Vice President Kamala Harris is more popular than Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, according to recent poll results.
Former President Donald Trump announced Vance, a U.S. senator from Ohio, as his running mate on Monday, just days after surviving an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
Polling data shared on Tuesday by YouGov reveals that while Americans are split on whether they have favorable or unfavorable views toward Vance, a larger group has yet to form an opinion.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Harris trounced Vance in YouGov polling in terms of “fame,” with 94 percent of respondents saying they had “heard of” the sitting vice president, compared to 63 percent for Vance.
Harris also had a significant lead over Vance in “popularity,” which the polling firm defines as the percentage of respondents with a “positive opinion” on a topic. Harris had a 49 percent popularity rating, with Vance far behind at 28 percent.
However, the vice president was also actively “disliked” by a larger number of respondents than Vance, with 32 percent disliking her and only 20 percent disliking Vance.
Slightly more respondents viewed Vance in a “neutral” light, with 13 percent saying they were neutral about Harris and 15 percent feeling the same about the Republican candidate.
In a somewhat more detailed question concerning Vance, U.S. adults surveyed on Monday were evenly split on whether they had “favorable” or “unfavorable” views about Trump’s running mate.
The poll found that 29 percent of respondents were favorable or unfavorable toward Vance, although 22 percent were “very unfavorable” while only 14 percent were “very favorable.”
A 43 percent plurality said that they were “not sure” about Vance, perhaps highlighting the freshman senator’s status as a relative unknown in terms of presidential politics.
Newsweek reached out for comment to the Trump and Biden campaigns via email on Tuesday.
Vance, best known for penning the popular memoir Hillbilly Elegy before entering politics, told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday that Trump asked him to be his running mate over the phone just hours before the public announcement.
The Ohio senator was previously a stanch Trump critic, declaring himself a “never Trumper” and pondering whether the then-future president was “America’s Hitler” in 2016.
Vance told Hannity that his past views on Trump were the result of “the media’s lies and distortions,” while praising the former president’s time in the White House and asserting he had become “very, very close” with Trump after meeting him in 2021, around the time Vance launched his political career.
Harris has been floated as a potential replacement for President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket following intense pressure for Biden to step aside and questions about his fitness for office due to a widely panned performance in last month’s debate with Trump.
Harris continues to back Biden’s candidacy and has rejected suggestions that he will step aside. On Monday, Harris congratulated Vance on becoming the Republican candidate and said that she hoped to meet him at a vice presidential debate, an event that has yet to be finalized.
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