Nate Silver says he has “a lot of sympathy” for Kamala Harris after her loss, saying that Joe Biden “did her no favors”—although he maintained that she was still a “replacement-level candidate” in her own right.
“I have a lot of sympathy for Kamala Harris’s position, maybe more than I have for any losing candidate in some time,” the pollster wrote in a post on his Substack.
He explained that, in his view, Biden did not set up his vice president for success before or after she replaced him as the Democratic candidate for president.
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“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 wrote. “He blew up the debate calendar, leaving nothing scheduled after Sept. 11 even though this was one of Harris’s best formats. Even up to the bitter end, Biden was stepping on her message.”
“Most appallingly of all, the White House was bad-mouthing Harris to reporters, saying she was a worse option than Biden, even though their internal polls reportedly showed Biden losing 400 electoral votes,” he added.
In the days since Trump’s surprisingly decisive victory, Biden has emerged as a frequent target of blame from his fellow Democrats—especially the fact that he only dropped out of the race after his disastrous debate showing versus Trump.
Although Silver thought that Biden didn’t help Harris, he didn’t think she was a strong candidate on her own, either.
He said that her two big issues were her inability to separate herself from Biden and her “clumsy effort” to walk back her further left-wing stances as a presidential candidate in 2019.
“Kamala Harris is a replacement-level politician,” drawing on a term used to describe athletes who are on the edge of being professional-level. “She has plenty of talent, and she builds relationships and gives speeches better than I could, or 99.9 percent of the readers of this newsletter might.”
In this election, though, Silver concluded that the Democrats “needed someone who was average to solidly above average,” which is why Trump landed in the White House.
Silver’s polling model, mirroring other major pollsters, had predicted a neck-and-neck race in the lead-up to the election. When early election night results showed a strong performance for Trump, Silver took down his model, saying that it wasn’t “capturing the story of this election night well.”
