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.”
In a tight presidential race, Pennsylvania, with its 19 electoral votes, will very likely decide the winner. And the state, which Donald J. Trump won in 2016 and President Biden won in 2020 by narrow margins, is up for grabs.
That’s clear in Berks County, which lies about 60 miles northwest of Philadelphia where flourishing Democratic suburbs melt into conservative, rural Pennsylvania.
The mountains and low hills that make up most of the county are sprinkled with small towns and farms, while the county seat, Reading, is Pennsylvania’s fourth-largest city, with a substantial Latino majority. In 2020, Mr. Trump won the county by around 8 percentage points, the narrowest margin of the 54 counties that he won across the state.
Berks is “a big bag of marbles,” said Matthew Orifice, a longtime resident of Boyertown, Pa., “half of which are blue, half of which are red.”
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Mr. Orifice, 56, says that people in the area with very different politics have come together on practical matters, like lobbying for school programs threatened by budget cuts.
He and more than two dozen Berks County residents interviewed this month described the county as a place that was mostly neighborly despite deep political disagreements. But nearly all of them worried that the growing toxicity of national politics had endangered that sense of community.
Frustrations Over Cultural Division
People’s views are much more polarized on issues like abortion, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and immigration. And each side blames the other side’s party leaders for the rise in political tensions.
In a mostly white county that is also home to a large and growing Latino population, opinions on race and immigration can be complex. Trump supporters outside the city often described Reading in grim terms, but some said they liked the city’s current mayor, a Democrat and the first Latino to hold the office. Inside the city, some Latino residents felt strongly that too many people were coming into the United States and relying on government services.
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The people who were really sowing discord, many Trump supporters insisted, were the Democrats with their emphasis on race and gender, particularly in schools.
“The people in power are splitting people into all these special groups,” said Randy Bleyer, 68, a retired machinist at a local polymer plant. “They’re pushing division.”
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Shavona Johnson, 37, who works for the state’s Department of Corrections, said she believed that the Democrats were trying to foster racial conflict to get votes and that the contentious debates about accepting refugees were just another part of that strategy.
She said she fully supported Mr. Trump’s proposal to round up and deport everyone who was in the country illegally. “There’s some countries that won’t even allow Americans to get citizenship,” she said. “Why do we have to be the one that’s open?”
Supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris said there were other issues more important to them, including abortion rights and reducing healthcare costs.
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Many said they were also deeply uneasy about the condition of the social fabric in Berks County. Several said that Mr. Trump had stirred up a small but belligerent subset of supporters who seemed to have become more hostile as the election approached.
“It’s a daily bombardment of hatred,” said Liz Groh, 62, who works at a restaurant in a suburb of Reading.
Who Can Bridge the Divide?
When Gary Simmons and Luther Crosby sat and joked at Mr. Simmons’s house in the countryside, it was easy to see the neighborly Berks County that many spoke about.
Mr. Crosby, 73, is a white Vietnam War veteran who helps Mr. Simmons tinker with old cars, and he is a staunch Trump supporter, proudly advertising his sardonic right-wing politics in a mosaic of bumper stickers. Mr. Simmons, 65, a Black man who served as a Marine and worked in a steel mill, is not as outspoken about his support for Ms. Harris, but he gets a kick out of his friend’s brashness.
Both men are worried about the vitriol in the country. But even as they echo one another in lamenting the political division these days, they have fundamental disagreements on which candidate would best bridge those divides. And they’re not alone.
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Mr. Crosby insisted that giving away too much money in foreign aid, while not being strict enough with border enforcement, had left the country a mess. But he thought it had become harder to fix because of unbending partisanship. “When did that ever start?” he asked. “I thought we were one country.”
Gary Simmons and Luther Crosby
Mr. Simmons agreed with some of this, though he was not as nostalgic as his friend. When he moved from Reading to rural Berks County around 50 years ago, he said in an interview before Mr. Crosby’s visit, he had a “hell of a time” as one of the few Black students in his school. He believed things had changed for the better since then.
But then came 2016 and Mr. Trump’s arrival onto the political scene. Mr. Simmons said some of those old, hateful sentiments returned.
“I don’t know how much longer the Lord is going to have me here to see all of this carrying on, but he cannot ever step foot in that office again,” Mr. Simmons said of Mr. Trump. “I think the man is just a ticking bomb.”
