Is Kamala Harris a weaker candidate than Hillary Clinton? What surveys show

The 2024 election cycle is in its final days, and once again America is just weeks away from potentially electing the country’s first female president – but how does Vice President Kamala Harris fare as the Democratic nominee?

Eight years ago, the party fielded its first female presidential candidate with the nomination of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Like Clinton, Harris is running against former President Donald Trump, who has now been the Republican nominee in the last three presidential elections.

Polls suggest that Harris is struggling to gain traction with voters and that he is still ahead of Trump within the margins of error of most polls. Harris’ lead is also narrower than the advantages that both Clinton and Joe Biden had over Trump at this point in the 2016 and 2020 races.

With 31 days until Election Day, Harris is up 2.6 percentage points, according to FiveThirtyEight’s national poll tracker. In 2016, a month before the election, pollsters had Clinton ahead of Trump by 5.1 points. At the same point in the 2020 cycle, Biden was 7.6 points ahead of Trump.

According to RealClearPolling, Harris is 2.2 points ahead of Trump as of Friday, well behind the Democrats before him. With 31 days to go before Election Day, Clinton was ahead by 4.7 points and Biden was ahead by 7.4 points, according to RealClearPolling. The margins of error for most surveys are between +/- 2 and 4 percentage points.

The poll numbers could be a warning sign for Harris’ campaign, as the vice president does not face the same challenges that Clinton faced in 2016.

Two presidential elections ago, voters saw the former secretary of state as a role model for the establishment and told pollsters they found her dishonest and untrustworthy. She ran against Trump, a political newcomer at the time, while embroiled in an email controversy that she later said cost her the election.

Harris, on the other hand, has no major political commitments. Many voters see her as a symbol of change. Her popularity skyrocketed after Biden resigned and endorsed her as the Democratic nominee, and there are no significant personal controversies against her. Furthermore, Trump is no longer the political outsider he was in 2016. But Harris is still struggling to pull away in the polls.

“Harris has yet to effectively introduce himself to many voters,” said political expert Steve Schier Newsweek. “Their initial rollout was accompanied by a lot of positive media messages, but the impression it created needed to be developed further.”

Harris quickly launched the campaign, but largely avoided contact with the press. It wasn’t until nearly six weeks into her campaign that she participated in her first in-depth interview with CNN, which was also a joint interview with her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz. She wouldn’t give her first solo interview for another eight weeks.

Schier said that although Harris performed adequately in what was likely the only debate between her and Trump, she “did not leave an impression deep enough to dispel doubts and uncertainties about her.”

A New York Times/A Siena College poll conducted two days before the Sept. 10 debate found that 28 percent of voters still say they need to know more about her, compared to just 9 percent who said the same about Trump. This share of voters was nearly identical after the debate, suggesting that Harris may have missed an opportunity to address these concerns.

“Her subsequent media strategy of avoiding press conferences and granting few interviews did not help her define herself well,” Shcier said. “All of this explains why her campaign wants another debate with Trump to better introduce itself and differentiate itself from him. Trump is unlikely to grant her this favor.”

However, other experts believe Harris is in a better-than-expected position at this point in the race.

veteran Democratic strategist Matt Bennett said Newsweek Despite entering the race incredibly late, inheriting a campaign she didn’t build, and having almost no opportunity to introduce herself or carve out her own political personality, it’s “remarkable that Harris is in such a GOOD position, as she is.”

“She took on a ticket that was in deep water against a former president whose chaotic time in office was viewed by many through rose-tinted glasses. She was weighed down by some poor policy decisions from her 2019 campaign. And their biggest obstacle has been inflation – or at least the public perception that life has become unaffordable in the post-pandemic era,” Bennett said.

And yet, he said, “Harris ended up sprinting.”

Tom Bonier, a Democratic data analyst and strategist, also said Newsweek that it is “deeply problematic” to compare the poll results from the 2016 election campaign with this election cycle. He added that the rise in Harris’ popularity ratings shows her campaign has done a “quantifiably good job of defining her as a candidate.”

“She and her team positioned her perfectly as a moderate focused on economic opportunity, she performed brilliantly on the big stages of convention and debate, they brought in tons of money, and they made a losing race very competitive ” ” said Bennett. “The headwind is still howling, but she has built up enough momentum to overcome it.”