Democrats rejoiced Sunday after President Biden announced that he would not seek reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination. Praising Biden for his “selfless” and “patriotic” decision, which reports suggest was driven more by highly unfavorable polling than by civic responsibility, leftists also celebrated Harris—not merely as the candidate best suited to replace him but as the candidate who has the best chance to defeat former, and perhaps future, President Donald J. Trump in just 105 days.

They are delusional.

Democrat enthusiasm notwithstanding, Harris is a terrible candidate whose chances of besting Trump are at least as slight as those of Biden. This could be why Trump has said that he prefers a face-off against her rather than the incumbent president this fall, but hard data also show that the vice president’s future is far from certain.

First, it is unclear that Harris will actually be the nominee. While she picked up a flood of endorsements from Democratic politicos and an impressive volume of contributions in the hours following Biden’s announcement, it is unclear whether Biden—who won this year’s Democratic primary elections, in which over 14 million voters participated—can simply reassign his delegates to another candidate. Some leading Democrats, including former president Barack Obama, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin (now technically an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats), and lifelong Democrat and current independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as well as such far-left media outlets as The New York Times and The Washington Post, almost immediately called for an “open” process to allow Democratic voters to choose Biden’s replacement as their party’s nominee. Excluding that process feeds a brewing narrative that Biden was forced out in a de facto party coup and makes a mockery of persistent Democratic claims that they are protecting “Our Democracy™” from Trump, whom they have falsely characterized as an “enemy” of democracy for allegedly disregarding the democratically expressed will of the people.

If Harris subverts a more open selection process, she is vulnerable to damaging allegations of hypocrisy. If she prevails in that process, she will have to waste crucial weeks of campaign time attempting to “earn and win” the nomination, as she has indicated she is ready to do.

None of these scenarios is promising for a brand new presidential campaign, which will have to establish a national organization and policy program with lightning speed. But assuming those things are doable, Harris still faces major polling challenges. Her approval rating is abysmal, equaling Biden’s terrible numbers at 38.6 percent. Last June, an NBC poll rated her the worst vice president in recent American history. In another survey, only 29 percent of Democrats identified her as their first choice to run if Biden dropped out of the race. A YouGov/Economist poll released last week found that she would lose to Trump by five points (44 percent-39 percent), outside the margin of error, while Biden would only lose to the former president by two points (43 percent-41 percent), within it. Other polls, including those taken in crucially important swing states, report similar results, often outside the margin of error, with apparently no polling giving Harris a lead over Trump anywhere. And this is before Trump’s campaign, which recently took a substantial fundraising lead over Biden’s, has devoted any significant attention to Harris, whose major achievement in life is that she served as No. 2 in the highly unpopular Biden administration. A new report even suggests that Biden delayed his withdrawal because he had deep doubts that Harris would succeed.

Harris’s record has yet to be explored at the presidential level, but there are no indications that the results would favor her. As vice president, her only significant responsibility—much to her reported chagrin—was to serve as Biden’s “border czar.” Yet the southern border, which tops voter concerns, has been one the administration’s most humiliating failures, with at least 7.2 million migrants illegally entering the country while Harris has done virtually nothing to solve the problem. That includes a failed legislative deal proffered earlier this year, in which she appears to have played no significant role. In the meantime, reports suggest that her administrative skills are bad, and that her office, despite doing little, is plagued by chaos.

Harris’s previous bid for the Democratic nomination in 2020 was one of the worst performing campaigns and ended in her humiliating withdrawal for lack of funds before any primaries took place.

Her four-year Senate career registered no significant achievements beyond advancing aggressive and unfair #MeToo tactics against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was confirmed anyway, and pushing a now-overwhelmingly unpopular diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda across American public and institutional life. Indeed, her nomination as Biden’s vice president followed 2020 primary debates in which she accused her new boss of racism and in which she said she believed sexual assault allegations against Biden. Their reconciliation came as the result of a racialist deal whereby a struggling Biden plucked her from her abandoned candidacy and added her to the ticket in return for a pledge of black support in South Carolina’s crucially important Democratic primary.

As California attorney general, and previously holding that office in San Francisco, Harris hails from one of America’s worst jurisdictions for crime and urban blight, and even there her record is checkered. More than 600 convictions obtained by her office were later overturned amid allegations that prosecutors withheld evidence, while she jailed over 1,500 criminal suspects for marijuana-related crimes before flipflopping to embrace marijuana legalization. She then claimed to have smoked marijuana herself while listening to gangster rap artists. Similarly, while Harris once opposed softening mandatory sentencing for certain crimes, she later opposed the practice altogether.

Harris’s lack of accomplishments, combined with her DEI advocacy, will mean that her only talking points will involve attacking Trump. This “Orange Man Bad” strategy has consistently failed to derail his prospects. Harris will also have to defend Biden’s many failures, to which she is fully party as his vice president. Worse, if Biden remains in office, as he says he plans to do through the remainder of his term, Harris will have to campaign in the shadow of continuing crises foreign and domestic. These will take place under a president who just signaled to the world that he does not have the wherewithal even to try to win reelection.

Trump’s campaign has understandably been Biden-focused up until now. But while Biden has been able to plead age and infirmity and rely on media spin to promote his administration’s supposed accomplishments, Harris has no excuses, no substance, and nothing recommending her other than convenience and enthusiasm for her race and gender among people who insisted until only a short time ago that Biden was perfectly fine. He wasn’t, and neither is she.