Democrat lawmakers are anxious about Vice President Kamala Harris’s ability to defeat former President Donald Trump on election day, just 99 days away.
“I would call it a honeymoon phase,” former Democrat governor of Nevada Steve Sisolak told the New York Times on Monday. “We’ve got to keep the energy going. You got it started — now you’ve got to keep it going. It’s going to be a challenge for everybody.”
Democrats are privately expressing concerns over Harris’s candidacy. One source familiar with the internal discussions told the Hill that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was “lukewarm” about Harris becoming the nominee, a view that appears to be widespread among the party elites.
“She wasn’t a great candidate,” a Democrat senator told the Hill about Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign. Harris ended her campaign before the Iowa caucuses. “And she may not be as a political campaigner as good as Biden was in his prime,” the senator said.
“We need to be very clear-eyed, and it’s going to be brutally tough,” the lawmaker added.
“It’s not as if there was a perfect vision of, ‘Oh we have the best candidate in the world [in reserve]’” , the senator told the Hill of Harris replacing Biden.
A Democrat strategist based in Pennsylvania echoed the senator’s worry about Harris’s ability to connect with voters living in Blue Wall states. “What I find surprising is how few relationships she has here,” the strategist told the Hill. “California is very far away. It’s seen as very foreign culturally.”
“Everything I’ve always heard is she doesn’t have that many relationships in Pennsylvania, and she hasn’t established any kind of identity here,” the source acknowledged. “Obviously, it’s a very big difference with Joe Biden.”
A third senator outlined the contradiction Harris will face: running on the unpopular Biden-Harris record while praising Biden and the administration in the midst of attacks that will expose her record in the Senate.
“She’s got to define herself,” the senator warned. “She doesn’t have the brand on the economy but she’s got the chops and Biden has the record.”
Just one week after receiving Biden’s endorsement, Harris is already experiencing negative polling numbers and headlines.
Only 39 percent of registered independents say Harris is “qualified” to be president, an Economist/YouGov poll found last week. And among the 54 percent of registered voters who believe there was a “cover-up of Biden’s health,” 92 percent said Harris was “involved,” at least a little, in the coverup.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
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