How Harris Turned the Tables Against Trump

Using Beyoncé’s pop anthem “Freedom” as her soundtrack, Kamala Harris delivered her most powerful speech yet to the White House in a striking video posted to social media on Thursday. “There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos, of fear, of hate,” the vice president said, as images of Donald Trump flashed on the screen. “But we chose something different. We chose freedom.”

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With about 100 days to go until November’s U.S. presidential election, Harris’ first official campaign video allowed the vice president to reintroduce herself to the American electorate and previewed some of the messaging that will underpin her early campaign for president. But it also laid bare the stark choice Americans will face when they head to the polls in November.

Last week, most U.S. voters feared a repeat of the 2020 election, which pitted the current and former presidents — two aging white men — against each other. Now, voters are being presented with a much sharper set of contrasts that cut across generations, gender and race.

While Republicans will try to frame Harris as a dangerous radical, Democrats will highlight the distinction between a 59-year-old former prosecutor and a 78-year-old former president who was found guilty by a jury this year on 34 criminal charges.

A Democratic establishment that had been dispirited in recent weeks is now elated at the prospect of electing the first female president, the first Asian-American president and only the second black president in U.S. history.

Kamala Harris’s late entry into the race this week has shaken up an already historic U.S. presidential election. Joe Biden’s decision last weekend to suspend his reelection campaign and endorse his vice president as his successor so deep into an election year is virtually unprecedented in modern political history. The last time a U.S. president dropped out of a second-term bid was Lyndon B. Johnson in March 1968.

At the same time, Biden’s momentous choice to step aside came just a week after Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. The last time a current or former U.S. president was shot was Ronald Reagan in 1981.

“There are decades where nothing happens, and days where decades happen,” says Bob Shrum, a professor at the University of Southern California and a veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns. “We are living in the days where decades happen.”

The tumult of recent weeks has left analysts cautious about jumping to conclusions about what Harris’s candidacy might mean for the outcome of the November election. “There’s no good historical precedent for what’s happening now,” said Kyle Kondik of the nonpartisan University of Virginia Center for Politics. “We’re flying blind.”

But Harris’s bid for the White House has injected energy and enthusiasm into a Democratic Party that for weeks has been plagued by infighting over Biden’s age, fitness for office and falling poll numbers. In the first four days of her campaign alone, she has raised more than $126 million in campaign contributions and signed up more than 100,000 new volunteers.

Even the most optimistic Democrats acknowledge that Harris faces a steep climb if she is to defeat Trump in November, in part because she has long suffered from relatively low approval ratings — the latest Real Clear Politics average shows that just 39 percent of Americans approve of the job she is doing as vice president. Trump has led in national opinion polls for months, which have swung even further in his favor after Biden’s disastrous showing in last month’s televised debate and the assassination attempt on Trump’s life.

However, polls this week suggest Harris is already outperforming Biden, narrowing Trump’s lead to within the margin of error. A New York Times/Siena College poll released Thursday showed Harris trailing Trump by just one point, 48-47, among likely voters — a virtual tie. Earlier this month, after the debate performance that led to Biden’s downfall, the president trailed Trump by a whopping six points.

“Democrats needed a boost of optimism, and they got one,” Kondik says, adding: “[Eles] turned death into a chance to fight to live.”

Harris faces several significant political tests on the horizon, starting with the selection of a running mate, a decision that could be announced as early as next week. The vice president is reportedly vetting several potential running mates, including Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and several Democratic governors, including Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Andy Beshear of Kentucky.

In mid-August, she will take center stage when she formally accepts the Democratic nomination for president at the party’s national convention in Chicago. And in September, she could face Trump on the debate stage, although the two campaigns are at odds over the date, moderators and format.

Meanwhile, Harris faces a more immediate challenge: defining herself and her candidacy to the American public. “The vice presidency is an important office, but it’s not the most visible office in the country,” notes Charles Franklin, a veteran pollster and director of the Marquette Law School Poll. “This is an opportunity for her to reintroduce herself to voters.”

