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There’s a conversation that happens every now and then when Democrats get together and start talking about the nation’s political future, about whether President Joe Biden should run for reelection, and about what will happen to the Democratic Party after Biden, however he makes his exit. “I’m worried about Kamala Harris,” they say. “What has she done? Why isn’t she more prominent, more popular?”
This has been, when I’ve heard it, asked in good faith by people who had been excited to see Harris elected vice president. They’re not now Harris haters by any means—they’re mostly disappointed and wondering what happened. But the question’s roots need to be interrogated because they’re coming from a deeply unfair place. The first response is “Okay, but what did Mike Pence do? And since you can’t name anything Pence did, why are you asking that question about Harris in a way that no one ever asked about Pence?”
Campaign ActionThat’s a serious question—why?—but the answer isn’t hard. People, even some who are predisposed to like her, doubt Harris because she has gotten media treatment that is uniquely hostile for a vice president. The explanation for that isn’t hard, either. Harris is a woman and Harris is Black and Harris is a Black woman and that underlies the media coverage she gets, which then informs (or misinforms) how even reasonably well-informed Democrats view the vice president. (Harris is, of course, also Indian American, but this isn’t as relevant to her media coverage.)
Since vice presidents rarely do anything that organically gets a lot of public notice, most voters, even the well-informed ones, get impressions from the media without a whole lot of information to back that up. You don’t hear the specifics of what Harris or Pence are doing, you hear whether they are being criticized or whether they are understood as having power within the administration. And when it comes to Harris, those impressionistic reports are negatively shaped by her race and gender, just as their equivalents for Pence or any of his predecessors were positively but invisibly shaped by race and gender.
To be fair, Pence also benefited from comparison with Donald Trump, but why wasn’t the fact that his most visible job was totally craven sucking up to Trump seen as a defining trait? He was supposed to make his name as a power player in the Trump administration with his pandemic response work, only to get edged out by Jared Kushner. And imagine if Biden owned a hotel in a country Harris was visiting and she stayed in that hotel despite the fact that it was nowhere near her official business. It would be a major scandal. Yet when Pence did the equivalent, it was "Business as normal." At every turn, Pence benefited from the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” while Harris is held to a much higher standard.
Harris’ standing in the media is also shaped by the fact that so many of her strongest supporters are Black women—a group that is important within the Democratic Party as reliable voters, but is often overlooked or dismissed by the media. If a politician’s base of support is discounted, it becomes easier for the narrative-shapers to justify a narrative that no one likes that politician.
During her first two years in office in particular but continuing today, Harris had the additional hindrance of needing to be constantly available to cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate. So far she has broken 29 ties, which puts her tied for second place among all vice presidents in U.S. history and limits her ability to take longer trips away from Washington, D.C. As a result, her need to be available to do one of a vice president’s most important and impactful jobs has limited her ability to hold the spotlight with flashier appearances.
Most of all, though, when you’re asking “why is my impression of Kamala Harris what it is,” unless you’ve made an exhaustive study of the specifics of what she is and isn’t doing, you’re relying on a general impression generated by fairly shallow media reports. And those media reports are absolutely shaped by racism and sexism, whether or not it’s visible on the surface. The answer to the question “why isn’t Kamala Harris doing more or better” is always “how do you know what you know about Harris and what are the forces shaping that?” The media has a great deal to answer for here.
State supreme court races are a favorite topic of ours, and there are literally dozens more on the ballot in 2024, so we're previewing the top battles with Carah Ong Whaley of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics on this week's episode of The Downballot podcast. Carah tells us how and why so much money has come to be spent on supreme court elections in recent decades before diving into next year's key contests, including several states where control is on the line, like Ohio, Michigan, and Montana. With the stakes high for redistricting reform, abortion rights, and democracy, progressives everywhere will want to stay up-to-date on all of these races.
