Harris loses – polls unfavorably in swing states and is tied to Biden.

What the data says: The major problem in comparing these Harris figures to Biden’s actual standing against Trump is that Biden’s numbers factor in every negative thing that he and his campaign have endured so far. Biden backers would point to the fact that opinions of Harris could still change for the worse as her theoretical campaign becomes not so theoretical anymore, and that her performing about as evenly as Biden against Trump is not that great of a sign when there is more uncertainty about how Harris would even campaign.

On that front, they point to the fact that Harris’s favorability numbers are not that different from Biden’s and could still get worse. In recent polls, she performs worse than Biden in battleground states like Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada — losing those states would likely doom a Democratic candidate.

And she doesn’t necessarily do significantly better than Biden when looking at how subgroups of voters feel: She wins the same share of Black voters as Biden in head-to-head matchups with Trump in battleground states, per Split-Ticket.org’s polling, and does slightly worse than Biden among white voters, who still make up the majority of voters in swing states and nationally.

What the campaign trail shows: Taking the Kamala-critical position on the data as is — that there’s essentially no difference according to polls in how Harris performs against Trump than Biden — you are justified in being worried about what the campaign trail might look like.

Harris has only recently, since 2022, been active on the campaign trail, in part because she’s not the most naturally gifted campaigner or communicator. She has found the issues she excels at championing, but that’s only after going through a rocky first year as vice president when her office saw a variety of staff departures, infighting, and missteps in message.

She received media training during that first year in order to get better at talking about the president’s agenda, but still struggled to define her portfolio — facing intense criticism on immigration and the border when that wasn’t even her original assignment.

Reporters who have been covering her tenure point out that she seems most at home when she’s having more roundtable-style conversations, not necessarily in one-on-one interviews or while giving stump speeches.

Harris critics also point out that she will struggle to convince voters to see her as a legitimate candidate given biases against her because of her race, her gender, and the general idea that she’s not that plugged into the White House inner circle or aware of the day-to-day business of running the country.

And then come the memes. While the genre of Kamala Harris memes has been exploding in popularity recently because of the chaos over Biden’s own candidacy, those jokes start from a kernel of truth: Harris is an awkward communicator. She’s prone to gaffes, to awkward jokes, to tortured analogies or stories, and is generally perceived as easy to mock.

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.

That’s one edge the governors and senators who have been talked about as potential alternatives to Biden have: They wouldn’t carry the same baggage from the Biden administration. Harris will likely be seen as tied to Biden’s legacy, which stands as another reason to look elsewhere.