Politics
The abortion debate is giving Kamala Harris a moment. But voters still aren't sold
When a group of crossover voters was asked during a focus group about Vice President Kamala Harris, their assessments were brutal: If she is helping Biden, you don’t see it. She rubs me the wrong way. She was picked because she is a demographic. The big things she had, she failed.
The comments, fair or not, represent a problem for President Biden and for Harris, echoed in interviews with voters here in Arizona, a key swing state where Harris spoke on Friday. More than three years into the oldest president in history’s first term, his understudy has failed to win over a majority of voters or convince them that she is ready to step in if Biden falters, according to polls.
“Swing voters don’t like her,” said Gunner Ramer, political director for a group called Republican Voters Against Trump, which allowed The Times to view videos from three focus groups, including the crossover group that featured people who voted for former President Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020.
It wasn’t just former Trump voters who were negative about Harris. In a focus group of Black voters who were disappointed with Biden, none raised their hand in support of Harris, with one participant calling her “the bad news bear.” A focus group of California Democrats, while they liked Harris, had to be prompted to discuss her and said she needed more influence and exposure.
Many of Harris’ allies and supporters say the judgments are influenced by racism and sexism, pointing out that other vice presidents stayed in the background with less scrutiny and saw their popularity tied to the top of the ticket. Some people in focus groups criticized her clothes or compared her to Hillary Clinton in comments that seemed to validate those concerns.
But her low popularity could pose a political problem that her predecessors have not faced, given the focus on Trump’s and Biden’s ages, 77 and 81 respectively. More than half of voters, 54%, said she is not qualified to serve as president in a March USA Today/Suffolk poll, compared with 38% who said she is.
“If there was a health event for either nominee, the VP is front and center in terms of people who may be on the fence, people who may dislike both candidates,” said David Paleologos, who conducted a USA Today/Suffolk poll that asked voters their assessment of Harris. “And there are a lot whose decision may hinge on a comfort level with the vice presidential choice.”
Harris has heard the criticism since she entered the White House to historic triumph in 2021. While she seldom responds directly, she has stepped up her appearances with core Democratic groups, often keeping a more robust campaign and travel schedule than Biden. Many allies believe her role as the administration’s leading voice on abortion rights will boost her and the Democratic ticket on an issue that helped carry the party to unexpected success in the 2022 midterm elections.
She spoke Friday in Tucson, three days after the state’s Supreme Court ruled that an1864 ban on abortion can be enforced in the coming weeks. She framed the Democrats’ case against Trump, who has claimed credit for shifting the Supreme Court against abortion rights and last week said each state should decide on the issue.
“Just like he did in Arizona, he basically wants to take America back to the 1800s,” Harris said.
Several voters said in interviews in Phoenix on Monday that they were not aware Harris was in their state just a few days ago, underscoring the challenge of getting attention as a vice president in an era of information overload.
“If she is coming for us, she doesn’t show it,” said Tracey Sayles, a 52-year-old Black Democrat.
Sayles voted in prior elections for Democrats Hillary Clinton and Biden but now says her choice is 50-50 in the coming election, despite calling Trump “vulgar,” because Biden “looks like he’s ill.” She would have driven to see Harris in Tucson if she’d known she was in the state, she said, but feels the vice president has been hiding.
Another voter who dislikes both Trump and Biden, Jeff Garland, said he has not seen much of Harris either.
“But from what I have seen of her, she doesn’t look like someone I want running my country,” said Garland, a 57-year-old retired member of the military who said he voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020 and planned to sit out 2024.
Kellie Hoverson, a 31-year-old Democrat, said she “was not thrilled about Biden” but was more bullish on Harris, despite hearing concerns from younger friends and relatives about her history as a prosecutor in California.
“I just want a woman president,” she said. “I just want to see it in my lifetime.”
Studies by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which works to advance women’s equality in politics, suggest women face an “imagination barrier” when they run for the highest executive offices, because voters have a harder time picturing them in the job than they do white men, who have historically held the posts.
“Men can tell and women have to show,” said Amanda Hunter, the foundation’s executive director.