Politics
Roy quizzes DOJ on 'coordination' with left-wing groups over suits challenging states' voter roll purges
FIRST ON FOX: A top House Republican is questioning the Department of Justice about what he says is “apparent coordination” with left-wing civil rights groups over its lawsuits against two Republican-led states over efforts to remove non-citizens from its voter rolls.
“The Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government is conducting oversight of the apparent coordination between the Civil Rights Division and left-wing advocacy groups to impede the ability of states to ensure the accuracy of their voter rolls,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, who is chairman of the subcommittee, says in a letter obtained by Fox Digital.
The Department of Justice sued Alabama and Virginia in recent months over their moves to remove non-citizens from the voter rolls. The DOJ has claimed that the states have violated clauses that say states must complete their maintenance program no later than 90 days before an election under a clause known as the Quiet Period Provision.
VIRGINIA AG CHEERS SUPREME COURT RULING AS ‘HUGE WIN’ FOR ELECTION INTEGRITY
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, wrote to the Department of Justice requesting answers on the timing of its lawsuits.
“This systematic voter removal program, which the State is conducting within 90 days of the upcoming federal election, violates the Quiet Period Provision,” the DOJ said as it filed suit against Virginia.
Virginia has insisted that the state’s process is “individualized” and conducted in accordance with state and federal law. A lower court ordered 1,600 individuals to be restored to the voter rolls, but that has since been blocked by the Supreme Court.
The DOJ sued Alabama on similar grounds, alleging that changes to the voter registration lists took place 84 days before Election Day.
“The right to vote is one of the most sacred rights in our democracy,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement. “As Election Day approaches, it is critical that Alabama redress voter confusion resulting from its list maintenance mailings sent in violation of federal law.”
But Roy says the lawsuits from the DOJ came after lawsuits by left-wing civil rights groups. In the letter, Roy says that the Sept. 27 Alabama lawsuit came weeks after a Sept. 13 lawsuit from a coalition of left-wing civil rights groups. The cases were consolidated on Sept. 28.
In Virginia, a civil rights lawsuit was filed on Oct. 7, and the DOJ filed its lawsuit on Oct. 11.
SUPREME COURT TEMPORARILY HALTS LOWER COURT RULING ORDERING 1,600 VOTERS BACK ON VIRGINIA VOTER ROLLS
“The cases involve the same or similar plaintiffs and lawyers and follow a similar pattern with respect to the timing of each complaint. These circumstances raise questions as to whether the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is working with these groups to file cases to keep noncitizens on voter rolls just before the 2024 election and prevent states from ensuring that only eligible citizens vote in federal elections,” Roy says.
He also says the DOJ “did not object to consolidating its cases with those filed by left-wing organizations and attorneys with a public history of opposing bipartisan efforts to prevent noncitizens from voting.”
Roy says many of the groups have objected to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections.
26 REPUBLICAN ATTORNEYS GENERAL JOIN VIRGINIA IN PETITIONING SUPREME COURT TO RULE ON VOTER ROLL
“The American people deserve to know whether left-wing activist groups are dictating the DOJ’s legal strategy with respect to noncitizens voting in the upcoming election,” he writes.
Roy is asking for all documents and communications relating to the lawsuits and any of the civil rights groups involved in the suits, as well as documents to show whether the DOJ plans to file any additional lawsuits against the states.
Virginia was handed a legal victory this week when the Supreme Court halted the lower court’s decision to reinstate 1,600 potential noncitizens to the rolls. A divided court granted the state’s stay application pending appeal in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
The DOJ said in a statement Wednesday after the Supreme Court’s ruling, “The Department brought this suit to ensure that every eligible American citizen can vote in our elections. We disagree with the Supreme Court’s order.”
Fox News’ Haley Chi-Sing contributed to this report.
LeBron James endorsed Kamala Harris in the presidential election via a post on social media Thursday.
“What are we even talking about here?? When I think about my kids and my family and how they will grow up, the choice is clear to me. VOTE KAMALA HARRIS!!!” he posted on X along with a video beginning with a racist joke from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe and including soundbites from former President Trump.
The video ends with the phrase “Hate Takes Us Back.”
Between his Instagram and X accounts, James shared the video and endorsement to more than 200 million combined followers.
James is no stranger to playing a role in presidential politics, having formed the group More Than a Vote in 2020 in response to the racial turmoil and reckoning following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. More Than A Vote worked with a nonpartisan voting rights group to fight voter suppression.
In 2024, WNBA star Nneka Ogwumike assumed leadership of the nonprofit, which shifted its focus to women’s freedoms.
James endorsed Joe Biden during the 2020 election and Hillary Clinton in 2016.
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