AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Election Analyst Nick Silver called vice president Kamala Harris a “mediocre” and “replacement” candidate in Friday’s edition of its think tank on the 2024 presidential election.

Under the headline “Kamala Harris was a surrogate candidate” and the subhead “Trump’s victory is largely Biden’s fault, not his.” Still, she was a mediocre candidate in a year when Democrats needed a strong candidate. Money argued that Harris underperformed against the president-elect Donald Trump.

Silver began by noting that “Biden did her no favors” by waiting so long to give up, giving her “tough assignments” as vice president and allowing his team to denigrate Harris to the journalists. Nonetheless, he argued that “people are confusing their sympathy for Harris’s position with the fact that she was a good candidate”, noting that she “underperformed the Democratic Senate candidate by 2.6 points in average”, and that she fell short of her expected electoral performance by two points. .

He continued to formulate “two main criticisms of Harris:”

One is his inability to get a message across and his refusal to separate himself more clearly from Biden. Now, I’m not going to pretend that these were easy waters for Harris to navigate, given that she was Biden’s sitting vice president. But — we should at least try, I think? Throw your unpopular boss under the bus at least a little?

At times, Harris’ campaign — based in Wilmington, Delaware and made up mostly of former Biden staffers — seemed reluctant to criticize Biden for fear of being seen as disloyal, a stupid thing to worry about given that he you have to win an election and that Biden has frequently undermined it. It wasn’t a risk-free option — Harris could have reminded Americans what they didn’t like about Biden — but she needed a bolder strategy, especially given the difficult political environment.

The other big negative is Harris’s strongly left-leaning positions as a 2019 presidential candidate. She may have attempted to pivot to the center in this campaign, but it was a clumsy effort at best given the lack of explanation as to why she had given up. his previous positions or what his agenda would actually look like.

“Sometimes replacement talent is enough in a pinch. But the electoral context was difficult for the Democrats. You only get so many Obamas – your No. 1 draft picks – so I’m not asking for a superstar,” Silver concluded. “But they needed someone who was average or significantly above average, and they have a good bench after their excellent midterms in 2018 and 2022. Those candidates were left aside, and now Trump is heading to the White House again.

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