Polling pundit Nate Silver on Friday argued that President Joe Biden did Vice President Kamala Harris “no favours” after he dropped out of the 2024 race in July.
Silver — founder of the polling analysis website FiveThirtyEight — wrote on his Silver Bulletin blog that Biden gave the vice president “tough assignments” on the border and voting rights while blowing up the calendar for debates, events he dubbed as one of Harris’ “best formats.”
“Even up to the bitter end, Biden was stepping on her message,” wrote Silver, who linked to a report about White House officials tweaking the official transcript of Biden’s “garbage” remarks.
“Most appallingly of all,” he continued, “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, according to Jon Favreau of Pod Save America.”
I'm sympathetic to Harris, but she was a mediocre candidate. And I think the evidence points toward this being a winnable race for Democrats with a better one.https://t.co/dUgICsU7b0
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 15, 2024
Favreau, in remarks on the political podcast last week, claimed Biden’s internal polling team said it found he was “the strongest candidate” and privately told reporters that Harris “couldn’t win.”
A source close to the president, in a comment to Mediaite, disputed Favreau’s reports on internal polling last week.
Silver remarked on “how hard” it would be for Harris to lose 400 electoral votes, even showing an Electoral College map depicting the imagined scenario.
He noted that he “wouldn’t take this entirely literally” and said he believes Biden would have fared worse on Election Day than polling numbers indicated when he dropped his campaign.
Silver, elsewhere in his blog post, expressed “a lot of sympathy” for Harris despite calling her a “mediocre” candidate.
He later revealed his “two main critiques” of the vice president.
“One is her inability to drive a message and her refusal to separate herself more clearly from Biden. ... The other big negative is Harris’s strongly left-wing positions as a presidential candidate in 2019,” he wrote.
He continued, “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.”
Read Silver’s full take on the Silver Bulletin blog.
