with him to hold an opinion about him, although these are more negative than positive.

Politically, he could easily replace Biden, whose messages fit seamlessly with his.

Bill Whalen, a policy fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Palo Alto, California says “he takes Joe Biden’s message, and he delivers it much more effectively”.

Real politics isn’t so simple, however. Electoral projections predict Newsom would lose to Trump in both the electoral college and the popular vote, worse than Harris.

• Wes Moore, the first-term Maryland governor is young and black and has been in the vanguard of support for Biden since the disastrous Atlanta presidential debate – and it has only endeared him to his party.

The 45-year-old relies on Biden for the federal funding he needs to achieve his ambitious policy goals – eradicating child poverty and 100% clean energy.

And Biden has been increasingly relying on Moore, particularly when it comes to the black vote, which polls have fallen away since 2020.

But he’s new and for many votes, their first exposure to him will have been as the face of the response to the collapse of the Baltimore bridge in March.

He’s the son of an immigrant, a Rhodes Scholar,  Army officer and investment banker.

His supporters hope he’ll be the next Barack Obama, but it’s unlikely to happen this election.

• Josh Shapiro, the 51-year-old governor of Pennsylvania is a rising star among Democrats.

After the attempted assassination of Trump last week, Shapiro went out of his way to praise Corey Comperatore, the Trump supporter who was killed in the crossfire, describing him as a “fellow Pennsylvanian” who had “died a hero”.

Shapiro had been talked of as someone to watch for the 2028 election cycle, so Biden’s sudden departure may have arrived too early for him.

Shapiro, who is Jewish, was one of four Democrats whom BlueLabs predicted would perform better in battleground states than Biden and Harris.

But that does not mean he would win a presidential election. Bookmakers put his odds of winning the candidacy at around 25/1, behind Newsom, Whitmer, Harris and others.