Criticism of Kamala Harris isn’t racist or sexist. It’s equality.

For the second time in the past three months, the president has deployed Vice President Kamala Harris for an electoral pit stop in Pennsylvania — arguably the most important swing state for the 2024 election.

Deploying Harris is an interesting choice. The veep is unpopular, with a recent NBC News poll showing Harris’ favorability hitting record lows.

Harris supporters quickly dismiss any criticism of their “Chucks and pearls” veep as sexist and racist. To be sure, Harris does endure the heinous slings and arrows of racism and sexism. CBS News reported that in the first five months of 2022, there were 4,200 tweets aimed at Harris that used the N-word. That is outrageous and indefensible.

But Harris’ defenders aren’t pointing to that. Instead, they levy vague claims of racism and sexism while failing to address the systemic problem. Harris apologists like former White House chief of staff Ron Klain state that racism and sexism are partly to blame for her low approval ratings — without further context or explanation.

Even before she was elected, a progressive commentator pointed to critiques like, “She’s ‘extraordinarily nasty.’ She’s ‘a cop.’ She’s too conservative — or she’s too liberal. She changes her mind constantly,” as examples of deep-rooted sexism.

As if no male politician was ever accused of being nasty or a flip-flopper.

“She is a politician for our time in a way her old, white male boss is not,” writes Vogue’s Molly Jong-Fast. “By all rights, she should be enjoying some bump from her unprecedented ability to crash through one of the most impermeable glass ceilings.”

I disagree. By all rights, the voters who put her in office should be the ones enjoying a bump in their wages and ability to carve out a living. But that’s not what’s happened since Harris took office.

A majority of workers saw negative wage growth in 2022, meaning the growth of their wages did not keep up with the growth of prices. Prices are still rising faster than what the Fed targeted. Most Americans feel their president is not fit to lead.

Could it be that Harris, as Joe Biden’s VP, is seen by Americans as holding part of the blame — regardless of her race and gender?

Arguably, this criticism of Harris symbolizes equality: Mockery on the public stage is a rite of passage in American politics, especially for her Republican predecessors.

Vice President Dan Quayle was the media’s whipping boy during the George H.W. Bush administration, relentlessly mocked for his intelligence. Quayle’s address to the United Negro College Fund is legendary in its cringe-worthiness (“[W]hat a waste it is to lose one’s mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful.”). As is his inability to spell potato.

Like Quayle (and her boss), Harris comes across as an out-of-touch gaffe factory. Social media is full of compilation videos of Harris’ embarrassing performances. From her “do not come” plea at the border to every word soup she cooks up in front of cameras, Harris regularly inserts her foot in her mouth.

Harris also has grappled with a cold-hearted public persona, shaped by her legacy as California’s attorney general. Calling herself the “top cop” and “progressive prosecutor,” Harris even shamefully jailed the parents of truant students. And she is accused of warehousing nonviolent offenders in California’s prisons, disproportionally harming Black Americans.

Worse, Harris is seen as being willfully silent as the current administration is considering reinstating the detention of migrant families, which human rights critics call out as “de facto family separation” — something Harris called “a crime against humanity” in 2018.

Harris certainly wouldn’t be the first veep of the modern era to be considered hard-hearted. Dick Cheney was considered pure evil by some — a villainous archetype once compared with Darth Vader.

The vice president’s job is ripe for ridicule and shaming. You’re under the same glare as the president with no power to do anything but defend what POTUS says and does.

It’s got to be miserable — just ask Mike Pence. He is one of the few modern vice presidents who showed courage in bucking the directive of the commander in chief when he certified the 2020 election.

Kamala Harris broke through a glass ceiling only to find that she receives the same public scolding as her predecessors. If equality with white, male Republicans was the goal, she’s got it.

And if Democrats want to win next November, perhaps they could give some deference to Americans — including many in their own party — who, being neither racist nor sexist, have ample evidence to believe Biden and Harris just aren’t good at their jobs.