Kamala Harris is less popular than Dick Cheney after he shot a guy in the face
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Kamala Harris has shattered yet another glass ceiling: becoming the most unpopular vice president in documented NBC history.
According to the pollsters at the Peacock network, nearly half of all voters view Harris negatively, with just 32% approving. Considering the context of her predecessors’ performance, Harris has no excuse.
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Mike Pence managed to survive the entire coronavirus crisis without hitting Harris’s net negative 17 approval rating. Despite Democrats getting clobbered in the 2010 midterm elections, then-Vice President Joe Biden (barely) broke even in the NBC poll, with a plus 1% approval rating. After the Bush administration invaded Iraq, Dick Cheney’s net approval was a whopping plus 23%. Even amid the war, shooting his friend in the face, and the White House’s lackluster response to the Great Recession, Cheney managed to outperform Harris, who is presiding over a peacetime country with a still-bustling economy.
Harris may blame her party’s razor-thin control of the Senate for keeping her physically in the nation’s capital. She is indeed one vote away from breaking more ties than any other veep in history. But when Biden sends Harris abroad, she achieves nothing but providing the Republican National Committee another 24 hours of attack ads on Twitter.
It is not simply that Harris is a gaffe-prone prosecutor and thus a paper tiger not remotely ready for prime time. Harris as the understudy for the first octogenarian to occupy the Oval never made sense considering the practical uses of the office of the vice presidency.
Pence, Biden, Cheney, and Al Gore all served essentially as liaisons to the Hill, helping out bosses who were all relatively new to the Swamp, having served as governors or, in the case of Barack Obama, fewer than three years in the Senate. Sure, those other four running mates did provide some perceived “electability” for their electoral tickets. Rightly or wrongly, an old white man was added to Obama’s ticket out of fear of racial anxieties, and Pence’s evangelical credentials crucially solidified Trump’s support among college-educated conservatives skeptical of the thrice-married celebrity. But a good vice president has a purpose beyond carrying her boss over the finish line. Outside of fundraising, Harris still hasn’t really found hers, and that’s reflected in the polling.