Vice President Kamala Harris cannot be blamed entirely for her 2024 election loss to President-elect Donald Trump. She had to build a national campaign in just three months, although that might also be regarded as an advantage because she did not become more attractive as a candidate over time. She was also to some extent responsible for the fact that when she ousted President Joe Biden, two-thirds of the country already believed the country was on the wrong track, and an equal percentage disapproved of Biden’s handling of the economy. That is a difficult electoral challenge to overcome.

Harris received relentlessly glowing press from a fantastically left-biased news media that ignored or minimized her obvious shortcomings. She was not, as noted, entirely blameless for the Biden administration’s unpopularity. She had pushed to make the administration’s policies even worse, with, for example, a larger COVID spending bill that Biden asked for, which would have made inflation even worse. Her positions on border security were also to the left, which is to say even more irresponsible, that Biden ended up implementing. A Harris presidency would have been worse than Biden’s, perhaps much worse.