Democrats a heart beat away from rout at 2024 election

‘It is good to be in France’: Kamala Harris visits the Pasteur Institute in Paris on Tuesday. Picture: AFP

If US President Joe Biden has had a bad few months, ending in an approval rating the lowest of any US president except for Donald Trump, his vice-president has done even worse.

Kamala Harris, picked for her impeccable woke credentials – black, Indian, female – has proved a terrible choice of running mate.

A long series of gaffes has made her the most unpopular vice-president in modern US ­history, even more than Dick Cheney. Her approval rating dropped to 28 per cent over the weekend, a full 10 percentage points worse than Biden’s. Her state visit to France this week, an exotic, unattainable destination for most Americans, would ­appear almost designed to drag it lower. “It is good to be in France and I am looking forward to many, many days of productive discussions reinforcing the strength of our relationship,” Harris said, drawing sniggers from critics back home.

Harris was to meet President Emmanuel Macron in a bid to mend relations with Paris after a crisis sparked by the pact between the US, the UK and Australia, which triggered the cancellation of France’s $90bn submarine contract with Canberra.

Whatever negligible foreign policy benefits might emerge from this, her third foreign trip, are unlikely to compensate for the political damage she’s done back home.

In March the President designated Harris the White House “border tsar”, with responsibility for staunching the rapidly growing flow of migrants into the US across the Mexican border that’s caused political carnage for Biden. Harris didn’t visit the border until June, famously laughing when journalists asked why.

By now, even some Democrats would admit she’s failed. Monthly arrivals, at more than 190,000 in September, are almost four times what they were in each of the three previous years, prompting calls for completing construction of Trump’s controversial border wall.

In July the President’s senior staff were anonymously describing the Vice-President’s office as a “shit show”. The two are rarely seen together in public.

In September Harris, visiting a school, thanked a student for ­accusing Israel of “ethnic genocide”. In October, it emerged the Vice-President had employed child actors to star with her in a publicity video about space exploration. And last week the Vice-President came under fire for asking NASA officials if the space agency’s satellites could be used to track trees “by race” in different neighbourhoods across the US, to improve “environmental justice”.

“This woman is a complete hack – and if this is not an act, she is also a moron,” tweeted one former defence department official, Tony Shaffer.

Harris, 57, matters a great deal more than most vice-presidents, always a “heart beat away” from the White House. The 78-year-old Biden, increasingly doddery, has accidentally referred to Harris as the president. Were anything to happen to him, she would become the president immediately, according to the US constitution.

And if Biden chooses not to run again in 2024, which looks more and more likely after every presidential press conference, Harris has a rightful claim to be his successor and an automatic advantage among Democrats.

On current polling that could spell disaster for the Democrats. Even Florida’s first-time governor, 43-year-old Ron DeSantis, is more likely to become president in 2024 than Harris, according to official betting markets.

Termed the Biden-Harris ­administration, a departure from previous practice where administrations took only the president’s name, the former California senator was always meant to play a significant and starring role.

Her significant role to this point is making it more likely ­Republicans, in particular Trump, who would relish a political competition with Harris, return to the White House in 2024.