Even After the Harris-Biden Substitution, the Presidential Race Still Sucks

It's still a close race between terrible, and terribly unpopular, major party candidates.

An old joke frames Washington, D.C. as Hollywood for ugly people. But it's more accurate to say it's Hollywood for horrible people who make you want to back away slowly in search of an exit. To notice the unattractiveness of members of America's political class, you need to be dangerously close to their sociopathy and hunger for power, and who wants to enter that orbit? And that brings us to Kamala Harris, vice president of the United States and savior (they hope) of Democrats' dreams of retaining the White House against a challenge by famously flawed former President Donald Trump.

Past-Due Departure

"It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President," read, in part, a letter published over President Joe Biden's signature and released on X Sunday morning. "And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term."

And so ends, kind of, the drama that began when Biden's disastrous presidential debate performance on June 27 put to rest any pretense that the octogenarian is up to the demands of campaigning for another term in office, let alone serving four more years. The situation also raised plenty of questions about who has been performing the duties of the head of the executive branch, since Biden doesn't seem up to the job. And it left unfilled the position of Democratic nominee.

In a subsequent message Biden offered "my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year." But the separate endorsement raised eyebrows. In truth, the president, even in his decayed state, is not known for confidence in his number two.

A Candidate With a Bad History

"President Biden hesitated to drop his re-election campaign in part because he and his senior advisers worried that Vice President Kamala Harris wasn't up to taking on Donald Trump, according to three Biden aides familiar with recent talks about his plans," Axios's Alex Thompson reported. Among concerns are Harris's inability to retain staff—they quit in droves—and her reluctance to take on responsibility.

Under Harris, the office of the vice presidency has had "an extraordinarily high 91.5-percent staff turnover rate," according to a report by OpenTheBooks, a watchdog group.

"People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it's an abusive environment," one official told Politico in 2021 about the environment in Harris's office.

Former staffers describe being subject to prosecutorial-style grillings—ordeals with special meaning given Harris's background as San Francisco District Attorney and then California Attorney General. In San Francisco, she was chastised by a judge for failing to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence to defendants about misdeeds at a scandal-ridden crime lab. Over 1,000 cases were dismissed.

"A review of her career shows a distinct penchant for power seeking and an illiberal disposition in which no offense is small or harmless enough to warrant lenience from the state," Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted in 2019 during Harris's crash-and-burn try for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Harris defended herself during the crime lab mess by apologizing for taking years to establish a policy for sharing evidence. But the impression that she wasn't on the ball carries over into her vice presidency, where she often seems to have neglected her homework. That was on display during Harris's infamous 2021 interview with NBC's Lester Holt regarding her nominal role overseeing border policy.

"This whole—this whole thing about the border. We've been to the border. We've been to the border," Harris insisted.

"You haven't been to the border," Holt responded.

"And I haven't been to Europe," Harris snapped. "I don't understand the point that you're making."

Even in the aftermath of that fiasco, Harris remains famous for word-salad comments that leave the impression she's trying to kill time with noise rather than address issues she simply doesn't understand.

Two Unsatisfying Contenders

But as bad as her record is, and as poor a candidate as she's been in the past, Harris has the advantage of running against Donald Trump, the abrasive Republican nominee with a loyal following but equally dedicated detractors. When Biden was still the presumptive Democratic pick, roughly half of Americans polled by Pew Research said they wanted to trade both Biden and Trump for other choices.

Famously thin-skinned as a boss, turnover among Trump's staff during his administration was almost identical to that of Harris's staff at 92 percent. (Biden administration turnover is 71 percent—it's almost as if these are all really unpleasant people to be around.)

If Harris turns sentences into ransom notes of randomly joined words, Trump uses the English language to paint a Jackson Pollock painting of overlapping truth, lies, and exaggerations.

And even as Biden's disability has become more obvious, and after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the former president's favorability rating has remained underwater at 42.1 percent (53.3 percent unfavorable). But that's better than Joe Biden's 38.5 percent approval (56.3 percent disapproval) and—importantly—it compares strongly to Kamala Harris's 38.3 percent approval (51.4 percent disapproval).

While Harris just stepped into the role of heir apparent to the Democratic nomination, pollsters anticipating the move tested her against Donald Trump. It's early days yet, but she doesn't look like a shot to the arm of Democrats' hopes and dreams.

It's Still Trump's Race To Lose

"She has been polling the same as Biden—or just slightly better—against Republican nominee Donald Trump, according to multiple surveys taken before Biden withdrew from the 2024 contest," NBC News noted this week of a comparison of polls for a then-hypothetical Harris-Trump race. "And Biden was running behind Trump in many national and battleground-state polls."

The Hill's polling averages have Trump up by 2.5 percent over Harris, compared to the 2.7 percent advantage he enjoyed over Biden.

Which is to say, not much has changed in this presidential campaign. It's still a close race between terrible, and terribly unpopular, major party candidates.