Republicans Claim Harris Can’t Beat Trump — Don’t Believe Them

Hours after President Joe Biden announced that he would not seek reelection, Donald Trump declared that he believed Vice President Kamala Harris, the most likely Democratic nominee, would be easier to beat in November than Biden. The Republican Party immediately kicked into gear, denouncing Harris as “enabler-in-chief” to a floundering Biden and decrying her role in what the party continues to label an immigration “crisis.”

Don’t believe Trump’s bluster for a minute. Harris has the potential to be a far more formidable opponent than Biden.

First off, Trump’s supposed strength is more a product of Biden’s weakness than of a sudden lovefest a majority of Americans are having with the impeached, found-liable-for-sexual-assault MAGA leader. Put simply, there is no lovefest. This became even more evident after he was shot by a sniper in Pennsylvania — a situation which has, historically, seen the surviving political figure benefit from a surge of popular good will. Reagan’s approval ratings, after he was shot, climbed to nearly 70 percent. Meanwhile, polls after Trump’s shooting showed that he still only had a 40 percent approval rating, with a majority of Americans continuing to disapprove.

And those numbers are after a month in which Trump has had an extraordinary run of luck: from a would-be-assassin’s bullet whizzing past his ear, missing his head and recasting him as a victim rather than a promoter of political violence; to the malevolent Supreme Court ruling granting presidents immunity for anything deemed to be done in an official capacity; to a Florida judge throwing out the charges against him for illegally hoarding classified documents; back to Joe Biden’s beyond-decrepit debate performance on June 27.

Trump went through the entire GOP convention with the media spotlight firmly focused on the death-watch around Biden’s campaign. And yet throughout, his favorability rating has remained underwater, and in most polls his electoral support came in at less than 50 percent. Given the many leg-ups Trump has had since late June from the judicial system, from his opponent, and from the fates themselves, it’s remarkable that the Republican nominee remains as unpopular as he is — and it suggests that he has reached an apex of popularity beyond which he cannot rise.

In fact, I would argue, Trump’s run of luck ended on Sunday morning when Biden released a letter to the American people announcing that he would not seek reelection. And it further corroded when, a few minutes later, the president endorsed Kamala Harris to succeed him. As potential challengers to Harris, such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, instead began rallying around her candidacy it became clear that the Democrats were going to avoid a food fight for the nomination.

If Biden trailing Trump by 2 percent seemed a pinnacle for the current president, from which he would only continue to tumble, Harris’s 1.5 percent deficit seems a baseline.

By day’s end, instead of forming a circular firing squad, Democrats had reaped more than $50 million in online donations — between five and 10 times the daily haul the party has seen since the June 27 debate. Given the sentiment of anyone-but-Biden among a wide swath of Democratic activists in recent weeks, and the relief at having a plausible candidate to support, this surge of incoming dollars could continue over the coming days and weeks, providing a huge war chest to take into the final post-convention sprint to the election.

Some pundits were quick to point out that there really wasn’t much of a difference in the polling between how Biden matched up against Trump and how Harris matches up against Trump — and to a degree that’s true. In an average of recent polls, Biden trailed Trump by about 2 percent, and Harris by about 1.5 percent.

These polls, however, obscure more than they illuminate. After the debate debacle, it was clear that Biden’s campaign was in a death spiral, one that he should have recognized weeks ago. Instead, he plowed ahead, taking a wrecking ball to his own prospects as he went. While the president touted supposed internal polls suggesting a rosier picture, in fact Biden’s numbers, especially in the swing states, were plummeting. States such as Michigan suddenly seemed entirely out of reach for the president, and a number of states that until recently were thought to be securely blue, such as New Hampshire and Minnesota, looked like potential Trump targets of opportunity.

By mid-July, it looked like the longer Biden remained the candidate, the more Democrats themselves would see it as a foregone conclusion that he would lose. As a result, donors began withholding funds and pollsters found that two-thirds of Democratic voters wanted a new horse to back in November’s election.

With a large share of Democrats sitting on their hands and refusing to actively campaign for Biden, and with the possibility that many more potential Democratic voters would simply not go to the polls come November, it seemed entirely possible the president’s campaign could be heading into wipe-out territory.

The race for the White House is, today, dramatically different from what it was last week.

To reiterate, however, this was due to Biden’s weakness rather than to Trump’s innate strength.

Harris, by contrast, will enter the race with her campaign on an upward trajectory. If Biden trailing Trump by 2 percent seemed a pinnacle for the current president, from which he would only continue to tumble, Harris’s 1.5 percent deficit seems a baseline.

From now on, this will be her campaign. If she is strategic — which she is — she will bring the energy of relative youth to contrast with Trump’s 78-year-old persona. After all, Trump is prone to making the same kinds of gaffes that Biden did; instead of being the dynamic presence in the race, he will now become the more blundering candidate — and the public scrutiny that Biden underwent may now shift onto Trump.

Harris will, moreover, be able to step out of Biden’s shadow and craft her own political agenda. She can forcefully contrast the Democratic position on reproductive rights with Republican support for the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade — a position that is deeply unpopular not just with Democrats but with independent voters.

Harris’s baseline poll numbers reflect views on a politician most Americans have seen only in a refracted light. They know her as Biden’s vice president, rather than as a political leader in her own right. Now, over the coming weeks, the country will see her shape her own political priorities, speak on the stump about her own values, debate — if Trump has the guts to share a stage with her — her corrupt opponent, and perhaps most importantly, choose her own vice-presidential nominee. If that nominee is a Rust Belt governor, or, say, Arizona’s astronaut-turned-senator Mark Kelly, the momentum from that choice alone ought to significantly recalibrate the race in several critical swing states.

In other words, take with a pinch of salt those Republicans who claim to be gleeful about the opportunity to take on Harris. The race for the White House is, today, dramatically different from what it was last week. In 2020, Biden was able to deprive Trump of a second term in office. In 2024, in stepping aside (albeit belatedly) and paving the way for a Harris candidacy and for the Democratic Party to rapidly coalesce around that candidacy, he may, once again, have found a way to trip Trump up and to block the MAGA leader’s authoritarian ambitions.