America sort of likes Kamala Harris – and that might just be enough

Polls show voters view Vice President Kamala Harris more favorably than they have had before, a trend that could buoy her campaign in a close race.

The 2024 White House race remains too close to call, but Vice President Kamala Harris’ momentum is evident when you look just a little past the horse race.

Earlier this week, Harris’ favorability emerged above water for the first time since shortly after President Joe Biden took office.

“She’s getting a chance to write her own story there and at least has been able to somewhat drive a more positive message about her,” Kristen Soltis Anderson, a founding partner at Echelon Insights, said on a press call hosted by AARP.

Soltis Anderson discussed a poll that the interest group commissioned, which found Harris has expanded Biden’s once-meager lead over women voters aged 50 and over.

According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, Americans now have slightly more favorable views of Harris than unfavorable. This is a dramatic shift, considering Harris was once polling so low that, at times, she flirted with being the least popular vice president in recent history.

“She has been allowed to shine a bit, which I think is very difficult to do when you’re the No. 2. By definition, a large part of your job is to stand a few feet to the left and a few feet behind the president and be supportive,” Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics told B-17. “As opposed to now being the person who is front and center and is allowed to talk about who she is, what she wants to accomplish, and she is allowed to talk about her strengths and what she brings to the table.”

Tim Malloy, a polling analyst for the Quinnipiac University Poll, said that favorability is a massive umbrella encompassing a wide range of emotions voters have for candidates. Likability also has a fraught history when it comes to female candidates, as best encapsulated by Barack Obama’s infamous 2008 jab that his Democratic senate colleague Hillary Clinton was “likable enough.”

Harris’ reversal of fortunes is a warning sign for former President Donald Trump’s campaign. Despite his and his allies’ best efforts, voters have yet to buy into their branding of Harris as a progressive chameleon who can’t be trusted. Even top Republicans, including former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, have recoiled at Trump’s attacks, including questioning her intelligence.

Harris has shaken up an election that once seemed poised to feature two of the least popular major presidential candidates since 1980, as FiveThirtyEight documented earlier this spring. Her rise is all the more remarkable given the hyperpartisanship that has overshadowed US politics to the point that some even wondered if there would ever be a return of popular presidential hopefuls.

As Gabe Fleisher wrote in his newsletter, Wake Up To Politics, the explanation for the shift could be very simple. Research shows Americans don’t form strong opinions of vice presidents. Now, reexamined on her terms, Harris has, to borrow one of her lines, “unburdened by what has been.”

But Trump could still win this election.

Harris’ campaign still views itself as an underdog. Famed forecaster Nate Silver’s model has returned to essentially a coin flip, though on Friday, it showed Harris with the first edge in weeks in the race to win the electoral college. The former president has been here before. Despite the reality that the most favorable candidate usually wins, he emerged victorious over Hillary Clinton in 2016 (who was also unpopular, though not nearly as disliked as he was).

This isn’t 2016, though. Walsh said Clinton’s failure was a flash point for women in American politics, a trend she thinks will benefit Harris. More women are now running for office and getting involved in politics than ever before. There’s now a larger percentage of women in Congress than at any other point in American history, according to the Pew Research Center.

Unlike Clinton, Walsh pointed out Harris hasn’t spent decades in the spotlight and isn’t faced with assuaging voters’ fears of a potential political dynasty. Clinton’s favorability, in fact, took almost the complete opposite journey from Harris’. Clinton was viewed more favorably as President Obama’s Secretary of State. Still, that goodwill dissipated as she geared up to become the first woman to be a major party’s presidential nominee and was made into a “caricature of who she was,” in Walsh’s view.

“I don’t know if you remember, but you could buy in airports the ‘Hillary Clinton’ nutcracker,” said Walsh, whose center is based at Rutgers University. “It played out, a lot of it gender-based, but compounded by all of these other factors that went into her candidacy and the public’s reaction to that.”

This isn’t Trump’s only struggle

One of Trump’s allies, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, is pressing on with a struggling gubernatorial campaign in a state that Democrats have only carried once this century (2008) but is now too close to call amid Harris’ rise. Robinson is trying to press through the latest scandal that he called himself a “Black Nazi” on a pornography forum decades ago. (Robinson has denied those are his words, despite CNN obtaining voluminous evidence to the contrary.)

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, remains deeply unpopular. And by almost every account, Trump lost the first and perhaps only debate to Harris. Democrats are even cutting into Trump’s advantage on the economy, the campaign’s biggest issue.

The best news he received all week is that Republicans in Nebraska may try one final time to change the state’s laws to deprive Harris of a likely Electoral College vote, potentially eroding her Great Lakes states/”Blue Wall” strategy.

Trump has also enjoyed a bit of a resurgence himself. Over the past year, he’s risen roughly 6 points in FiveThirtyEight’s favorability average. But a majority of Americans still view him unfavorably, which has been true since he descended the escalator in Trump Tower over nine years ago.

More troubling for Trump, Malloy pointed to Quinnipiac’s recent findings that Harris is ahead in Pennsylvania and Michigan with a third key battleground, Wisconsin, up for grabs. He said the combined results should be warning signs for the former president’s campaign. Harris’ favorability was up slightly in both Pennsylvania and Michigan.

“That is the canary in the coal mine for the Trump folks, that is the red flag for the Trump folks because it means people are getting to know her as a person,” Malloy said.