Like so many vice presidents before her, Kamala Harris has one of the hardest jobs in Washington. She is an unpopular No. 2 to a historically unpopular President Joe Biden. She’s simultaneously serving as Biden’s point woman on the most important pieces of his agenda and is the face of a reelection campaign that is bleeding support with young and minority voters.
Harris’s struggles as a presidential candidate date back to 2019. Her limitations as a retail politician are well documented. The former California attorney general isn’t a media darling. Her on-camera appearances are often marred by curious word salads and meandering answers to simple questions.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley made Harris a part of her stump speech as much as Biden or former President Donald Trump.
Trump-skeptical Republicans don’t appear ready to hold their noses to vote for the incumbents, seeing the elevated risk of Harris remaining a heartbeat away from the presidency when Biden appears frailer than ever.
However, beneath the headlines and poor polling, Harris appears to be doing the administration’s most important work and, despite his frustrations, a trusted member of Biden’s government.
Joel Goldstein, a scholar of the vice presidency, told the Washington Examiner Harris has been distinctive as a historic figure and a public spokeswoman and making herself the center of attention internationally.
“Every vice presidency differs depending upon what the needs of the administration are,” said Goldstein, a professor of law emeritus at St. Louis University. “I think one of the things that’s important in thinking about those persons is that what they’re trying to do is to add value, and adding value, to some extent, means filling in gaps.”
And Biden has plenty of gaps that need to be filled.
When Biden and Harris came into the White House, the world was still in a pseudo-COVID-19 shutdown, meaning international travel was limited and, as a result, Harris got off to a slow start, according to Goldstein.
Besides her historic status as the first black woman to be vice president, Harris has been the most visible spokeswoman for the administration on the world stage.
She’s been sent to Auckland, Paris, Munich, and a spate of Asian and Southeast Asian countries to speak on Biden’s behalf. She, like vice presidents before her, hasn’t been on the trips that draw eyeballs — Biden rode the train into a war zone in Ukraine and flew to Israel following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas — but her role as the messenger about Biden’s priorities to the world shows the president has placed a tremendous amount of trust in her.
Sometimes that role has meant she can stick her elbows out on geopolitics with which Biden is constrained at home.
Harris recently sent a fiery message demanding an immediate ceasefire to address the “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza.
“People in Gaza are starving, conditions inhumane, and our common humanity compels us to act,” Harris told a crowd. “Given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate ceasefire for at least the next six weeks, which is what is currently on the table.”
However, voters don’t seem to share Biden’s trust. As of Jan. 23, Harris had a 55% unfavorable rating, according to the Los Angeles Times. Her favorable/unfavorable ratings swapped places when she fumbled her first big-ticket assignment of addressing the “root causes” of surging immigration that has evolved into a signature crisis for Biden.
And she has polled worse than any of the four other most recent vice presidents: Mike Pence, Biden, Dick Cheney, and Al Gore.
Comparing polls from now to vice presidents 20 years ago isn’t exactly comparing apples and oranges, Goldstein said. He pointed to the increasing polarization in politics as a factor that is going to skew responses and complicate analysis.
“Biden’s approval ratings are down, and vice presidents tend to sort of track the president’s approval rating,” he said. “It’s hard for a vice president to be perceived as being, you know, more popular than the president.”
That’s a problem for Biden if he is relying on Harris playing a significant role in putting him over the top in a likely rematch with Trump in November.
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But as much as he relies on Harris as a spokeswoman and a bridge, most voters aren’t looking past the first name on the ticket. And Goldstein pointed out that if Harris is going to have any impact on the 2024 contest, she has room to grow.
“People can make their judgments between Biden and Trump,” Goldstein said. “In Harris’s case, people are looking at Harris, and they’re sort of measuring her against an ideal of a vice president. At some point, when Trump picks somebody, it’s not going to be Harris against some ideal. It’s going to be Harris against an actual human being.”
