Vice President Kamala Harris’s approval rating curiously increased after she entered the presidential race in July, an NBC News poll found this week, causing political pundits to question why.
Before Harris joined the race, she held the lowest net negative rating (-17) for a vice president in U.S. history. Her approval rating was only 28 percent in January 2024, and it only improved to 32 percent in July, the month President Joe Biden stepped aside. Harris’s approval rating is now 48 percent, an increase of 16 points in just two months.
“What changed?” digital strategist Greg Price asked on X this week. “The media coverage.”
“The media machine has kicked into over drive and too many people in America still think the news is real,” said Price. “Nothing about Kamala Harris has changed.”
Harris has refused to change many of her radical positions once championed in 2019, such as her support of reparations, the legalization of prostitution, and amnesty to illegal aliens; and just like before she entered the race, Harris commits gaffes and delivers word salads in meandering responses to simple questions about how to secure the southern border or improve the economy.
Despite her performance, Harris’s approval rating wondrously improved, mirroring the establishment media’s shifting coverage of the vice president. In 2021, for instance, the media broadly reported on “friction,” “internal tensions,” and “anxiety” within her vice presidential office. It reported on a history of “mistreatment of employees and dissent” going back to her days in the Senate:
Aides “are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” a staffer told Politico in 2021. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s—.”
The media’s coverage was so complete that some Democrats began to doubt Harris’s political viability. She was “fucking up” and perhaps “shouldn’t be the heir apparent” for 2024’s presidential race because she “could not defeat whomever the Republican Party puts up,” declared Democrat operative Margaret Talev of Axios and Jonathan Swan.
The media also reported on numerous staffers fleeing Harris’s office. “Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now,” CNN recounted in 2022.
The media elites, however, appeared to change their breadth of coverage as soon as Harris entered the race, taking a 180 degree turn that some Republicans predicted would happen at the time. “Harris is being transformed from a national punch line into a rock star,” National Review‘s Noah Rothman reported in August. “[T]he determination displayed by journalists to polish Harris’s apple are working in Democrats’ favor.”
Television networks provided Harris with 84 percent “positive coverage” since she joined the race, a Media Research Center study found in August, while they produced 89 percent negative coverage of former President Donald Trump.
Leading up to the Trump-Harris debate, ABC News program World News Tonight gave an overall positive spin on Harris, versus its overall negative reporting of Trump, the Media Research Center (MRC) found. After the debate, Democrat allies in the establishment media gave ABC News debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis rave reviews for their biased performance. “I will say it: ABC moderators have exceeded expectations,” said Jennifer Rubin, a “pro-democracy” opinion writer at the Washington Post.
The media’s shift in coverage will likely not escape the notice of voters. Six out of ten Americans say the establishment media is to blame for misinformation, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found in 2023. About three out of four Americans said the media is responsible for the polarization, and just under half of those sampled have little to no trust in the media’s accuracy or fairness in reporting.
More is here on the media’s bias towards Harris.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
