Behind hoopla, Democrats anxious about Harris

Behind the public jubilation over Vice President Harris’s swift rise to become their party’s likely nominee for president, Democratic lawmakers are privately anxious about her prospects of defeating former President Trump, acknowledging that she is largely untested as a candidate and faces serious challenges.

The anxiety, for the most part, has been set aside out of a deep sense of relief that President Biden decided to drop his reelection bid. After months of unease over the 81-year-old incumbent, Democratic lawmakers are glad to rally behind Harris in hopes she will rev up Democratic donors along with young and minority voters.

But concerns are already bubbling up over Harris’s ability to connect as well as Biden did in 2020 with white working-class and union voters in three states that were critical to defeating Trump: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.   

“She wasn’t a great candidate,” one Democratic senator said of Harris’s performance as a presidential candidate in 2020, when she pulled out of Democratic primary before the Iowa caucuses.