Actually, Harris Is Good At Politics

And her 2020 campaign is part of the evidence.

Presidential general election outcomes are about a lot of things beyond candidate skills. To the extent political skills matter, however, the evidence is that Kamala Harris is extremely capable, and perhaps a good deal better than that.

It’s not surprising that Harris’s image and reputation took a hit over the last three-plus years. It’s not her; it’s the office. Recall that perhaps the greatest Senator in US history, Hubert Humphrey, rapidly turned into a laughingstock as soon as he became Lyndon Johnson’s VP in 1965 — just as the formidable Johnson was an afterthought at best when he held that office.

It’s structural. Even after it was re-invented by Walter Mondale (1977-1981) so that modern VPs actually do plenty of meaningful things instead of just sitting around waiting for the president to die, the first rule of the position is to pass all the credit for any successes up to the president while accepting blame for things that go wrong.

But the other thing that has hurt Harris’s reputation as a good politician has been her 2020 presidential run. The NYT’s Pamela Paul is a good source for mistaken conventional wisdom, and she delivers: “Harris is a fundamentally weak candidate. She fizzled out early in her first presidential run…”

The conventional wisdom is flat-out wrong. Harris ran a strong campaign in 2020. She lost, as did 34 of the 35 (or whatever the count was) candidates defeated by the former vice president, which isn’t exactly a surprise. Vice presidents (as we have just seen!) have large advantages in nomination politics. Nor is it a surprise that reporters were able to generate stories about what went wrong — every losing campaign can supply plenty of anecdotes about how they lost.¹ Stepping back from those stories, however, it’s more obvious that Harris’s campaign was actually a strong one. Indeed, I’ve argued that see may have been the 2020 nomination runner-up if that’s defined as the candidate who came closest to the nomination without winning it.

So that’s going to require a bit of explanation. If “runner-up” is simply the candidate who had the second-most delegates or the second-most votes in primaries, then it’s clear that Bernie Sanders finished second to Joe Biden in 2020. Those are objective questions, and Sanders is the answer. Similarly, one could define runner-up as the candidate who stays in the longest, perhaps all the way to the convention.²

None of those, however, necessarily gets to the question of who came closest to winning other than the actual winner. There’s a pretty strong case that Sanders 2020 never really had much of a chance once he decided to run as a factional candidate; his solid results in the first three states that year merely convinced the majority of party actors and party voters that they needed to coordinate to beat him, which they eventually did fairly easily.³

If it’s not Bernie, then who? No one else really ever combined support from party actors and from voters. I could make an argument for Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, or even Amy Klobuchar as having come at least as close to winning as Bernie, but I’m not sure how convincing any of those arguments could be.

The truth is that Joe Biden wound up winning fairly easily, even after seriously faltering in Iowa and New Hampshire. In part because it’s just hard to beat a recent vice-president who is adept at finding the center of the party; in part because after the 2016 election, a lot of Democratic party actors wanted a (straight, Christian) white guy at the top of the ticket.

So none of the candidats who contested the primaries really came close to winning.

And that sets up the case for Harris, who as Perry Bacon Jr. says basically lost because Biden beat her in a party that wasn’t especially interested in someone like her in the first place.

Harris famously was long gone before voters in Iowa caucused. Early on, however, she actually was a solid second in endorsements to Biden, and showed some strength in the polls (behind Sanders and Biden) nationally and in Iowa. She was able to generate one polling surge with a strong debate early on, but when that faded she was never able to recover. Still, it seems odd to me to focus entirely on her failure to build on a strong start and not give her any credit at all for achieving that strong start.

What all of those candidates needed to have a chance was for Biden to collapse, and as it turned out that wasn’t going to happen, even after he did poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire. That wasn’t clear in, say, early 2018. But one might argue that by fall 2019 Biden had what turned out to be an insurmountable lead.

If that’s true, then downplaying Harris’s chances of winning (and therefore concluding she’s an inept politician) because she realized more quickly than the other candidates that Biden had it wrapped up seems backwards. Instead, one might argue that Harris — more than any of the others — did what was needed to win if Biden wasn’t there. She had a fully engaged campaign, and was gathering crucial party suppot. That’s the case for her as the real runner-up.

And when Biden did show up Harris was smart to get out early, thereby keeping on good terms with as many party actors as possible, which in turn no doubt contributed to her selection as Biden’s running mate.⁴

Look: There’s more to political skills than election results, and there’s more to election results than the candidates’ political skills. Still, Harris’s record sure seems impressive to me. Looking back before the presidential race, it’s fair to say that beating Republicans in California should have been easy. But the flip side is that the nominations for Attorney General in 2010 and for US Senate in 2016 were extremely valuable, and her ability to secure party support there is probably undervalued.⁵

All of which does add up to fairly strong evidence hat Harris is actually a highly skilled politician. And nothing that’s happened in the last few weeks would suggest otherwise. Again, I’m not sure how important that is in presidential general elections. But it is extremely important in the job of presidenting.

1. Winning campaigns have those stories too, but they’re typically quickly forgotten after election day.

2. Sanders was the last to drop in 2020, so by that metric he was the runner-up. But Tulsi Gabbard was the second-to-last to drop, and no one could argue that she was among the top ten in terms of how close they came to winning.

3. See my essay on the contest in Making of the Presidential Candidates 2024.

4. I should defer to Julia here, but my sense is that at this point people think of these choices as entierly personal choices by the presidential nominee and shortchange the influence of the party overall. Either way, it’s to her credit.

5. With California’s awful top two system, there was no formal nomination in the 2016 contest. Still, Harris seems to have won the endorsement race, including from the state party.