Behind the public jubilation over Vice President Harris' rapid rise to become her party's presumptive presidential nominee, Democratic lawmakers are privately concerned about her prospects of defeating former President Trump, acknowledging that she is largely out of line tested as a candidate and faces serious challenges.

Anxiety, for the most part, has been pushed aside by a deep sense of relief that President Biden has decided to drop his bid for re-election. After months of unease over the 81-year-old incumbent, Democratic lawmakers are happy to rally behind Harris in the hope that he will galvanize Democratic donors along with young and minority voters.

But concerns are already emerging about Harris' ability to connect as well as Biden did in 2020 with white working-class and union voters in three states that were critical to defeating Trump: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“She wasn't a great candidate,” one Democratic senator said of Harris' performance as a presidential candidate in 2020, when she dropped out of the Democratic primary before the Iowa caucuses.

“And she may not be as good a political activist as Biden in his prime,” the senator added.

The lawmaker argued that Harris' pure political skills won't be as crucial to her success now that nearly the entire Democratic Party is rallying behind her and now that she has a clear path to the nomination when the Democratic National Committee hold virtual proceedings early next month.

“She's not campaigning in the primary. She's the candidate, she has thousands of people working for her and she has a team of the smartest people, many of whom have worked with her over the years,” he said. say the senator

But the senator warned that Harris will not have an easy road to victory.

“We have to be very clear, and it will be brutally tough,” the lawmaker said.

An Emerson College poll of registered voters in swing states conducted July 22-23 found Trump leading Harris 46% to 45% in Michigan and 48% to 46% in Pennsylvania , while the two candidates tied with 47% in Wisconsin.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and his allies say Harris needs to do much more to win over blue-collar voters in those states. They were unhappy that Biden was kicked off the ticket after working closely with his top advisers to craft a progressive economic plan for the first 100 days of his second term.

“To become president, she will have to talk about issues that affect 60 percent of Americans, working people who live paycheck to paycheck,” Sanders. he told The Hill last week.

A Democratic strategist allied with Sanders said it is not clear that Harris will be a stronger candidate than Biden in November. And the source noted that she was more associated with defending abortion rights and voting rights than fighting economic inequality during her three and a half years as vice president.

One of the main reasons for concern among Democrats is that the third Robert F. Kennedy Jr. it could end up absorbing the votes of many culturally conservative, union-aligned working-class voters in the industrial Midwest.

Stronger than Biden

A second Democratic senator who requested anonymity acknowledged that Harris is not perfect but argued that he is far better than Biden would have been, citing widespread pessimism about Biden's chances of victory after his disastrous debate and his attempts to straighten out his campaign.

“Democrats were in a slump,” the senator said of the mood in the caucus after the debate. “Backstage … almost everyone was trying to say, 'Gosh Joe, we love you, but go.'”

“It's not like there's a perfect vision of, 'Oh, we've got the best candidate in the world.' [in reserve]”, added the senator.

But the source said Harris doesn't have much time to win over voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the three states most critical to winning the White House.

“She's just getting started. This challenge is not something she's blind to by any means,” the senator said of the work Harris has to do to woo voters in those battleground states.

A Pennsylvania-based Democratic strategist said Harris has no special relationship with the Keystone State. He is nothing like Biden, who was born in Scranton and represented neighboring Delaware for 36 years in the Senate.

“What surprises me is how few relationships he has here,” the strategist said. “California is so far away. It feels so foreign, culturally.

“All I've always heard is that he doesn't have that many relationships in Pennsylvania and he hasn't established any kind of identity here,” the source said. “Obviously, it's a very big difference with Joe Biden.”

Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), who is in a tough re-election battle, said Harris has a lot of work to do in his home state.

“His campaign is not even a week old. There's an obvious need to be able to get his message out,” he said. “I think he's going to win in the end, but we've got a lot of work to do.”

The presence of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on the ticket could change things, and the Democrat is seen as a leading candidate to become Harris' running mate.

During heated debate within the Senate Democratic Conference earlier this month over whether to drop Biden from the ticket, the president's allies told colleagues that Harris would almost certainly take his place as a nominee, making the implicit argument that she would have her own flaws. flag bearer of the party.

A source familiar with internal discussions about Biden's replacement said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (DN.Y.) initially was “lukewarm” to Harris taking over as the party's nominee.

On Wednesday, however, Schumer gave a strong endorsement of the vice president and appeared elated by the huge outpouring of Democratic support for his candidacy since Biden announced his decision to end his campaign.

“Boy, boy, we're excited,” Schumer declared at a news conference with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY).

Clear strengths

To be sure, Democratic senators say Harris has clear strengths.

As only the second woman nominated by a major party for president, she is seen as an ideal candidate to deliver her message on abortion rights, which is seen as the party's strongest issue in the 2024 election .

And they believe it will increase enthusiasm among minority voters, who were critical to Barack Obama winning the White House in 2008 and 2012, and to Biden's victory in 2020.

And they believe her background as California's attorney general, her four years in the Senate and her four years as vice president make her clearly well-qualified to lead the country.

They say he can claim credit for Biden's major accomplishments, including reducing child poverty by 20 percent by expanding the child tax credit by 2021; make the biggest investment ever in renewable energy; enact a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package; capping seniors' out-of-pocket prescription drug costs at $2,000 a year and capping insulin costs at $35 a month.

But Democratic senators warn that Harris is far behind Trump, and even behind where Biden was earlier this summer, in defining himself as a leader who would successfully manage the economy, that a plurality of voters say it is their top priority.

But they hope he can run on Biden's economic record, even as his administration struggled to sell “Bidenomics” to voters.

A third Democratic senator said Harris was in a somewhat difficult position because he let Biden soak up all the credit for the strong economy under his administration.

“She needs to define herself,” the senator said. “He's done a good job of being loyal and letting Biden sink into the limelight.

“She doesn't have the mark on the economy, but she has the coasts, and Biden has the record,” the lawmaker said, pointing to the Commerce Department's latest report that the economy grew 2.8 percent in in the second quarter, exceeding economists' expectations. .

Even Democratic lawmakers who pushed to replace Biden as the running mate admit they have little idea how Harris, 59, will fare as a candidate, but are optimistic that her personal charisma and coolness as a candidate will compare favorably. to Trump, a 78-year-old three-time presidential candidate who is viewed unfavorably by 51 percent of registered voters.

A fourth Democratic senator said Harris needs to pick a running mate with a good record on economic issues and singled out Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), one of the Senate's leading advocates for investing in the domestic industry of semiconductor manufacturing, as a good option.

The lawmaker argued that no candidate is fully tested before running for president, but said Harris is more prepared than when he ran more than four years ago.

“No one is completely proven when you go into a presidential campaign,” the senator observed.

The senator admitted that Republicans will try to hit her on some of the far-left positions she took in 2019, such as signing Sanders' Medicare for All proposal or suggesting that private health insurance could be abolished in a how many years.

“People in the primaries said all kinds of things,” the lawmaker noted about the mad scramble in 2019 and 2020 to appeal to the party's liberal base.

The senator questioned the wisdom of Harris supporting the Green New Deal, the bold proposal launched by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DN.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in 2019, which failed not a single one vote in the Senate that year.

The lawmaker said Trump and Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) have also said plenty in the past to pander to the Republican base that will come after them again in the general election.

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