Polls suggest Harris, who dropped out early in the 2020 presidential primary, has made strides with the Democratic base. Three quarters of Democrats had a favorable view of her in the USA Today/Suffolk poll, which showed a little more than a quarter of independents view her favorably.
Brian Fallon, who serves as her campaign communications director, said she “has proven to be a highly effective messenger on issues from reproductive freedom to gun violence prevention” and said she is “uniquely positioned to mobilize critical groups across the Biden-Harris coalition, including both progressives and independents.”
The fact that many voters say they remain unfamiliar with Harris is something her allies and advisors see as an opening, because it leaves room for persuasion when more voters focus in on the race in the early fall.
“This is not a one-speech or two-speech thing, this is four or five months of just putting in the work,” said Cornell Belcher, who served as one of former President Obama’s pollsters.
Belcher argued that the small slice of persuadable voters who give Harris her lowest marks won’t decide the race; it will instead be a question of whether Democrats can rebuild their coalition of young voters, women and people of color that delivered Obama his 2012 reelection and formed the backbone of Biden’s 2020 victory.
“I’m more worried about these younger voters taking the off-ramp, like they did in 2016,” he said, crediting Harris with her work reaching them in college campus tours and other outreach.
But there are questions there, too, with inconsistencies in polls of voters age 18-29, given the small sample sizes of subgroups. One poll conducted in early April by Emerson College showed Harris with pretty high favorable marks among those younger voters, nearly 49%, while another poll by the Economist taken a few days later showed only 34% of that age group viewed her favorably.
It’s unclear whether Trump, who has not targeted the vice president often, will pick up his attacks on Harris, who is unsurprisingly toxic among Republican base voters. “If they cheat on the election, it might be Kamala,” Trump said during a March rally in North Carolina, echoing his false claims of widespread election fraud.
He fairly quickly pivoted back to Biden: “We got enough problems with this guy.”
A senior advisor to the Trump campaign, Danielle Alvarez, called Harris irrelevant. “Political reality is that Biden’s under water and he is a failed president,” she said. ”She is certainly probably equal to him in those failures, but he is the target.”
Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster, agrees that running mates do not generally impact votes but points to Sarah Palin in 2008 as an exception, in large part because polls showed dual concerns about John McCain’s health and Palin’s fitness for office. He argues that Harris, whom he characterizes as a walking gaffe, presents a similar problem.
“There may be plenty of time, but if you don’t have the ability to be more articulate and look like you’re ready to be leader of the free world, it’s going to be difficult to accomplish that,” Ayres said.
Harris is counting on that time. She is fairly busy with public events, but vice presidents, by design, don’t tend to draw much attention compared with the president.
As the campaign heats up, and Trump picks a running mate, they are likely to see more of her, and, potentially, in a different light.
“For people who have misgivings about her, ultimately the question for them is going to be how does she look as opposed to X?” said Joel Goldstein, a historian who studies the vice presidency. “Now, she’s measured against an ideal figure.”
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Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is leveling a stunning accusation at Vice President JD Vance amid the national furor over this week’s fatal shooting in Minnesota involving an ICE agent.
“I understand that Vice President Vance believes that shooting a young mother of three in the face three times is an acceptable America that he wants to live in, and I do not,” the four-term federal lawmaker from New York and progressive champion argued as she answered questions on Friday on Capitol Hill from Fox News and other news organizations.
Ocasio-Cortez spoke in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting death of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good after she confronted ICE agents from inside her car in Minneapolis.
RENEE NICOLE GOOD PART OF ‘ICE WATCH’ GROUP, DHS SOURCES SAY
Members of law enforcement work the scene following a suspected shooting by an ICE agent during federal operations on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Video of the incident instantly went viral, and while Democrats have heavily criticized the shooting, the Trump administration is vocally defending the actions of the ICE agent.
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Vance, at a White House briefing on Thursday, charged that “this was an attack on federal law enforcement. This was an attack on law and order.”
“That woman was there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation,” the vice president added. “The president stands with ICE, I stand with ICE, we stand with all of our law enforcement officers.”
