A new CNN feature is shining a different kind of light on Vice President Kamala Harris, stating after a rough start to the election year, she is up, running and ready for a second term as the second most senior-level official in the United States.
“The vice president is clearly feeling energized these days. She is more engaged. She is looser,” writes Edward-Isaac Dovere in the report. “Aides say she was the one who pushed to explicitly call out former President Donald Trump as responsible for every rollback in abortion rights, and she is clearly feeding on the old prosecutorial rush of tearing apart the opposition’s argument.”
According to the report, Harris has described her last few months on the 2024 Biden-Harris presidential campaign as “very liberating.”
“You can’t forget that for the first probably year and a half, we were landlocked. It was basically me and Joe and a Zoom screen,” she told the outlet. “Being out and being able to just have real conversations and not soundbites in an interview — it is liberating.”
The news comes less than one week after Shine My Crown reported that Harris’ popularity is nearly on par with that of Beyoncé. According to the April omnibus survey conducted by Echelon Insight, 43% of voters hold a favorable view of Harris, while 45% feel the same about Beyoncé. Despite this near equivalence, the vice president faces twice as much unfavorable opinion, with 52% compared to Beyoncé’s 26%.
Throughout President Biden’s tenure, Harris, the first female, Black American, and Asian-American vice president, has grappled with fluctuating approval ratings. Despite starting with a 48% approval rating, Harris experienced a decline in mid-September 2021, just eight months into office, and her approval has remained below water since then, according to polling averages from FiveThirtyEight. In March, a Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll found only 35% approval for Harris, while a Suffolk University/USAToday survey showed 36% approval, with disapproval ratings at 46% and 52%, respectively.
The latest Echelon poll indicates Harris’s popularity is particularly strong among Black voters, with nearly seven-in-ten viewing her favorably, compared to fewer than half of Hispanic and Asian voters. Among white voters, less than four-in-ten hold favorable views of Harris.
