Can Kamala Harris Save the Presidency for Democrats? Not Likely.

The dilemma Democrats face in the 2024 presidential election is growing more serious by the day, as Joe Biden's ongoing physical and mental deterioration grows ever worse, to the point where even the legacy media is growing concerned. A lot of virtual ink has been spilled on the topic; what the Democrats can do, who will bell the cat and convince Joe (and Jill) to step aside, and who will replace him.

On Tuesday, at Fox News, columnist Liz Peek makes a case for Kamala Harris being the stand-in. My reaction? Sure - if they want to lose.

Joe Biden is running out of excuses. While many Democrats have urged him to end his re-election bid, including friendly columnists like the New York Times’ Ezra Klein and Washington Post’s David Ignatius, it has been the conventional wisdom that Biden could not do so, fearful that an even less popular Kamala Harris would replace him as the 2024 Democratic candidate for president.
That is changing. Vice President Harris has been out on the stump, performing the kind of all-out energetic campaigning that the president cannot manage. She meets almost daily with women’s groups talking about abortion and Black groups talking about racial justice.

Note that last part: Kamala Harris has been burning some shoe leather, yes, which is a vital part of retail politicking. But she is not facing any real challenges (nor is old Joe at this point) as in, she has not been to any venue where there is any challenge. She only appears to fawning audiences who soak up her word salads without question.

There are some problems with her as a replacement candidate, and I think Liz Peek, much as I respect and admire her, overlooks some things.

Harris’ overall approval ratings of 38% (net 11% disapproving) on average today are slightly better than those of her boss (net 17% disapproving), and they have improved since the beginning of the year, when her net disapproval was above 17%. Biden’s have not. Importantly, recent surveys show she is more popular with Black voters – where Biden has suffered a serious swoon – than the president.

While it's correct to point out that Kamala Harris' approval ratings are "slightly better" than Joe Biden's, this is the very definition of "damning with faint praise." Her approval ratings are, as Liz Peek points out, underwater (to be fair, so are Donald Trump's ratings, and by a similar margin) but it's also important to note that at this point in the cycle, nobody is really paying any attention to the Vice President. And, as pointed out, she hasn't faced any real challenges yet; when and if she does, it's liable to be a repeat of her 2020 primary campaign, which self-destructed before the first vote was cast.

Then there's the historical argument; the last time something like this happened was when Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek re-election in the 1968 election, leading to his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, stepping in as the candidate.

When Lyndon Johnson announced he was withdrawing from the presidential race on March 31, 1968, his approval rating was about 36%, according to Gallup, only slightly worse than Biden’s today. LBJ knew his chances were dim, given anger about the Vietnam War, and took himself out of contention. At the Democratic convention that year, delegates picked Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, to succeed him as the 1968 candidate, despite many within the party seeking an anti-war candidate.
Humphrey was not popular – only 34% of the country supported him on the eve of the convention, compared to 40% backing Richard Nixon and 17% leaning toward the segregationist (former Democrat) George Wallace, who ran as an independent. But, nominating Humphrey was the least contentious of possible outcomes; in the end, Democrat power brokers opted for harmony. The decision did not go well; Humphrey lost that year to Richard Nixon in a tight election.

The election wasn't that tight. Richard Nixon won the election, with 301 Electoral College votes to Hubert Humphrey's 191, with American Independent candidate George Wallace taking 46. Further, Nixon won re-election in 1972 over George McGovern by a 49-state landslide - a feat only repeated once, by Ronald Reagan in 1984. Of course, only months later Nixon resigned in disgrace, but the election results remain regardless.

Here's where that comparison falls apart: Hubert Humphrey was an experienced politician, an articulate speaker, and well-educated, with views that were, for the time, moderate. Kamala Harris is none of those things. Her every public appearance has given the GOP riches of embarrassment to drag through social media; the one thing that you can count on with Kamala Harris is that every time she speaks, she says something that makes people scratch their heads and say, "Wait, what?"

Loathe as I am to offer the Democrats advice, it's very apparent that if they want to stand any chance of winning the 2024 presidential election, the vapid and witless Kamala Harris, who has all the personal appeal of a cinder block and the political acumen of a traffic cone, cannot be their candidate.