Harris would not be able to make a strong case against Trump – history shows

[Christian Paz, Vox senior politics reporter, 7-21-24, Vox, “Does Kamala Harris give Democrats a better chance to win?,” https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/361750/biden-drop-out-harris-endorse-polls-against-trump-democrats-dnc, accessed: 7-21-24, ES]

What history tells us: Harris critics also have plenty to point to when criticizing her electoral history. Her toughest race was her first race, for California attorney general, when she was the worst-performing statewide Democratic candidate on the ballot, winning her seat by about 1 percentage point.Read that again. She nearly lost to a Republican in California.

There’s the context that this was a red-wave year — the 2020 midterm elections were terrible for Democrats. But in California, she essentially had united Democratic support for her campaign, and still came close to failure — while every other Democratic candidate on the ticket performed significantly better.

She cruised to victory during the 2016 Senate race in part because the whole contest was “uninspiring,” and neither Harris nor her opponent were able to excite voters during most of the campaign because Harris’s victory was assumed from the start. She also faced an easy, flawed candidate in that race: a wacky US representative who famously “dabbed” on stage during a debate.

And her 2020 presidential contest showed what happens when a candidate lacks clarity about her campaign and reasons for running. She struggled to define herself, and her position on the ideological spectrum, relative to her Democratic rivals. She could not run a disciplined campaign — two rival camps within her operation pulled the campaign in different directions for much of the primary.

This record shows the legitimate reasons to question whether Harris would be able to make a proactive case for herself — not just a negative case against Trump. She faces the struggle of convincing voters not to blame her for the unpopular results of the Biden-Harris administration, while still thinking of her as presidential material.