And Vance claimed Good was “brainwashed” and suggested she was connected to a “broader, left-wing network.”
Federal sources told Fox News on Friday that Good, who was a mother of three, worked as a Minneapolis-based immigration activist serving as a member of “ICE Watch.”
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Ocasio-Cortez, in responding to Vance’s comments, said, “That is a fundamental difference between Vice President Vance and I. I do not believe that the American people should be assassinated in the street.”
But a spokesperson for the vice president, responding to Ocasio-Cortez’s accusation, told Fox News Digital, “On National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day, AOC made it clear she thinks that radical leftists should be able to mow down ICE officials in broad daylight. She should be ashamed of herself. The Vice President stands with ICE and the brave men and women of law enforcement, and so do the American people.”
In Springfield, Ill., in 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln delivered a powerful speech decrying the “ravages of mob law” throughout the land. Lincoln warned, in eerily prescient fashion, that the spread of a then-ascendant “mobocratic spirit” threatened to sever the “attachment of the People” to their fellow countrymen and their nation. Lincoln’s opposition to anarchy of any kind was absolute and clarion: “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.”
Unfortunately, it seems that every few years, Americans must be reminded anew of Lincoln’s wisdom. This week’s lethal Immigration and Customs Enforcement standoff in the Twin Cities is but the latest instance of a years-long baleful trend.
On Wednesday, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mom, Renee Nicole Good, was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Her ex-husband said she and her partner encountered ICE agents after dropping off Good’s 6-year-old at school. The federal government has called Good’s encounter “an act of domestic terrorism” and said the agent shot in self-defense.
Suffice it to say Minnesota’s Democratic establishment does not see it this way.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey responded to the deployment of 2,000 immigration agents in the area and the deadly encounter by telling ICE to “get the f— out” of Minnesota, while Gov. Tim Walz called the shooting “totally predictable” and “totally avoidable.” Frey, who was also mayor during the mayhem after George Floyd’s murder by city police in 2020, has lent succor to the anti-ICE provocateurs, seemingly encouraging them to make Good a Floyd-like martyr. As for Walz, he’s right that this tragedy was eminently “avoidable” — but not only for the reasons he thinks. If the Biden-Harris administration hadn’t allowed unvetted immigrants to remain in the country without legal status and if Walz’s administration hadn’t moved too slowly in its investigations of hundreds of Minnesotans — of mixed immigration status — defrauding taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars, ICE never would have embarked on this particular operation.
National Democrats took the rage even further. Following the fateful shooting, the Democratic Party’s official X feed promptly tweeted, without any morsel of nuance, that “ICE shot and killed a woman on camera.” This sort of irresponsible fear-mongering already may have prompted a crazed activist to shoot three detainees at an ICE facility in Dallas last September while targeting officers; similar dehumanizing rhetoric about the National Guard perhaps also played a role in November’s lethal shooting of a soldier in Washington, D.C.
Liberals and open-border activists play with fire when they so casually compare ICE, as Walz previously has, to a “modern-day Gestapo.” The fact is, ICE is not the Gestapo, Donald Trump is not Hitler, and Charlie Kirk was not a goose-stepping brownshirt. To pretend otherwise is to deprive words of meaning and to live in the theater of the absurd.
But as dangerous as this rhetoric is for officers and agents, it is the moral blackmail and “mobocratic spirit” of it all that is even more harmful to the rule of law.
The implicit threat of all “sanctuary” jurisdictions, whose resistance to aiding federal law enforcement smacks of John C. Calhoun-style antebellum “nullification,” is to tell the feds not to operate and enforce federal law in a certain area — or else. The result is crass lawlessness, Mafia-esque shakedown artistry and a fetid neo-confederate stench combined in one dystopian package.
