Pollster Nate Silver said he has “a lot of sympathy” for Vice President Harris after her loss to President-elect Trump because President Biden “did her no favors” before or after he dropped out of the presidential race this summer.
“He gave her tough assignments — the border, perhaps Democrats’ worst issue, and voting rights, an issue on which the White House probably knew it wouldn’t make any progress,” Silver stated in a post to his website on Friday, referencing the vice president’s focuses while in office.
“He blew up the debate calendar, leaving nothing scheduled after Sept. 11 even though this was one of Harris’s best formats,” he added. “Even up to the bitter end, Biden was stepping on her message.”
But Silver argued this sentiment warped some positive views of Harris’s candidacy, stating she is a “replacement-level politician” and that someone “average or slightly above average” was needed to beat Trump.
“I think people confuse their sympathy for Harris’s position for her having been a good candidate,” he penned, citing her underperformance compared to Democratic Senate candidates on the November ballot.
“On net, Harris underperformed the Democratic Senate candidate by an average of 2.6 points and a median of 2.4,” he wrote.
Reasons for this underperformance, according to Silver, included problems with messaging and a “refusal” to differentiate herself from Biden as well as her shifting stances between her first bid for the White House in 2020 and her most recent attempt in 2024.
“She may have tried to pivot to the center in this campaign, but it was a clumsy effort at best given a lack of explanation for why she’d abandoned her previous positions or what her agenda would actually look like,” he said.
Still, Silver maintains that Biden would have lost if he stayed at the top of the ticket, citing reporting that internal polling showed Trump winning 400 electoral votes.
“When Biden dropped out, he was trailing Donald Trump by 4 points in our national polling average. I actually think the final margin would have gotten worse, not better,” Silver said.
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