Over more than three years, Democrats couldn’t sell Joe Biden; now, they must sell Kamala Harris in just under three months. This tall order requires two things: convincing voters that this administration deserves four more years and that Harris is truly different from Biden. Democrats’ continued marketing strategy of hiding their candidate tells Americans that neither is true.
On paper, selling Joe Biden should have been easy. Joe had a long Senate resume. He also had two terms as vice president behind Democrats’ most popular living president. Facing him was a divisive incumbent hobbled by a pandemic, an economy slowed by lockdowns, and civil unrest.
Even so, it was not all that easy with Joe. Despite winning with 51.3 percent of the popular vote, his electoral vote victory was razor-thin (just 77,000 votes spread across four states provided his margin). And from the moment Joe entered the White House, it got harder still.
Joe seemed to have the Midas touch in reverse: everything he touched went wrong — foreign policy, inflation, illegal immigration. Topping it off, Joe’s own failings became increasingly clear. As Joe’s term progressed and his popularity fell, he became increasingly dependent on — and subservient to — his radical Left.
Selling Joe as substance, rather than symbol, proved too hard a task. So, halfway through 2024, the Democrat elite replaced Joe with Kamala Harris.
On paper, Harris in 2024 should be as easy a sell as Joe was in 2020. Where Biden’s time in politics lacked accomplishments, Harris’ lacked duration.
The problem for Harris — and therefore for Democrats trying to sell her — is that she, like Biden before her, only exists on paper. Not only is there no “there” there; there is less “there” than there was with Biden.
While Biden had practically no private sector experience, Harris has literally none. After entering government straight from law school, she has held only government jobs, some (thanks to then California Speaker Wille Brown) as incongruous as they are forgettable (on California’s Unemployment Insurance Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission).
Harris’ time as a prosecutor would seem appealing at a time when America feels threatened by rampant lawlessness — until we recall that this lawlessness is Democrats’ doing and that Harris’ tenures also overlap with California’s descent into dystopia — in particular through the now infamous Proposition 47 (now on California’s ballot for repeal this November).
In the Senate, Harris was there just over two years before she mistook herself for president. Democrat voters, however, did not, and her 2020 campaign ended before 2020 itself began. Somehow, failing to make it to the presidential starting line qualified her to be vice president.
Yet like her presidential campaign, Harris’ tenure as vice president started in reverse. It never found its forward gear. Of her three most notable assignments — abortion, voting rights, and immigration — she registered two “nondecisions” and a cataclysmic failure so great on immigration that her first job in running for president has been to run away from having been the administration’s border czar.
It was not long ago that there were calls to replace Harris as vice president.
Of course, Harris’ biggest problem is also Democrats’ biggest problem — which in turn was Biden’s biggest problem and remains this administration’s biggest problem: radical left policies. Democrats insisted, Biden capitulated, and Harris now owns them. Hugely unpopular, Democrats cannot change the American people’s mind.
As much as Democrats would like to pretend — and to have America believe — that Harris (and before her, Biden) is “the product,” she is not. Harris and Biden were merely the spokespeople for the actual product: leftist extremism.
Stuck with selling a hugely unpopular product, Democrats’ hope was to hide it behind their spokesperson. When over the first six months of this year, both product and spokesperson failed with Biden, Democrats just changed their spokesperson.
Harris and Biden have some differences. Harris is far more to the left than Biden: in 2019, the National Republican Senatorial Committee ranked her the Senate’s most liberal member. Her embrace of the Green New Deal in the Senate and her tapping of Tim Walz (the Midwest’s version of Bernie Sanders) only confirm it.
Like Biden, Harris has a tissue-thin resume. Harris is also a poor communicator. Similarly to Biden, she can veer into the nonsensical at a moment’s notice and a teleprompter’s absence. And because Biden’s speaking difficulties were ultimately used to depose him from the nomination he had won, Democrats are doubly reluctant for Harris to wrestle the English language in public.
So, in another similarity with Biden, Democrats are using the same strategy of hiding her from serious public interaction — as they did with Biden in 2020 and increasingly during his presidency — something the establishment media is happy to accommodate. With under three months to go, Democrats hope their strategy of running out the clock on Harris may have a better chance of success.
However, Biden and Harris are similar in an even more important, and dangerous, way for Democrats. Neither are the real problem; Democrats’ real problem is the leftist extremism with which they have stuck their nominees.
The same people who told us that Biden was fine from 2020 and into 2024, that he was the best choice for the president, and then forced him out less than a month ago now tell us to trust them about Harris. They see no inconsistency because Biden and Harris are merely spokespeople, not the product itself. Changing the mouthpiece doesn’t change the message — any more than hiding the messenger does.
J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.
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