Should it really be this hard to beat Donald Trump?

Over the summer, when it seemed increasingly likely that President Joe Biden would drop out of the 2024 race, a pair of questions dominated media coverage and political punditry. Should Vice President Kamala Harris succeed him as the Democratic nominee? Or was there a better candidate out there who could put up a tougher fight against Donald Trump?

Some in the party floated the idea of a mini-primary. Ultimately, that open process never happened — Harris and her allies moved quickly to secure the delegates needed to clinch the nomination before the convention, no one stepped up to challenge the vice president, and the Democratic base quickly rallied behind Harris.

Since then, there have been, broadly speaking, two ways to view how her presidential campaign has unfolded.

One is more skeptical about how Harris has fared. Here she is, running against a twice-impeached, historically unpopular, convicted felon former president — and it’s still a toss-up.

Another view offers a more charitable interpretation of the Democratic campaign. After an aging, historically unpopular incumbent president badly damaged his party’s hopes of winning, Harris clawed her side back into a competitive race. She mostly restored the levels of support her party needs among nonwhite, college-educated, and young voters, while holding together a coalition that spanned from former Vice President Dick Cheney to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And she did it as the standard-bearer for an incumbent political party at a time when one of the only hard-and-fast trends of world politics is that ruling parties are being punished in the post-Covid inflationary period.

Here’s the case for each perspective.

The case that Harris is fumbling

The contention that Harris should be performing better is predicated on what some see as the unique awfulness of Donald Trump. With Biden out of the race, it’s now Trump who is the historically unpopular presidential candidate, whose campaign’s ground game is virtually nonexistent, who has been consistently outspent by the Democrats, and whose closing weeks have been filled with chaos and late-breaking scandals.

The argument that Harris has underperformed tends to rest on two different charges: that she has played it too safe, and that she has played it too vague. 

The “safe” charge relates to her perceived pivot toward the center to court moderates and disaffected Republicans. Progressives argue that this has cost her support and energy from the political left. Her embrace of Liz and Dick Cheney, for example, recently reignited criticism from the anti-war left and speculation it could backfire with Arab American voters. 

The same critique has been made regarding her stance on Gaza. Harris’s refusal or inability to distance herself from the Biden administration’s position, with the exception of a few nods to Palestinian suffering in speeches and on the debate stage, has lost her support from the left flank.

Zooming out a bit, critics point out that Harris’s centrist pivot on the campaign trail reflects a bigger problem: that Harris has never been clear about why she wants to be president, what she actually believes in, or where she stands on certain policies. She’s avoided explaining changes in policy positions and avoided talking to the press, opting instead for friendly settings, alternative media, or social media influencers and content creators.

Just this week, an Axios report offered the latest instance of Harris’s avoidance strategy: When asked about Harris’s stance on 12 policy matters she had previously supported — like ending the death penalty at the federal level, eliminating the Senate filibuster, or providing reparations to Black Americans — the campaign declined to comment.

And so, on the eve of the election, Harris remains neck-and-neck with Trump — whose favorability ratings are now the highest they’ve been since he left office, despite millions spent in advertising against him.

The case that Harris is beating expectations

The more positive assessment of Harris’s campaign holds that, given where she started and what she’s facing, running neck-and-neck is a feat, not a failure.

As the New York Times’s Nate Cohn has written, the national environment in general is one with all the ingredients for a Republican landslide and a conservative cultural rebuke. Americans really dislike Biden. They are upset with the direction the country is heading. Republicans have an edge in national party identification. And Republicans tend to have an edge on most of the issues that seem to matter to voters, specifically the economy and immigration. Gallup recently framed it this way:

Nearly all Gallup measures that have shown some relationship to past presidential election outcomes or that speak to current perceptions of the two major parties favor the Republican Party over the Democratic Party.

That dynamic is true around the world for parties in power. Voters have been consistently punishing incumbents in nearly every democratic election held this year largely because of dissatisfaction with both pandemic response and the ensuing economic crises brought on by inflation and rising global interest rates. This was true for the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, which was swept out of power in the summer; in South Africa, where the African National Congress party lost its majority for the first time; in France; in Japan; in Germany; in India (to a degree), and most recently, in Botswana. To the north, Canada’s incumbent Liberal Party is mirroring much of the last year of American politics: The party has been trailing the Conservative Party in polling for months, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is facing similar internal pressure to step down before his party heads for electoral disaster in a little less than a year. 

It’s also not clear that there was any position Harris could take on Gaza that wouldn’t cost her support from some part of the Democratic coalition.

Some of Harris’s moves appear to be paying off. Yes, she has moved her platform to the right on the issues where Trump has an advantage — crime and immigration — while moderating or compromising on others. But that has, in turn, opened up a big-tent ideological coalition. Her focus on personal freedoms (predominantly abortion rights) and democracy has given her a significant boost among Democratic partisans and moderates. In the final polls of the cycle, Harris has managed to largely wipe out Trump’s advantage on the economy and make inroads with those who view immigration as a top concern: The final PBS/Marist poll, for example, found Harris and Trump tied on the question of who voters think would better handle the economy. 

And among subgroups, she’s leaned into the gender gap, increasing the levels of Democratic support among women voters to a historic margin, while restoring levels of Democratic support among young voters and nonwhite voters that Biden was drastically underperforming among. Additionally, she’s done that as she boosted her favorability ratings into the positive single digits when those started nearly as bad as Biden’s when the president was at his lowest this summer.

All told, Harris’s defenders see a candidate who, despite an unfavorable national environment, has given her party a chance — a far better situation than Democrats found themselves in when Harris took over the nomination just a few short months ago.