‘Can she win?’: Why Kamala Harris can’t shake doubts about her political future

President Joe Biden could soon be out — but that doesn’t guarantee Vice President Kamala Harris is in.

If Biden cedes to overwhelming political pressure and steps aside as the Democratic presidential nominee, it might seem natural that Harris — as Biden’s political heir since 2020 — would inherit the party’s mantle and its resources, with Democrats unifying behind her in the name of defeating former President Donald Trump. That could still be the case for Harris.

Yet for months, even those now nudging Biden out the door haven't been confident that Harris would be a winning presidential candidate, reviving some of the same concerns that sank her White House run and dogged an uneven vice presidency. Clips and memes of her odd and circuitous sound bites have proliferated on social media. While some Democrats cheer her push on abortion rights, Republicans have made clear they intend to go directly at Harris’ White House work on the southern border.

Even as calls for Biden’s exit have crescendoed, prominent Democratic officials and donors have continued to cast doubt on the wisdom of swapping in Harris. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , who has emerged as a steadfast voice for Biden staying put, reminded her followers on Instagram Live late Thursday night that the party is not fully in Harris’ camp.

“If you think there is a consensus among the people who want Joe Biden to leave, that they would support Vice President Harris, you would be mistaken,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I’m in these rooms, I see what they say in conversations. A lot of them are not interested in removing the president. They’re interested in removing the whole ticket.”

Here are the primary reasons panicking Democrats and donors may not be sold on a Harris-led ticket:

It’s not clear that the polling is there

Democrats are trying to solve a basic equation: Who gives them the best odds of keeping Trump out of the White House and maximizing Democratic success in the House and Senate, where candidates are currently being dragged down by Biden? On that point, Harris wouldn’t necessarily enter the general election in better shape than Biden.

Recent national polls that tested both Biden and Harris against Trump showed little difference between the two Democrats. An NBC News poll earlier this month showed Trump edging out Biden, 45 percent to 43 percent, while Trump led Harris by an identical two-point margin, 47 percent to 45 percent.

And some influential Democrats are far from sold on her political viability.

“Be careful what you wish for,” said John Morgan, a Democratic megadonor, who echoed his longstanding critique in warning Harris comes across as inauthentic.

“Fundraisers and donors are just like people who go to the race track,” Morgan added. “They go to win.”

Defenders of elevating Harris note, however, that her numbers could well improve if her presidential candidacy goes from a hypothetical exercise to a reality in which she is regularly making her case to voters. She’d also benefit from tens of millions of dollars in Biden-Harris campaign funds.

She could help shore up support with vital voter blocs: A recent POLITICO/Morning Consult poll found Harris outpacing Biden among Black voters, in a notable improvement on her performance four years ago, even as it suggested she’d struggle to consolidate Democratic support. Harris has also spent years focused on outreach to younger voters for the administration and campaign. Yet Harris also has to navigate the double-edged dynamics of being a Black woman in politics. Her defenders argue she has faced consistent sexism and racism, both in terms of unreasonable expectations and disproportionate critiques, and Harris would again need to contend with those obstacles as the party’s presidential nominee.

And at 59, Harris would quickly quell Democrats concerns about the age of the party's leader and draw a sharp contrast to the 78-year-old GOP nominee.

Her backers say the political class still undersells her demonstrated strength as a candidate.

“Democrats misunderstand or forget how President Biden and Kamala Harris won the White House in the first place,” said Aimee Allison, who founded the organization She the People to try to elect more women of color.

“I’ve heard it this week, it's a perennial thing — ‘Can she win?’ I say, ‘Yes, she already has,’” Allison said, adding that the persistent downplaying of Harris' strengths is “true for every Black woman in politics.”

Democrats are also contemplating darker outcomes, particularly after an assassin's bullet narrowly missed Trump.

"If Biden steps down, she should be the one to receive the delegates," said Renay Grace Rodriguez, president of the Los Angeles branch of the Stonewall Democratic Club. "But I also know how this country behaves toward women and women of color, and I worry for her that there would be a bullet that would not miss.”

Harris' failed run for the 2020 nomination casts a long shadow — and affects perceptions of her prospects today

While Harris charted a rapid ascent through California politics, serving as San Francisco District Attorney and then state attorney general before capturing national attention and a U.S. Senate seat in 2017, her presidential campaign fizzled before voting even began and with Harris down in home-state polls.

