If Harris Is the Nominee, It Still Won’t Be Easy to Beat Trump

Kamala Harris’s favorability ratings have been below 50 percent. Credit…Eric Lee/The New York Times

Ever since Donald J. Trump won the presidency, Democrats have stuck to a winning electoral playbook: From congressional races to presidential ones, they’ve nominated well-liked, moderate candidates who could appeal to nearly any voter who disliked Mr. Trump and his allies.

It hasn’t always been easy for Democrats to follow this playbook. But when the stakes have been highest, they’ve managed to do so — from preventing the nomination of Bernie Sanders by elevating Joe Biden four years ago, to pushing Mr. Biden to abandon his re-election campaign.

With President Biden bowing out of the race Sunday and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats still won’t find it easy to follow their time-tested approach. Many Democrats have coalesced behind Ms. Harris, but she doesn’t start the campaign as the kind of broadly acceptable candidate Democrats have put forward to great success during the Trump era.

At the outset, one enormous caveat is necessary: Ms. Harris became a candidate for president only on Sunday. She will have every opportunity to reintroduce herself to the nation, distinguish herself from Mr. Biden and rally Democratic voters in the weeks ahead. Similarly, her opposition will have every opportunity to criticize her handling of the border or her support for a ban on fracking or for Medicare for All. In the end, her standing could easily change for the better — or worse.

But a majority of voters have long had an unfavorable view of her. She has trailed Mr. Trump in nearly every national and battleground state poll conducted so far this year. In the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll of Pennsylvania, just 42 percent of likely voters said they viewed Ms. Harris favorably — well short of the 51 percent who had a favorable view of Mr. Biden in the state ahead of the 2020 election. It’s even lower than the 46 percent who said the same for Mr. Trump in the recent poll.

With numbers like these, a Harris-Trump matchup doesn’t look much like the 2020 presidential election, when Mr. Biden prevailed as a moderate candidate who was liked by a majority of voters. Instead, it’s more like the Biden-Trump contest of a month ago, before the debate, when Mr. Trump led narrowly and the race seemed poised to be decided by the fickle voters who dislike both candidates — the so-called double haters.