Vice President Kamala Harris seems undeterred by criticism of her and her vice presidency as she manages her portfolio of thorny policy issues, from immigration to student loan debt forgiveness.
Instead of stepping back, Harris is stepping up as she and President Joe Biden brace for what is expected to be a close general election against former President Donald Trump.
A vice president to an older president, and the country’s first woman and first minority second in command, Harris has come under intense personal scrutiny for everything from her laugh to substantive policy scrutiny for calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Israel–Hamas war before Biden.
Although Harris’s overall approval ratings have been worse than those of Biden, that is no longer the case after her more hectic public schedule and a recent spate of softer, more flattering profiles, in addition to more puff-piece social media content. Harris’s average approval rating is currently net negative 15 percentage points, 37% approval-52% disapproval. Biden’s, for comparison, has a net negative 16-point rating, 39% approval-55% disapproval, according to FiveThirtyEight.
While Harris did experience her lowest average approval of 35.9% this month, her highest disapproval of 56% has been decreasing since last August.
Regardless, Harris will find it difficult to make a second first impression with some people, including Republican strategist John Feehery, who takes issue with her communication skills, despite her promotion of longtime press secretary Kirsten Allen to communications director and her hiring of Hillary Clinton‘s 2016 spokesman Brian Fallon to represent her on the campaign.
“I think Kamala Harris comes off as insincere and irrelevant,” Feehery told the Washington Examiner. “She is not an effective communicator, no matter how desperate her handlers are to reinvent her image.”
As 2024 Republican presidential candidates former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) did during the primary, Republican National Committee spokeswoman Anna Kelly underscored the importance of Harris to the general election because of Biden’s 81 years of age, the oldest president in the country’s history, and embraced the prospect of more public appearances by her.
“While Joe Biden is sleepwalking his way through the presidency, Kamala Harris is pushing her radical-left California dream: from opening the southern border to gutting America’s energy independence to defunding the police,” Kelly told the Washington Examiner. “The more that Harris says, the less people like her ideas, so we welcome her presence on the campaign trail and look forward to watching her socialist agenda go down in flames this fall.”
Fallon did not respond to the Washington Examiner‘s request for comment.
In the past week, Harris has had solo trips to Puerto Rico and Florida, as well as having accompanied Biden to North Carolina, for White House business and political campaign stops.
The White House’s Office of the Vice President told the Washington Examiner Harris has traveled to 16 states since the start of the year through 25 different trips. That is in contrast to the 24 states she went to last year, one-third of which were for her Fight for Our Freedoms college tour last fall. She is in the middle of her Fight for Reproductive Freedoms tour, with six states this year, including Minnesota, where she became the first vice president to step inside a Planned Parenthood clinic.
In Parkland, Florida, last weekend, Harris visited Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the site of the 2018 Valentine’s Day school shooting in which 17 people were killed. There, she announced the launch of the first-ever national extreme risk protection order resource center, which will help implement state red flag laws, and issued a call to action for states that do not have similar legislation.
Last Monday, Harris announced a pledge of an additional $170 million to Guatemala, depending on congressional notification, for development, economic, health, and security assistance to address the root causes of migration.
The next day, she announced a SAVE Day of Action to promote SAVE student loan plans, a new program through which borrowers who earn roughly $16 or less an hour are not required to make any repayments. That was followed by her announcement on Thursday that the administration was necessitating that federal agencies hire chief artificial intelligence officers and assess their AI use for safety.
Those outings were not without incident. Before Parkland, Ryan Petty, whose 14-year-old daughter, Alaina, died during the shooting, contended Harris was “not there to make schools safer; she’s visiting to reinforce a gun control agenda.” For Andrew Pollack, whose 18-year-old daughter, Meadow, was also killed in the shooting, it was “repulsive and hypocritical” for her to show up during the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars, in which “many casualties [are] children.” Then in Puerto Rico, she initially clapped along with a protest against her presence on the island that was being sung in Spanish, though translations vary.
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Democrats, however, remain confident in Harris, with vice presidential scholar Joel Goldstein, a Saint Louis University School of Law professor emeritus, asserting she is an “engaged and able” No. 2.
“She looks different than America’s 46 presidents and her 48 vice-presidential predecessors, and that is part of the barrier that she has faced in achieving public acceptance and approval in some circles,” Goldstein told the Washington Examiner.
