The Trump-Harris unpopularity contest

Now that the Democrats have toppled the president in a bloodless coup, the bases of the Republican and Democratic parties have candidates they’re excited about. But both parties remain largely in denial regarding the unpopular leaders they’ve picked. According to the RealClearPolitics average of favorability polls, Harris is just over nine points underwater with 51 percent of Americans viewing her unfavorably, and Trump is just under nine points underwater, with 53 percent of Americans viewing him unfavorably. In nominating Harris and Trump, the devoted bases of both parties have essentially extended middle fingers at each other and to a swathe of independents who view both of them unfavorably.  

If you tried to engineer candidates in a lab designed to highlight rather than overcome the weaknesses of their parties, it would be hard to do better than Harris and Trump. Let’s start with our ever-cackling, word-salad producing, Venn-diagram-loving vice president. A New York Times poll conducted after Biden’s calamitous debate performance revealed a massive gender divide even before Harris entered the race. Biden was losing to Trump by twenty-two points with men but was still leading among women by six points. Trump also held a thirty-six-point lead with white voters who do not have a college degree. A new NYT poll, released Thursday, shows Harris with a commanding fourteen-point lead with women, and a seventeen-point deficit with men. And Trump’s thirty-six-point lead over Biden with white voters without a degree has expanded to thirty-eight points with Harris now at the top of the ticket.

In a recently released CNN poll, Harris is a whopping forty-two points underwater with white voters without a college degree, with 68 percent viewing her unfavorably. Fifty-seven percent of men and 57 percent of those without a college degree also viewed her unfavorably. If the Democratic Party was serious about trying to repair its standing with white working-class voters, why clear the decks for a polarizing, San Francisco liberal like Kamala Harris? Recall that Harris likened ICE agents to the KKK during a 2018 confirmation hearing in the Senate. And she, along with other Democrats, signaled at debates in 2020 that she supported decriminalizing illegal border crossings and providing free healthcare for illegal aliens. And her tenure as Biden’s “border czar” was a disaster. The highlight of her 2020 presidential run was calling Joe Biden a racist, but she was outed as a calculating charlatan minutes later when her campaign started flogging $29.99 “That Little Girl Was Me” T-shirts. 

The last time she was in a competitive election, in 2010 for California attorney general, she beat her Republican opponent by less than one point. As Nate Moore at the Liberal Patriot points out, every other Democrat running for statewide office in California that year won their race by double digits. Biden effectively saddled her with DEI baggage in saying he’d pick a black woman as his running mate. And Harris already faced an undercurrent of suspicion that her career path was paved at age twenty-nine, when she had a romantic relationship with the then-sixty-year-old speaker of the California Assembly, Willie Brown, who subsequently gifted her two sinecures, netting her nearly $100,000 while raising her profile in state party politics.

Given that baggage, combined with her disastrous 2020 run for president, and persistent complaints, even from friendly news outlets, that she’s a poor leader who is difficult to work for, you would think that Democrats would make her earn the party nomination based on merit. Instead, they handed it to her on a silver platter because it was “her turn.” Hillary Clinton was nominated on the same basis in 2016, but at least she earned the votes. Still, Harris often seems like a less substantive but equally annoying version of Hillary — hectoring, inauthentic, and condescending.

Most on the left seem not to grasp how deeply unpopular she is. Seventy-seven percent of Democrats in the CNN poll said that Harris will unite the country. Ha! That’s about as likely as Trump doing so. Remember all the talk on the right of Trump 2.0 and Donald emerging from the assassination attempt as a changed man, one who could unify the country? In his first rally since Biden dropped out, Trump called Harris a “radical-left lunatic who will destroy our country if she ever gets the chance to get into office.” So much for Trump 2.0.

At least Trump, hyped as an existential threat to democracy, was chosen by voters in a democratic process, rather than the palace coup that resulted in Harris’s ascension.

I suspect that even if Trump voters knew he’d be facing Harris, rather than geriatric Biden, they’d still pick him as the party nominee. But having just gotten rid of the oldest president in American history, I’m not sure voters want to replace him with a man who will break Biden’s age record if he remains in office until 2028, when he’d be eighty-two.

Aside from his age and his legal baggage, there’s the fact that everyone in America already has a strong opinion about him and many simply do not like him. In the recent CNN poll, Trump is twenty points underwater with women and a whopping thirty-six points underwater with college graduates. The NYT poll has him twenty-two points underwater with women and shows that 54 percent have a strongly unfavorable view of him. In that poll, two-thirds of those with a degree have an unfavorable view of him, including 57 percent who have a strongly unfavorable view of him.

To his credit, Trump has turned the GOP into a working-class party, but he has no opportunity to reinvent himself and is probably the least likely Republican to succeed in winning back suburban women and college graduates. Harris now has an infusion of cash — she raised $126 million in less than three days since Biden stood down — and the media is already working overtime to help her reinvent herself as something other than the vacuous, incompetent liberal many perceive her as. Meanwhile, as they sell Comma La harder than time-share salespeople on commission-only pay, she reminds audiences about Roe v. Wade roughly every fifteen seconds. She’ll do everything perhaps short of inviting doctors to perform abortions on stage during her rallies to drive home her primary selling point. 

The candidates’ best attributes may be their opponents. Trump threaded several battleground needles to pull of an electoral college win in 2016, sparing us from Hillary, but the GOP has been on a hell of a losing streak since then, with him as the party’s standard bearer. And Cackling Kamala is an improvement over immemorial Joe Biden, but all the coconut tree memes in the world can’t change the fact that she’s a very weak candidate. The winner of this unpopularity contest is likely to be the one who turns their bases out and performs least poorly with their Achilles heels — college-educated women for Trump and working-class men for Harris. Those who were hoping for a unity candidate from either party will have to wait till 2028 or beyond.