Harris’ 2020 bid peaked on a primary debate stage where she interrupted a conversation about race to excoriate Biden, her future boss, for his past relationships with segregationists. The calculated jab was a rhetorical gut punch at Biden, whose son Beau had been close with Harris as a fellow state attorney general, and it pushed Harris to her best polling position as she vied for position in a crowded Democratic field.

But that moment — which ended up creating lasting bad feelings with some Biden allies, even after he picked her as running mate — brought new scrutiny and exposed some of her weaknesses. When questioned about her own position on busing, Harris’ answers were vague — and, in the eyes of some observers, not all that far from Biden’s views on the topic. She otherwise struggled to articulate a coherent ideology or consistent positions on the issues — most notoriously espousing ever-evolving and contradictory positions on single-payer health care.

Meanwhile, her public struggles were mirrored by behind-the-scenes issues with her campaign, which lacked a consistent strategy, a clear chain of command and a candidate who was unable to identify problems and right the ship. Money dwindled as summer turned into fall, staff layoffs ensued, and, in December, Harris announced she was quitting before a single primary vote was cast. In March, she backed Biden.

That history has stuck in the minds of many voters and donors. They’re looking for certainty in a time of chaos, or at least reassurance, and many are finding more reasons to worry when they revisit Harris’ record.

“The last three to four days I’ve been traveling around, that’s been the big thing — ‘You guys are in disarray,’” one House Democrat said this week. “‘Kamala, eh that’s not good. In the primary four years ago, she didn’t last very long.’"

A spokesperson for the vice president defended her record — and stressed that she’s dedicated to partnering with the president through November beyond.

“Whether it is fighting to protect fundamental freedoms — including a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body — lowering the cost of prescription drugs for working families, or advancing U.S. national security interests on the world stage, Vice President Harris is proud to be a governing partner to President Biden, and together they will continue to lead the nation forward for the rest of this term and next,” the spokesperson, Ernesto Apreza, said in a statement to POLITICO.

Staff turnover has fueled questions about her management

In each office she’s ascended to, Harris has had a rocky start in which she’s turned over key staffers before finding her footing in a new role. Those early stumbles were magnified when she got to the White House, with staffers complaining about her first chief of staff and a dysfunctional office environment .

As problems inside Harris’ office spilled into public view, its relationship with the White House became even more strained. Senior Biden aides viewed the office as unorganized and, most importantly, a distraction at a moment when the administration couldn’t afford any.

Persistent leaks about mismanagement and low morale conveyed a sense that Harris was struggling to keep her house in order. A year in, allies were urging Harris to take a more assertive management role.

Those struggles echoed campaign drama over personnel. When Harris’ presidential campaign fell apart, some people faulted the candidate for overly relying on the counsel of her sister and trusted confidante Maya.

But Harris' political orbit shifted as she took on a national role that yielded a new team of advisers. And by the middle of her second year as vice president, things had begun to turn a corner as a new chief of staff, Lorraine Voles, quieted the drama inside the office.

She's had trouble winning over Biden's inner circle in the West Wing

Harris got off to a rocky start with Biden’s inner circle in 2020, and while four years later the relationship between her team and Biden’s trusted advisers has improved, some of the old scars linger .

Harris’ biggest moment in the primary — the busing comment — also sowed doubts in Biden’s inner orbit as her name emerged atop lists of possible running mates for the ex-vice president.

Some of those closest to him — including Biden’s wife and trusted political counselor Jill — bristled at Harris’ debate clapback. They saw it as a betrayal by a close family acquaintance and a craven political move that didn’t comport with the facts.

But Biden’s political advisers, particularly future White House chief of staff Ron Klain, still believed Harris could be a valuable addition to the ticket and made their case to the president. She could bridge divides inside the Democratic Party that had only grown wider over the course of a grueling primary season, the thinking went, and address the dissonance of having a white man serving as standard bearer for an increasingly diverse base.

The concerns from some senior Biden aides and family members didn’t stop after Harris’ selection — or after the election, or even after the inauguration. Harris and aides tried to focus on being “Joe Biden’s Joe Biden,” harkening back to the president’s reputation as a loyal No. 2 to President Barack Obama.

Yet the first two years of her tenure were littered with staff turmoil, public gaffes and public missteps, as well as uneven handling of an admittedly challenging policy portfolio.