“We have a candidate who is well-known in terms of name recognition, but she’s not really very well-defined,” Amy Walter, editor in chief of the Cook Political Report, said at an event this week at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. “She can deliver the message certainly much better than Biden did,” Walter added. “But how trustworthy is she as a messenger? That’s the real thing that will be tested.”

So far, Harris has echoed Biden’s arguments, albeit with a more pointed message. Her pitch to voters has largely focused on making the case against Trump and portraying herself and the Democratic Party as the guardians of freedom, especially when it comes to abortion.

The issue of reproductive rights has proven to be an electoral victory for Democrats since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. But party insiders believe Harris will be a more effective advocate for reproductive rights than Biden, a practicing Catholic who earlier in his career favored more restrictions on abortion access.

While Trump has tried to moderate his stance on the issue, Democrats are also likely to point to the record of his running mate, JD Vance, who has in the past supported a nationwide ban on abortions and opposed exceptions in cases of rape or incest.

Harris largely inherited Biden’s campaign apparatus and said this week that she would keep Jen O’Malley Dillon, the architect of Biden’s successful 2020 campaign, as chairwoman of her own White House bid. One of the many challenges Biden’s campaign was grappling with was Trump’s growing support among Black and Latino voters. In a memo this week, O’Malley Dillon insisted that Harris, the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, would be able to galvanize support among Black voters, Latino voters, Asian-American voters and women voters in particular.

“This campaign will be tight, it will be very competitive, but Vice President Harris is in a position of strength — and she will win,” O’Malley Dillon wrote.

Another contrast with Trump that Democrats are trying to highlight is his law-and-order record. In comments to campaign staff on Monday, Harris made clear that she would rely on her credentials as a San Francisco district attorney, and later California attorney general, to go after Trump.

“In those roles, I’ve confronted perpetrators of all stripes: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” Harris said, in what has become a staple of her campaign rhetoric. “So hear me when I say: I know the Donald Trump type.”

Trump and Republicans have also wasted no time in going after Harris, whom they have tried to paint as a dangerously left-leaning Democrat whose policies are out of step with the mainstream. Many have pointed to a 2019 ranking by GovTrack, a company that tracks congressional voting records, that named Harris the “most liberal” U.S. senator.

“I really believe she’s a San Francisco radical. She’s actually, I think, a much worse candidate, in some ways, much worse than [Biden]“She also wants to defund the police, and she really wants to do that more than anybody else. She’s probably the most radical person we’ve ever had in office, let alone in the office of president.”

Republican pollster Whit Ayres says “the way they should run against her is as a San Francisco liberal” who has held positions on energy and health care “far to the left of most Americans.” He adds: “Their least effective message is to go after her race and gender… That will blow up in their faces. It’s totally unnecessary.”

Trump and his allies have also tried to blame Harris for inflation and the flow of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, two of Biden’s biggest political vulnerabilities.

“If Republicans do their job and define her as a radical Democrat and tie her to Joe Biden’s record … she’ll come back down to Earth and sink like cement in water sometime after Labor Day,” says Florida Republican strategist Ford O’Connell, referring to the U.S. bank holiday in early September. “Democrats are trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, and at the rate things are going, it’s still going to be the same outcome.”

Harris ran for president once before, in a Democratic primary that began with high expectations in early 2019 but fizzled out before the end of the year. The then-U.S. senator dropped out of the race two months before the 2020 Iowa caucuses amid middling poll numbers, a financial crisis and an inability to make a compelling case for her candidacy.

But Democrats insist Harris has learned the lessons of that campaign, when her history as a “tough on crime” prosecutor worked against her as she tried to win over progressive Democratic voters. As a general election candidate this time around, Harris needs to win over moderates in the middle — and allies insist she has grown as a communicator and candidate during her time in the Biden administration.

“Harris gave an extraordinary speech when she announced her candidacy for president in 2019. But she never had a clear message,” Shrum recalls. “That’s not an issue now. The message is about what’s wrong with Trump and how she’s fighting for the people.”

With information from the Financial Times