Nate Silver Calls Out ‘Mediocre Candidate’ Kamala Harris and ‘Unpopular’ Biden Over Trump’s Victory

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Elections analyst Nate Silver called Vice President Kamala Harris a “mediocre” and “replacement-level” candidate in the Friday edition of his newsletter reflecting on the 2024 presidential election.

Under the headline “Kamala Harris was a replacement-level candidate” and subhead, “Trump’s win is mostly Biden’s fault, not hers. Still, she was a mediocre candidate in a year when Democrats needed a strong one,” Silver made the case that Harris underperformed against President-elect Donald Trump.

Silver began by noting that “Biden did her no favors,” by waiting so long to drop out, giving her “tough assignments” as Vice President, and allowing his team to bad-mouth Harris to reporters. Nevertheless, he argued that “people confuse their sympathy for Harris’s position for her having been a good candidate,” noting that she “underperformed the Democratic Senate candidate by an average of 2.6 points,” fell short of her expected popular vote performance by two points.

He went on to level “two main critiques of Harris:”

One is her inability to drive a message and her refusal to separate herself more clearly from Biden. Now, I’m not going to pretend that these were easy waters for Harris to navigate, given that she was Biden’s sitting vice president. But — you have to at least try, I think? Throw your unpopular boss at least a little bit under the bus?

At times, Harris’s campaign — headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware and staffed mostly by ex-Biden people — seemed reluctant to criticize Biden out of fear of being perceived as disloyal, a stupid thing to be concerned about given that you have an election to win and that Biden frequently undermined her. It wasn’t a risk-free option — Harris might have reminded Americans of what they disliked about Biden — but she needed a bolder strategy, especially given the challenging political environment.

The other big negative is Harris’s strongly left-wing positions as a presidential candidate in 2019. She may have tried to pivot to the center in this campaign, but it was a clumsy effort at best given a lack of explanation for why she’d abandoned her previous positions or what her agenda would actually look like.

“Sometimes, replacement-level talent is good enough in a pinch. But this was a difficult electoral environment for Democrats. You only get so many Obamas — your #1 overall draft picks — so I’m not asking for a superstar,” concluded Silver. “But they needed someone who was average to solidly above average, and they have a good bench after their strong midterms in 2018 and 2022. Those candidates were left on the sidelines, and now Trump is headed to the White House again.”