Some prominent Black women in politics accused Biden’s team of misreading the level of scrutiny she would face as the first woman of color to hold the job. There was a broader perception that she’d been dealt an unwinnable hand. “Her portfolio is trash,” Harris surrogate Bakari Sellers lamented in 2021 .

Harris, in the meantime, was focused on proving to Biden and his longtime inner circle that she would be loyal to the end.

Can she unite the party?

Harris allies hope to garner strong support from women and Black Democrats for a potential Harris candidacy. As POLITICO reported on Thursday , female Democratic donors and a women's political organization are taking steps to ensure an initial wave of funding for Harris if she becomes a presidential candidate. Prominent members of the Congressional Black Caucus have signaled strong support for Harris, with Jim Clyburn saying that if Biden chooses to leave of his own volition, his replacement needs to be Harris.

That said, Harris would need to lean on party constituencies that she hasn't successfully won over in the past. It's not obvious that she would unite a broad cross-section of the party in the way Biden did in 2020, and she lacks the longstanding congressional relationships enjoyed by Biden, who spent the vast majority of his adult life in national office.

Ocasio-Cortez’s comments highlight an important element of this: Progressive Democrats in Congress, many of whom were skeptical of Harris in 2019 given her law enforcement history, have not been clamoring to ditch Biden. The liberal House “squad” and Sen. Bernie Sanders have remained conspicuously supportive of Biden staying in the race. But on a key 2024 issue for progressives — the U.S. stance on Israel conduct in its war against Hamas — Harris has been slightly ahead of Biden in her willingness to call for restraint from Israel.

On Saturday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren broke from that progressive camp when she told MSNBC that while “Biden is our nominee … Harris is ready to serve.”

Harris became the key White House messenger on abortion rights, but Her border work made her a prime target for Trump

Being vice president means serving as a loyal soldier, even if that requires taking on politically fraught tasks. That was a throughline in Harris’ early tenure. Allies complained she was not given portfolios that positioned her to succeed — especially on immigration.

Despite insisting that she not be made the face of the administration’s border policies, Harris was tasked with stemming migration from Central American countries. That prompted GOP attacks on her as “border czar,” a narrative the White House did little to combat.

At one point, Biden himself described Harris’ job as “managing the border” — much to the Harris team’s annoyance. She was tasked with addressing the root causes driving people from Central America to the United States. She visited the region — where she admonished possible migrants “do not come ” — and worked to generate funding to combat deeper societal problems.

The details don’t matter to Trump-led Republicans who have made Harris a prime target for hammering Democrats relentlessly over the southern border. The GOP made it clear they’d take advantage of Harris’s border focus in a series of speeches at the Republican convention in Milwaukee this past week.

The fall of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, however, gave Harris an opportunity to pivot to a position of strength. Biden — an observant Catholic who has long been uncomfortable making full-throated pitches for abortion rights — was happy to make Harris his point person on the subject. And it was a role she was well suited for, making use of her past work on an issue that would require an aggressive, prosecutorial approach.

Harris undertook a busy campaign schedule ahead of the 2022 midterms, where she honed her rocky speaking skills and found success linking the fight for abortion rights with a broader fight for freedom — a message that was eventually picked up across the party.

Those efforts, especially in light of the better-than-expected midterm results, helped ease tensions with the White House. And now Harris has made reproductive health the focus of Biden’s reelection bid.

"She's a terrific messenger on the issue that we believe is going to win Democrats this election, which is abortion,” said Christina Reynolds, senior vice president of EMILY’s List, which recruits and trains women candidates who support abortion rights. “Since the Dobbs decision, she's been out there making the case, and people are responding."

Harris has often been at her strongest when she’s leaned into her prosecutor past. She rose to prominence by wielding those skills to cross-examine Senate Judiciary Committee witnesses, including Trump officials. Some of those exchanges went viral.

Those strengths weren’t enough to carry a presidential campaign. Now it’s a key part of Harris' appeal. Her handling of Trump has drawn notice from anxious Democrats in recent weeks, especially in contrast with Biden’s feeble debate performance, in which he missed easy opportunities to hit Trump. With Biden’s effectiveness on the stump in serious question, Harris’ sharp attacks on his predecessor have perked up the ears of many Democrats who now believe she might be able to change the dynamics of a race that Biden appears to be losing.

Christopher Cadelago, Sarah Ferris, Julia Marsh, Hailey Fuchs, Steven Shepard, and Dan Goldberg contributed to this report.