Polling pundit Nate Silver on Friday argued that President Joe Biden did Vice President Kamala Harris “no favors” 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 debate calendar, something he dubbed one of her “best formats.”
“Even up to the bitter end, Biden was stepping on her message,” wrote Silver, who linked to a report on White House officials tweaking the official transcript of Biden’s “garbage” remarks.
He continued, “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, according to Jon Favreau of Pod Save America.”
Favreau, in remarks on the political podcast last week, claimed Biden’s internal polling indicated that 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 internal polling claim last week.
Silver remarked on “how hard” it would be for Harris to lose 400 electoral votes before showing an electoral college map depicting the imagined scenario.
He noted that he “wouldn’t take this entirely literally” before claiming that Biden would’ve fared worse than Trump on Election Day compared to polling numbers when he left the campaign.
Democracy In The Balance
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.
Silver, elsewhere in his blog, expressed “a lot of sympathy” for the Harris despite her being a “mediocre” candidate.
He’d 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.”
You can read more in the Silver Bulletin here.
Source: politics.einnews.com…
Leave a Reply