The truth is that swaths of the activist left now engage in these sorts of threats as a matter of course. In 2020, the left’s months-long rioting following the death of Floyd led to upward of $2 billion in insurance claims. In 2021, they threatened the same rioting unless Derek Chauvin, the officer who infamously kneeled on Floyd’s neck, was found guilty of murder (which he was, twice). In 2022, following the unprecedented (and still unsolved) leak of the draft majority opinion in the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court case, abortion-rights activists protested outside many of the right-leaning justices’ homes, perhaps hoping to induce them to change their minds and flip their votes. And now, ICE agents throughout the country face threats of violence — egged on by local Democratic leaders — simply for enforcing federal law.
In “The Godfather,” Luca Brasi referred to this sort of thuggery as making someone an offer that he can’t refuse. We might also think of it as Lincoln’s dreaded “ravages of mob law.”
Regardless, a free republic cannot long endure like this. The rule of law cannot be held hostage to the histrionic temper tantrums of a radical ideological flank. The law must be enforced solemnly, without fear or favor. There can be no overarching blackmail lurking in the background — no Sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of a free people, ready to crash down on us all if a certain select few do not get their way.
The proper recourse for changing immigration law — or any federal law — is to lobby Congress to do so, or to make a case in federal court. The ginned-up martyrdom complex that leads some to take matters into their own hands is a recipe for personal and national ruination. There is nothing good down that road — only death, despair and mobocracy.
Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. X: @josh_hammer
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Ideas expressed in the piece
- Democrats and activist left are perpetuating a dangerous “mobocratic spirit” similar to the mob law that Lincoln warned against in 1838, which threatens the rule of law and national unity[1]
- The federal government’s characterization of the incident as self-defense by an ICE agent is appropriate, while local Democratic leaders are irresponsibly encouraging anti-ICE protesters to view Good as a martyr figure like George Floyd[1]
- Dehumanizing rhetoric comparing ICE to the Gestapo is reckless fear-mongering that has inspired actual violence, including a shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas and the fatal shooting of a National Guard soldier[1]
- The shooting was “avoidable” not because of ICE’s presence, but because the Biden-Harris administration allowed undocumented immigrants to remain in the country without legal status and state authorities moved too slowly investigating immigrant fraud[1]
- Sanctuary jurisdictions that resist federal law enforcement represent neo-confederate “nullification” and constitute crass lawlessness and Mafia-style extortion, effectively telling federal agents they cannot enforce the law or face consequences[1]
- The activist left employs threats of violence as systematic blackmail, evidenced by 2020 riots following Floyd’s death, threats surrounding the Chauvin trial, protests at justices’ homes during the abortion debate, and now threats against ICE agents[1]
- Changing immigration policy must occur through Congress or federal courts, not through mob rule and “ginned-up martyrdom complexes” that lead to personal and national ruination[1]
Different views on the topic
- Community members who knew Good rejected characterizations of her as a domestic terrorist, with her mother describing her as “one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” “extremely compassionate,” and someone “who has taken care of people all her life”[1]
- Vigil speakers and attendees portrayed Good as peacefully present to watch the situation and protect her neighbors, with an organizer stating “She was peaceful; she did the right thing” and “She died because she loved her neighbors”[1]
- A speaker identified only as Noah explicitly rejected the federal government’s domestic terrorism characterization, saying Good was present “to watch the terrorists,” not participate in terrorism[1]
- Neighbors described Good as a loving mother and warm family member who was an award-winning poet and positive community presence, suggesting her presence during the incident reflected civic concern rather than radicalism[1]
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President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he plans to meet with Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado in Washington next week.
During an appearance on Fox News’ “Hannity,” Trump was asked if he intends to meet with Machado after the U.S. struck Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro.
“Well, I understand she’s coming in next week sometime, and I look forward to saying hello to her,” Trump said.
Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado waves a national flag during a protest called by the opposition on the eve of the presidential inauguration, in Caracas on January 9, 2025. (JUAN BARRETO/AFP via Getty Images)
This will be Trump’s first meeting with Machado, who the U.S. president stated “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country” to lead.
According to reports, Trump’s refusal to support Machado was linked to her accepting the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, which Trump believed he deserved.
But Trump later told NBC News that while he believed Machado should not have won the award, her acceptance of the prize had “nothing to do with my decision” about the prospect of her leading Venezuela.
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