Joe Biden had to stand down due to incapacity, but I have an uneasy feeling about Kamala Harris as the candidate to beat a resurgent Donald Trump. Sitting vice-presidents tend to lose presidential elections, and it will take a colossal gear shift for Harris to escape the curse.
Since the Second World War, three sitting VPs have lost as presidential candidates and only one, George Bush the elder, has won. A fourth, called Joe Biden, couldn’t even secure his party’s nomination to run after eight years as VP to one of the most popular president of modern times, Barack Obama.
This isn’t an accidental curse. After four or eight years in the shadows as the dutiful and largely ceremonial deputy to a president, it is hard to suddenly become a dominant and domineering public leader. Even for that mega narcissist Richard Nixon, it took eight years of recuperation, after losing to Kennedy as Eisenhower’s VP, before he beat Lyndon Johnson’s vice-president Hubert Humphrey.
There is another problem for sitting VPs. You literally personify the outgoing administration, and your opponent is obviously only going to go for the unpopular bits of your legacy in promising a “fresh start.” In Harris’s case there is one huge legacy albatross—unchecked immigration—which is open season for Trump.
However, the margins of defeat were small in all three postwar cases of VP election losses (Nixon/JFK in 1960, Humphrey/Nixon in 1968 and Gore/Bush junior in 2000). In two of the three, the loser may even have won had the votes been fairly counted in Texas for Nixon and Florida for Gore. And George HW Bush’s extraordinary victory in 1988 shows the curse can be broken by an incumbent moderate able to reinvent themselves as a campaigning rottweiler.
The trouble is, Bush’s opponent—Michael Dukakis—was the liberal, conventional, decent opposite of Trump. Harris will need to revert to her early years as a California public prosecutor if she is going to put Trump on the defensive and win.
She has one huge opportunity, which is that Trump really is the incumbent on one mega policy that she is uniquely placed to turn into an election defining issue: abortion, and the rights of women and families to control over their own lives. It was a Supreme Court packed by Trump which two years ago struck down the constitutional protection for abortion, and in the wake of that seismic ruling it is Trump’s party which is now seeking systematically to make abortion virtually illegal, state by state and nationally.
You don’t need a crystal ball to see the potency that abortion and personal freedom now have as electoral issues. The midterm elections two years ago, held soon after the Supreme Court struck down the Roe v Wade abortion protection, were dominated by this assault on women and family rights. And the Democrats outperformed expectations.
The right to abortion is a huge ongoing public concern, with Democrats commanding a consistent two to one majority in support of it. By contrast, Trump’s claim that he, not Biden, won the 2020 election is waning in importance in voters’ minds, and arguments about his populist economic and migration policies are at best evenly balanced.
Harris’s opportunity is not just the already profound effects of the virtual outlawing of abortion in Republican states, but the huge threat that a Republican president and Congress, bolstered by Trump’s Supreme Court, will move next to legislate for a national abortion ban. The fact that Trump denies this doesn’t make it any less potent a threat, given the support for such a ban among his radical base.
If there is one issue where a black female public prosecutor from California ought to be able to dominate a hypocritical, malign, aged, white misogynist, it is abortion and the rights of families. Even better, if Harris can lump it together with Trump’s threat to social security and healthcare, she could turn the populist tables on Trump.
Harris needs to comprehensively out-debate and out-populist Trump. And make him, not her, seem like the incumbent. And then maybe she can break the VP curse.
