No longer the tie-breaker: Kamala Harris has a new lease on life

The vice presidency may be the “most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived,” as the first Vice President John Adams described it or“not worth a bucket of warm spit” in the immortal words of John Nance Garner, FDR’s number two.

But the vice presidency was the launching pad for two recent presidents: George H.W. Bush and Joe Biden. Former Vice President Mike Pence is giving a 2024 run “prayerful consideration,” while current Vice President Kamala Harris likely has presidential aspirations of her own.

If Democrats had floundered in the midterms, there would have been lots of pressure on Biden to stand aside for 2024 and Harris might not have been ready for a primetime run in two years. Instead, Democrat’s picked up a Senate seat and minimized its House losses. The unexpected Democratic midterm strength was more than enough to quiet talk about a primary challenge against the president.

The Democratic pickup of a U.S. Senate seat gives Harris a new lease on life. She will have more time in more ways than one.

So far, she’s been tied to the Senate as the tie-breaking vote in the evenly split chamber. Starting in January, she’ll have more time to travel outside the Beltway to pick up political IOUs by raising money and campaigning for 2024 Democratic candidates. The unexpected Democratic performance in the midterms also means Biden will probably run for reelection, which could give Harris an extra four years to prepare for a brutal campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028.

Harris would have her hands full in a 2024 Democratic presidential primary. She would have faced fearsome competition against prominent Democrats and rising stars.

Despite the high-profile nature of her position as second in command, it hasn’t elevated her over her other competitors. A survey of Democrats conducted in July for USA Today showed her virtually tied in the high teens with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — who all ran against Biden in 2020. 

She might have also faced the Democratic governors of populous and powerful states with lots of Democratic delegates. Gov. Gavin Newsome of her home state of California and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan both handily won reelection in November. Whitmer came close to getting the Biden VP nod instead of Harris in 2020.

Harris had to break 26 ties in her two years as the presiding officer of the U.S. Senate — nearly as many as there have been shootouts to settle draws in World Cup history. Her Senate duties made a mess of her travel plans. She was stuck in Washington almost as much as the District’s Mayor Muriel Browser. This left the vice president precious little time to travel across the nation for anything else, including campaigning for Democrats running in 2022.

With Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D-Ga.) recent run-off victory, Democrats have an extra Senate vote to spare (including the independents that vote with the party). Now, Harris can be more of a road warrior. She will only have to break tie votes when either Sen. Kirsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) or Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) bail.

While Sinema just changed her voter registration status from Democratic to independent but despite her maverick tendencies on major legislation, she and Manchin vote with the administration most of the time. Both senators voted for the Biden administration agenda about 90 percent of the time in the 117th Congress. 

The GOP will now control the House, so there’s not much room for groundbreaking Biden legislative proposals in the Senate anyway. A big part of Biden agenda in the upper chamber will be the nomination and confirmation of federal judges. Sinema and Manchin have been reliable supporters of the president’s judicial nominations.

Harris has a unique set of credentials, so she’s got lots of presidential potential despite rocky start as vice president. But her approval ratings are as shaky as the president’s, which means she hasn’t established a political base of her own.

She is the first woman and first Asian American and only the second African American to be elected to national office. She has served in local, state and national elected office as a county prosecutor, the California attorney general and in the United States Senate before she became vice president.

No one gives any credit to the co-pilot when an airliner lands safely, so she’ll likely get little affirmation for any significant presidential initiative. She might take a page out of Biden’s own playbook when he was vice president and give the president a nudge to solve problems of vital interest.

On Tuesday, Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act — 10 years after he opened the door for President Barack Obama to embrace gay marriage. At the time, Biden caught some flak for goading Obama into an endorsement, but it paid off for Biden, Obama — and America.

Hate crimes constitute a new national pandemic. Biden recently appointed Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, to head the fight against antisemitism. Her background makes the vice president the perfect candidate to helm an initiative to study the problem and to lead an effort to eradicate the plague of racism that is a big challenge as people of color become a bigger piece in the ethic mosaic that makes America such a great country.

Brad Bannon is a Democratic pollster and CEO of Bannon Communications Research. His podcast, “Deadline D.C. with Brad Bannon,” airs on Periscope TV and the Progressive Voices Network. Follow him on Twitter @BradBannon.