If Harris Is the Nominee, It Still Won’t Be Easy to Beat Trump

Ever since Donald J. Trump won the presidency, Democrats have stuck to a winning electoral playbook: From congressional races to presidential ones, they’ve nominated well-liked, moderate candidates who could appeal to nearly any voter who disliked Mr. Trump and his allies.

It hasn’t always been easy for Democrats to follow this playbook. But when the stakes have been highest, they’ve managed to do so — from preventing the nomination of Bernie Sanders by elevating Joe Biden four years ago, to pushing Mr. Biden to abandon his re-election campaign.

With President Biden bowing out of the race Sunday and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats still won’t find it easy to follow their time-tested approach. Many Democrats have coalesced behind Ms. Harris, but she doesn’t start the campaign as the kind of broadly acceptable candidate Democrats have put forward to great success during the Trump era.

At the outset, one enormous caveat is necessary: Ms. Harris became a candidate for president only on Sunday. She will have every opportunity to reintroduce herself to the nation, distinguish herself from Mr. Biden and rally Democratic voters in the weeks ahead. Similarly, her opposition will have every opportunity to criticize her handling of the border or her support for a ban on fracking or for Medicare for All. In the end, her standing could easily change for the better — or worse.

But a majority of voters have long had an unfavorable view of her. She has trailed Mr. Trump in nearly every national and battleground state poll conducted so far this year. In the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll of Pennsylvania, just 42 percent of likely voters said they viewed Ms. Harris favorably — well short of the 51 percent who had a favorable view of Mr. Biden in the state ahead of the 2020 election. It’s even lower than the 46 percent who said the same for Mr. Trump in the recent poll.

With numbers like these, a Harris-Trump matchup doesn’t look much like the 2020 presidential election, when Mr. Biden prevailed as a moderate candidate who was liked by a majority of voters. Instead, it’s more like the Biden-Trump contest of a month ago, before the debate, when Mr. Trump led narrowly and the race seemed poised to be decided by the fickle voters who dislike both candidates — the so-called double haters.

A year ago, many Democrats weren’t alarmed by the prospect of running an unpopular candidate like Mr. Biden (or presumably Ms. Harris) against Mr. Trump. Back then, many asserted that America had an anti-MAGA majority; in this view, it was all but impossible for Mr. Trump to win the presidency, despite Mr. Biden’s poor job approval ratings. As late as this spring, Mr. Biden’s team comforted itself with the assumption that the election would ultimately be about democracy and therefore he would prevail, despite his obvious liabilities.

In the end, Ms. Harris and the Democrats might win a coin-flip election by campaigning on abortion and democracy, just as Mr. Biden’s advocates hoped he would. But it’s far harder to be confident about that assumption today. After all, Mr. Biden had been trailing in the polls for essentially 10 straight months — long before the first presidential debate.

The polls have offered a long list of explanations for his weakness, and many of them had nothing to do with his age. A majority of voters have said the country is heading in the wrong direction. They have said the economic and political system in the country is broken. They’re deeply concerned about the economy and immigration — two of Mr. Trump’s strongest issues in surveys. In poll after poll, voters say they’re looking for change.

These challenges prevented Mr. Biden from making the election solely about democracy and abortion. It put him in a more challenging position than he was ahead of the 2020 election, when voters were most concerned by a pandemic and racial unrest that Mr. Trump was judged to have badly mishandled. The Biden campaign barely needed a vision for change in 2020: “Restore the soul of the nation” and a “return to normalcy” sufficed to capitalize on the desire for an end to the pandemic and the chaos of the Trump presidency.

Ms. Harris is a new face; to some extent, she might help satisfy the electorate’s desire for change, simply by being someone other than Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden. But she is still part of the Biden administration; she will be hobbled by many of the same challenges faced by Mr. Biden, and it’s not clear whether she is better positioned to overcome them. To do so, she would probably need to offer an optimistic and hopeful vision for the future, backed by a plausible agenda — something that her 2020 campaign largely failed to accomplish.

In fairness to Ms. Harris, it would be challenging for any Democrat today to advance a clear agenda for the future. Mr. Biden struggled to do so in his re-election campaign. The party has held power for almost 12 of the last 16 years, and it has exhausted much of its agenda; there aren’t many popular, liberal policies left in the cupboard. As long as voters remain dissatisfied with the status quo and the Democratic nominee, a campaign to defend the system might not be the slam dunk Democrats once thought it was.