NBC News poll: Kamala just notched another historic first!

Somehow I doubt that this administration will celebrate this historical moment, even as obsessed as they are with such claims. Despite months of mainstream-media fluffing for Kamala Harris to make Americans feel guilty about their assessment of her vice presidency, her numbers continue to sink.

And in the latest NBC News poll, those numbers hit their lowest mark ever. Not for Harris — for any vice president in the history of their polling:

Data Download: The number of the day is … 32%

That’s the share of registered voters in a new NBC News poll who say they have a positive view of Vice President Kamala Harris. That’s compared with 49% who have a negative view of her, including 39% who have a “very negative” view.

Harris’ net-negative rating (-17) is the lowest for any vice president in the poll’s history.

Note that this polling history apparently only extends back to 1995, so it missed the Dan Quayle era. I point that out because the media obsessed over Quayle’s occasional verbal fumbles and painted him as a lightweight, which he clearly wasn’t, after an inarguably bad debate performance against Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. Quayle became such a figure of universal media scorn and ridicule that he clearly was the model for John Heard’s hilarious character in the 1996 film My Fellow Americans.

That doesn’t mean that other polls didn’t capture Quayle’s standing with Americans at the time. Two years ago, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake attempted to defend Harris against claims then that she was the worst-performing VP. Blake cited WaPo/ABC polling data to show that Harris was still above the Quayle line:

Dan Quayle was the modern vice president people most derided (though for different reasons). At this point in 1989, Quayle was less unpopular than Pence and Harris, with a Washington Post-ABC News poll showing his approval rating at 43 percent and his disapproval at just 22 percent. About one-third of people offered no opinion.

But this masked how little regard people had for Quayle. The same poll showed just 38 percent of people said he was qualified to assume the presidency, while 52 percent said he was not. And 43 percent went so far as to say it was a “mistake” for then-President George H.W. Bush to have selected Quayle.

At that time in August 2021 — just before the disastrous and disgraceful bug-out from Afghanistan that permanently flipped Joe Biden’s approval ratings — two polls showed Harris’ overall approval at 46/47 and 46/48. Mike Pence’s were lower than Harris’ but not net negative.

Now, however, Harris has clearly slipped below the Quayle line. Heck, Harris has fallen below the Dick Cheney line at the same time in office:

In May 2003, Dick Cheney was at 47% positive, 24% negative (+23).

Oof. I haven’t found the historical records on the NBC News poll, but Gallup polling put Cheney firmly in positive territory until after Hurricane Katrina. Cheney didn’t get below 34% until his final year in office.

Harris has managed to do that at the same time that national media outlets relentlessly try to validate her victimhood and argue for her “accomplishments” in a way that national media never did for Quayle or Cheney. Harris has squandered these assets for a good reason: she is utterly incompetent at her job, which she amply demonstrated during the 2019 primary debate cycle. She went into that campaign as a relative favorite for the nomination of a party that was desperately looking to choose a woman of color to highlight their commitment to diversity — and couldn’t even make it to Thanksgiving, let alone a primary or caucus.

Normally, this would just be a laugh line, as VPs and running mates usually matter little to voters. This cycle, however, it’s more critical to Democrats in a couple of ways. With Biden clearly showing signs of cognition issues and even some physical signals of decline, they will have to rely on Harris as their argument for a prepared replacement. No one’s buying her as even a prepared VP, though, and the more she gets seen on stage the worse she does. The combination of word salads and incongruous cackling gives the impression that she’s in way over her head already — and almost certainly that’s more than just an impression.

It also complicates any Plan B Democrats might have. They may need to push Biden off the ticket at some point, but what are their options? Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Roy Cooper, and Jared Polis might all have an argument for a Democratic nomination, but they’re all white males. Biden chose Harris and sold her as the progressive future of the party, and those same progressives and DEI activists will not take kindly to a black woman getting pushed out of the way for yet another white guy. The only way to get Harris out of the way in a way that doesn’t split the party is probably to lose a national election with her at the top of the ticket.

Democrats have a real problem on their hands, and not just in the short term. Harris is 59 years old, and she’ll be around for a while, whether Democrats like it or not. It’s yet another data point proving Joe Biden’s own incompetence, and perhaps a hint that John Heard’s character in My Fellow Americans could have been based on Biden … even if that wasn’t the intent of the filmmakers.