Harris campaign leaving the honeymoon phase

Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign followed a strategy of personality first, policy second in its opening month. The Democratic National Convention featured footage of Harris growing up and highlighted her working-class upbringing with immigrant parents. Speakers portrayed her as friendly, caring, and morally superior to her opponent, former President Donald Trump.

“As much as any policy or program, I believe that’s what we yearn for—a return to an America where we work together and look out for each other,” former President Barack Obama said at the DNC. “An America that taps what [Lincoln] called ‘the better angels of our nature.’ That is what this election is about.”

Democrats I talked to at the DNC embraced the strategy, emphasizing who Harris is more than what she could accomplish as president.

“I have decided not to have any issues until Nov. 9,” O.C. Connor, a Georgia bishop who led the LGBT caucus at the Democratic National Convention, told me. “That means it is all about making sure that we have Kamala Harris as the president of the United States. The only focus is getting her in office. Then we can press on everything else.”

As of last week, Harris has spent more than $142 million on digital ads, outpacing Trump’s $25.7 million year to date. In a statement on Sunday, she said she plans to dedicate $370 million to digital advertising alone. Harris has also closed in on Trump in the polls in battleground states where President Joe Biden trailed before dropping out of the race. The Cook Political Report last week moved North Carolina from “leans Republican” to “toss-up.” Cook editor in chief Amy Walter wrote that Biden trailed Trump by 7 percentage points in the state when he dropped out. Now, Harris and Trump are in a statistical dead heat, not because she is eroding Trump support, but because Democrats are mobilizing, according to Walter.

“The most conspicuous feature of the campaign has been an incredible surge in morale,” said Ross Baker, emeritus professor in political science at Rutgers University. “And morale is an enormously important but intangible factor in the campaign. If people think there’s a real chance of winning, they become energized. They become deployable.”

Within weeks of launching, the campaign scheduled and hosted online calls for special interest groups including “White Guys for Harris” and “Evangelicals for Harris.” Organizers of a “Swifties for Harris” call last week said more than 14,000 registered to vote while on the call. Pop star Taylor Swift has not endorsed any political candidate.

Up until recently, Harris was not a party favorite. At the beginning of the year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wavered during a Boston radio interview about whether Biden should keep Harris on his reelection ticket. She apologized in a statement later, but the sentiment was shared across Democratic operatives speaking to the press anonymously. At about the same time, Harris’ public opinion polling had dipped below 40 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight. A September 2023 CBS-YouGov poll found that only 30 percent of Democrats were “enthusiastic” about Harris being on the ticket.

“It’s one of the great construction jobs of American history, the political equivalent of the building of the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge,” Baker said of Harris’ revived image. “It was staged in a very effective way. The problems that President Biden was having as a candidate were so visible and painful that her exuberance and her joy at being the candidate and being able to speak was really one of the most notable achievements.”

When she ran for president in 2020, many Democrats accused Harris of being out of step with the party because she was a former prosecutor. Harris described her record as “smart on crime” rather than tough. Campaign ads tout Harris’ experience prosecuting hundreds of cases and putting criminals behind bars. But past opponents in 2003 accused Harris of inflating her record to include cases she was involved in but had not tried in court.

At the start of the Biden administration, Harris was appointed to investigate illegal immigration across the southern border and its root causes. In an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, she dodged a point he made that she had not yet visited the nation’s southern border six months into the Biden administration. While commonly called the “border czar” at the time, the administration now says that was never her position. Instead, she worked on partnerships with Central American nonprofit programs and businesses. She also directed humanitarian relief for the region and millions of COVID-19 vaccines. Harris partnered with the Justice Department to launch anti-corruption and anti-migrant smuggling task forces. But immigration still climbed, and Harris redirected to other efforts, like her pro-abortion college tour earlier this year.

At the DNC, Louisiana delegate Eric Paul Broussard-Bueno said he considered Biden one of the most effective presidents in modern history, but his campaign was not performing well enough this year. He said Harris has changed the race.

“It’s transformative, what’s happened in the last month,” Broussard-Bueno said. “This isn’t about supporting one candidate just because we don’t like the other. There is absolute concrete evidence you can see across the country of people that are exploding with energy.”

With only 63 days until the election, Harris has a shortened timeline to pull together enough support. Candidates typically receive a post-convention boost, which polls last week reflected. But two months is still a long time.

In her first interview with the press since the start of her campaign, Harris took a long time to defend her policy positions. She told CNN’s Dana Bash that while her stance on fracking shifted, “my values have not changed.” Harris avoided speaking about Trump directly, joking “same old playbook” when asked to respond to one of his statements. But she also fell into some confusing speaking patterns that, before she became the presidential candidate, were the subject of teasing videos. Speaking about climate change, she said, “I have always believed and I have worked on it, that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.”

Labor Day traditionally represents the beginnings of the final sprint for presidential campaigns. Harris will debate Trump on Sept. 10 in Philadelphia. While Trump asked for a Sept. 4 and a Sept. 25 debate, Harris declined the former and has not yet committed to the latter.

“How agile is she?” Baker asked. “You can’t dodge the question coming out of nowhere, from somebody at the bottom of the stairs of an airplane or stepping out of a venue that really blindsides you. How quick is she in terms of response but also the quality of the response? I think all that is yet to be determined, and that could be a danger zone for her.”