With President Biden’s future uncertain, a majority of Democrats say the country would be safer with Vice President Biden taking over the White House.
A new poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Policy Research finds that about 60% of Democrats think Vice President Kamala Harris would do a good job as president. About 20% of Democrats don’t think she would, and another 20% say they don’t have enough information to make a judgment.
The survey comes as Democrats are increasingly publicly urging Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential race following his dismal performance in the June 27 debate. Democrats worry that voters don’t trust the 81-year-old president to handle the job, and many have suggested Harris or another candidate would fare better against Republican challenger former President Donald Trump.
Recent polls have found that Democrats are also disappointed with Biden. A Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll of Massachusetts residents found that 64% of Democrats or Democratic-leaning voters want someone other than Biden to run against Trump. A national poll by the Associated Press/University of North Carolina similarly found that 65% of Democrats say Biden should drop out of the race.
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Vice President Harris spoke at a campaign rally in Las Vegas on June 28, 2024. (Bizayev Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
While Harris has become the focus of insider debate over a Plan B candidate, the vice president has maintained strong public support for Biden and defended him from criticism by panicked party officials who spoke anonymously to reporters.
But if Harris, 59, were to replace Biden in the top spot, Democratic voters would likely be largely comfortable with a younger candidate, a woman of color who can defend the party’s message on abortion rights and a former state attorney general who could prosecute Democratic cases against voting for Trump.
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President Biden and Vice President Harris. (Getty Images)
Harris could also help rally key Democratic constituencies, such as women and black adults, who are more likely than Americans overall to think she would do well as president, to turn out to the polls on Election Day.
Non-Democratic Americans were skeptical about how Harris would perform in the Oval Office: Only 3 in 10 Americans said they thought she would make a good president, while almost half said she wouldn’t do a good job and 2 in 10 said they didn’t know enough about the topic to have an opinion.
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Former US President Donald Trump arrives to speak at the Republican National Convention (RNC) at Fiserv Forum, Thursday, July 18, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Harris’ favorability rating is about the same as Biden’s, but the percentage of Americans with an unfavorable opinion is slightly lower. The poll found that about four in 10 U.S. adults have a favorable opinion of Harris, while about half have an unfavorable opinion. About six in 10 Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Biden, more than Biden. About one in 10 Americans say they don’t know enough about Harris to form an opinion, but almost everyone has an opinion about Biden.
About three-quarters of Democrats have a favorable view of Harris, which is in line with how Democrats view Biden: Seven in 10 have a favorable view of Harris.
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Harris is better known among Democrats than other candidates, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. About a third of Democrats say Newsom would be a good president, but half don’t know enough to say. About a quarter of Democrats say Whitmer would be a good president, but about two-thirds don’t know enough to say.
The Associated Press poll was conducted July 11-15, 2024 among 1,253 adults using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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