Why Democratic front-runners might be hesitant to join a Harris ticket

President Joe Biden is facing long odds in his quest to defeat former President Donald Trump in November, with his party calling for him to step down amid negative polling numbers and age-related concerns.

Vice President Kamala Harris is the favorite to take Biden’s spot if he steps aside, but she could be facing her own adversity in a decision she will have to make then: finding a running mate.

While there has been ample speculation on who Harris could take as her vice president, any of those candidates would have to deal with being on a ticket that has similar polling to Biden at the moment.

Many of the polls plaguing Biden also recorded Harris’s numbers against Trump, which are largely better than Biden’s but nonetheless paint the picture of an uphill climb for Democrats. According to RealClearPolitics’s polling average, Harris knocks down Trump’s lead to 1.9 percentage points as opposed to Biden’s 3-point deficit nationally.

She also trails Trump in most of the battleground states. Harris’s poor polling likely wouldn’t be made much better if Biden does step down, especially if he chooses to resign the presidency, because voters could blame her for not pointing out the president’s condition sooner.

Those factors could make being her running mate a hard sell to anyone who has their own presidential ambitions. Govs. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) are both reportedly not interested in being Harris’s No. 2. Both names have been regularly floated as future presidential candidates, though they’re unlikely to go for it this cycle since Harris is positioned better.

Neither of them, or other prospective running mates, will likely want to risk chalking a loss into their electoral records prematurely. That especially goes for Whitmer and Newsom, who have never lost an election in their political careers.

There’s also a historical precedent for why a potential Harris running mate might not want to risk losing. Former Vice President Walter Mondale and former Sen. Bob Dole both unsuccessfully sought the vice presidency again or for the first time on unsuccessful presidential tickets before losing themselves as the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees, respectively.

A potential Harris running mate might look more like Govs. Andy Beshear (D-KY) and Roy Cooper (D-NC), who haven’t often been linked to their own presidential runs and could complement Harris with their appeal to centrist Democrats. Cooper is term-limited this year, and Beshear will face the same consequence in 2027.

What could be encouraging to a potential Harris vice president is Sen. J.D. Vance’s (R-OH) relative political inexperience and his past statements against Trump. A Harris running mate will likely use those things as firepower in a vice presidential debate in order to draw a further contrast between the Republican and Democratic tickets.

And while Trump probably won over Biden in the first presidential debate due to the latter’s mental errors, a vice presidential debate that tilts in the Democratic Party’s favor would help its cause.

In any case, Biden will need to decide whether to step down or not first before Harris can take his place, and he hasn’t made any statement indicating he will do so. Biden has said he’s confident in Harris’s ability if she did have to take over as president, though.