Pollster Nate Silver labeled Vice President Harris as a “mediocre candidate” in his latest blog post breaking down the 2024 election.
President-elect Donald Trump clinched the White House in a decisive victory last week after sweeping the seven battleground states. Silver, who declared the race a toss-up up until Election Day, said in Friday’s post that Trump’s win was largely President Biden’s fault and argued Harris was not a strong enough candidate.
“Trump’s win is mostly Biden’s fault, not hers. Still, she was a mediocre candidate in a year when Democrats needed a strong one,” Silver wrote in his latest blog post.
He wrote that he had “a lot of sympathy for Kamala Harris’s position, maybe more than I have for any losing candidate in some time” before explaining how Biden may have hurt her campaign more than helped.
“Obviously, this was a position of her choosing. Harris is ambitious: She sought the Democratic nomination in 2020 and then the vice presidency and quickly moved to consolidate support within the party once Joe Biden was finally shoved aside,” he wrote.
“But Biden did her no favors. He gave her tough assignments—the border, perhaps Democrats’ worst issue, and voting rights, an issue on which the White House probably knew it wouldn’t make any progress. He blew up the debate calendar, leaving nothing scheduled after Sept. 11 even though this was one of Harris’s best formats. Even up to the bitter end, Biden was stepping on her message," he added.
Silver also emphasized how many Democrats in Senate races in battleground states outperformed Harris, suggesting that it could have been a winnable race for the Democrats. He also added that some of his critiques of her were her “inability to drive a message and her refusal to separate herself more clearly from Biden.”
“Now, I’m not going to pretend that these were easy waters for Harris to navigate, given that she was Biden’s sitting vice president. But — you have to at least try, I think? Throw your unpopular boss at least a little bit under the bus?" he said
“At times, Harris’s campaign — headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware and staffed mostly by ex-Biden people — seemed reluctant to criticize Biden out of fear of being perceived as disloyal, a stupid thing to be concerned about given that you have an election to win and that Biden frequently undermined her," he added.
In the days following Election Day, Democrats have been scrambling to figure out went went wrong for Harris. Many Democrats and pundits have blamed Biden and his late departure from the race as the driving factor to why Trump won across the swing states.
Stories by Lauren Sforza
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