Why did Joe Biden choose Kamala Harris as his Vice President? It was in some ways a peculiar decision. Harris had herself run to be president in the same election. She flopped, despite substantial establishment and financial backing. It became very clear then that people just don’t like her, which ought to be a serious obstacle to high office in a democracy. Harris had also attacked Biden over his imperfect record on matters of race, as part of her bid to beat him in the primaries, and some of Biden’s team can never quite forgive her for that.

In other ways, however, Kamala as Biden’s ‘veep’ made perfect sense. As a career politician from California, she was plugged into the west coast power matrixes that dominate the Democratic Party from Hollywood to Silicon Valley – an ultra-liberal world in which scrappy old Biden from Scranton Pennsylvania feels uncomfortable.

In la la land, then, Vice President Harris was an ideal Vice President. 

In reality, it’s been a complete disaster. President Biden’s popularity has plummeted since he took office in January, but Harris is even less loved.

It had been widely assumed that 79-year-old, doddery Joe Biden would merely be a “placeholder” President who would make way for Kamala in 2024. But Harris has made such a mess of the various roles she has been given as vice-president – from stopping migration from the Southern border to leading the charge on vaccines – that some figures in Washington are reportedly considering the “nuclear option” of moving her to the Supreme Court and putting a more well-liked vice president in her place in time for the next presidential election. Staff are now leaving her office in their droves because they don’t want to be tarnished as a ‘Harris person’ ahead of 2024.

Speculation that she will be shunted to the Supreme Court any time soon may be pretty wild. There’s no denying, however, that, in the Biden-Harris administration, the Democrats have a serious re-electability problem that won’t go away until one of them steps down.

Aside from her apparent incompetence, one of Kamala’s biggest problem is that she comes across as a phoney. In the endless videos her press team pumps out to make her seem authentic, she comes across as anything but: a recent film of her feigning wonder at the stars with a group of children went viral for all the wrong reasons.

In October, the White House released another somewhat emetic video showing Biden giving Harris flowers for her birthday, but such stunts can’t hide the fact that relations between Team Biden and Team Harris are not at all rosey. The pair are giving fewer and fewer public appearances together as their first term goes on, perhaps because the President’s staff recognise that Harris is an increasingly toxic figure.

Harris’s response has been to give herself a rebrand, of course. She has brought in a crisis PR team, including a former strategist to Hillary Clinton. Will they be able to turn her reputation around? It never exactly worked for Hillary.