Editors at the Washington Examiner ponder Democrats’ support for Kamala Harris.
The Republican Party, we’ve been told by its critics, is the party of primitive tribalism, driven more by grievance and a cult following of one man than a principled worldview. Democrats, meanwhile, are supposedly the pragmatic party of what works, unmoved by the celebrity of one politician.
But Vice President Kamala Harris’s rapid rise in the polls blows this myth to pieces. Just two months ago, President Joe Biden and his policies were widely disliked, and Harris was regarded as even less capable than her failing poss. From the border crisis to inflation to war in the Middle East, the policies of the incumbent Democratic Biden-Harris administration were seen as complete failures. Biden was underwater on each issue by double digits in every poll.
But then, magically, just by his stepping aside and creating a new personality at the top of the ticket, all that has changed. Democrats are joyous backers of a new nominee and the supposed possibility of a fresh start, even though the person upon whom they fix their adoring eyes has been in power for the past four years and does not intend to change policies, except to make several of them worse.
While Biden has been consistently despised since the one-two punch of the Del Rio bridge disaster and the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, Harris’s fortunes have suddenly rebounded. Biden is still just as unpopular as he has been since August 2021, with 56% of the public viewing him unfavorably compared to just 40% viewing him favorably.
Before July of this year, Harris was just as unpopular, with 54% viewing her unfavorably and 39% viewing her favorably. Her ditzy “idea voyages” were received by Democrats almost as negatively as by Republicans. But now voters are being told she is the great hope for beating former President Donald Trump. All of a sudden Democrats love her.
