Kamala Harris’s Lucky Break
Updated at 9:30 a.m. ET on August 2, 2024
Until two weeks ago, to observe Vice President Kamala Harris was to be entertained and a little bewildered. “I love Venn diagrams!” she once told an interviewer, giggling. “It’s just somethin’ about those three circles!” She likes yellow school buses too, and her mother’s old saying about the coconut tree. She has often reached for lofty rhetoric only to come away with elegant platitudes: “What can be, unburdened by what has been”; “It’s time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.”
Critics have seized on those comments to portray Harris as inauthentic, even vapid. She faced the same criticism in 2019, when her first presidential campaign failed to catch on because she could never quite figure out what she wanted to say.
You might imagine, then, that Democrats would be concerned as Harris—now her party’s presumptive presidential nominee—works to define herself for the American public.
So far, though, Democrats seem, well, unburdened by what has been. Harris is in a totally different situation now, Democratic strategists and campaign advisers told me in interviews this week. What she says in this election matters a lot less than the fact that she’s bringing a desperately needed change to the race, they believe. Which is another way of saying that this election is not going to be defined by substance so much as by personality and vibes.
“Messenger matters just as much, if not more so, than message,” Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run for Something and Hillary Clinton’s onetime digital strategist, told me. “And she is a good messenger for this particular moment.”
But 100 days in politics is a long time. Positive vibes alone probably can’t carry Harris through the election. Fortunately for her, she’s in a better position this time around to survive the intensified scrutiny that’s coming.
[Adam Serwer: Why Trump can’t banish the weirdos]
When Harris kicked off her first bid for president, in January 2019, her candidacy felt explosive, unrivaled in its potential. She held a giant event in Oakland, California, where she painted a striking contrast between herself and Donald Trump. “She came out like a ball of fire,” Faiz Shakir, a senior adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders and the executive director of the nonprofit media organization More Perfect Union, told me. “If you were in the betting markets, you might have put her as the likeliest to get the nomination.” But the campaign never caught on. By fall of that year, Harris was polling in the single digits.
She dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary a whole month before her first test with voters, at the Iowa caucuses. Although staff infighting and money troubles helped doom her campaign, Harris’s central problem was that she had never made clear what she would do as president. Senator Elizabeth Warren had a plan for that. Sanders promised to stage a political revolution. Then-Mayor Pete Buttigieg wanted an institutional overhaul. And Joe Biden was dedicated to restoring “the soul of America.”
Harris, though, struggled to find her own niche in a field of more than a dozen candidates. “Everything was so diluted,” Rebecca Pearcey, an adviser on Warren’s campaign, told me. “She needed to find a policy lane and couldn’t quite get there.” She wavered on whether, as president, she’d abolish private health insurance. There was that strange interlude when she waffled on the merits of busing. And at a moment rife with anti-police sentiment, foregrounding her experience as a prosecutor was not ideal. “By upbringing and orientation, Harris seems to have a strong sense of right and wrong and a fierce drive to fight injustice, coupled with virtually no large-scale policy instincts,” Time’s Molly Ball wrote.
This time around, her campaign exists in a very different context. The Biden-Harris switcheroo 12 days ago was like a B12 injection for the Democratic Party. Instead of watching anxiously to see if their candidate will stumble onstage or get lost mid-sentence, Democrats are seeing an alert, youthful-seeming politician who’s speaking forcefully and looking giddy on camera. Democratic excitement is high, as the party’s through-the-roof fundraising numbers and volunteer sign-ups indicate.
All of this helps Harris. But it probably could have helped almost any Democratic nominee not named Biden. “There’s something about her that certainly generates that enthusiasm,” Shakir said, “but I also think that really a lot of people would have benefited from stepping in at that moment.”
The moment is opportune for the vice president in other ways. In a general election, projecting optimism and sticking to broad themes is helpful; getting mired in wonky detail is not. She won’t have to wade into the challenging particulars of, say, Medicare for All versus Medicare for All Who Want It. Her campaign website doesn’t yet have a page dedicated to her policy priorities, but when I asked political professionals what her platform would look like, they were confident: It will be a continuation of the Biden agenda, with greater emphasis on abortion rights, an issue she’s very confident about speaking on. “I would keep it as simple and straightforward as possible,” Litman said. “Keep it focused on values as opposed to pinning down specifics.”
Besides stressing her support of women’s reproductive rights, Harris’s task seems obvious. She can pick up where the administration left off on the Build Back Better agenda, emphasizing lower inflation, wage growth, child care, and paid family leave. Harris faces calls for a change of direction from the Biden administration in a few policy areas—on the war in Gaza, on the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust work—but in this race, there’s no need for her to reinvent the Biden wheel. “I don’t think there are going to be any big new surprises, because those introduce uncertainty and risk into the situation,” Gil Duran, a former opinion editor of The Sacramento Bee and a longtime critic of Harris, told me. The election won’t “come down to the fine points of policy,” he said.
[Ron Brownstein: How Harris can tackle the Clinton factor]
Harris has been lucky so far. Her opponents have been pretty helpful with clumsy attacks: Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, ate up a whole news cycle when his earlier comments about “childless cat ladies” came back to haunt him. And Trump’s Wednesday smear questioning Harris’s racial identity looks likely to backfire.
Eventually, Harris will have to participate in sit-down interviews with journalists, and town halls where she’ll face questions from voters about her vision for the country and her reasons for wanting to be president. She’ll have to take on Trump in a debate setting, if he ever agrees to one.
The big risk for Harris lies in how she answers questions in these off-the-cuff situations. Democrats are banking on her skills as a prosecutor—the Harris they saw subject Brett Kavanaugh to a grilling when he was up before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Onstage, Duran said, she will need to “tap into a different level of confidence and start speaking as the future president of the United States, rather than some rising politician who’s afraid of saying the wrong thing.”
If the excitement of this moment lasts, the Harris campaign could end up looking a lot like Barack Obama’s in 2008, which expanded the map of where in the country Democrats could compete and engaged a whole new set of voters. But it could also look like Hillary Clinton 2.0; that 2016 campaign was rife with missteps and mishaps, forced memes, and a general sense of overconfidence. “What I worry about is a campaign that gets so enamored with hoopla” that it loses focus on voters in the states that matter most, Shakir told me.
Harris’s sudden arrival at the top of the ticket has imbued the campaign with a sense of purpose that her previous one lacked. The biggest danger lies in assuming that she can simply ride this wave of relief and enthusiasm to victory in November.
This article originally stated that Amanda Litman was a communications adviser to Hillary Clinton. In fact, Litman was a digital strategist.