Kamala Harris meets the troops on her first full day as a presidential candidate.
Photo: Erin Schaff/Pool
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Early last year, I joined Kamala Harris on a mostly unremarkable day trip to Atlanta, where she talked about climate change and promoted the administration’s credits for buying electric vehicles. It was the day after Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, and Harris was struggling to earn respect. Some pundits and donors had spent months whispering that she had been a disappointment dating back to her 2020 presidential campaign, and light Washington chatter was once again circulating about whether Biden should replace her on his reelection ticket. At the same time, I’d been hearing from some Democratic strategists about how Harris’s image was far better than Biden’s among Black voters, especially Black women, and that this was being badly underappreciated in the Beltway parlor games. “Younger girls kind of see her in a way that younger African Americans saw Barack Obama: This too can happen, there too can I be,” Cornell Belcher, a pollster who’d worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, told me at the time. “It’s beyond politics, it’s beyond cultural, it’s a spiritual thing.” For Harris, Belcher said, “from a political standpoint, that shit is gold.”
Few national outlets were following Harris’s trips or announcements, and none took notice when Harris’s first stop in Georgia was to record an interview with Steve Harvey, whose radio show reaches millions of mostly Black listeners weekly. He couldn’t help himself. Quickly, Harvey slipped, calling Harris “Madam President” and only then half-apologized: “My bad, probably just a hope.” As Harris promoted Biden’s insulin price caps, Harvey sounded surprised and impressed. At the end of the interview, he got earnest. “You mean a lot to so many people,” he told her. “This vice-presidency is huge, huge for so many people.”
Seventeen months later, Biden is the failed candidate and Harris is regarded as the country’s potential savior from Donald Trump. Against almost everyone’s expectations, and with remarkable speed and agility, she has gotten her party — all of it — to move on from Biden with minimum drama and maximum excitement.
Two days into her presidential campaign, she walked onto a high-school stage in suburban Milwaukee before a crowd of 3,500, larger than any Biden drew this year or last. She thanked him for his service and pivoted directly into criticisms of Trump’s record and outrages. She insisted, “We are not going back!” as the crowd roared and chanted it back to her. Feeding off the energy, she framed the election as “a choice between freedom and chaos,” dwelling on Project 2025, the extreme playbook proposed for a second Trump term. And she delivered a line her audience seemed to be waiting for: As a prosecutor, she said, “I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” For the first time in years, Democrats are ebullient, even confident about winning.
In Wisconsin, you could practically hear the sigh of relief coming all the way from campaign headquarters in Delaware. The day before, in Wilmington, some aides cried when Harris greeted them for the first time. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers’ relief was visible in the way they bounded through the halls. “The vibes are great! Everybody is very excited,” said Hawaii senator Brian Schatz. “I have not seen this abrupt of a turnaround maybe ever in my political life.” Online, coconut and brat memes started flowing. Beyoncé gave Harris permission to use her song “Freedom” as her new entrance music. Over $100 million charged into the campaign’s parched bank accounts almost immediately from everyday supporters and from donors from the Upper West Side to Beverly Hills; $150 million in new pledges flooded the starved super-PAC. More than 40,000 Black women joined an organizing call on Sunday; 20,000 Black men joined another the next night. By Tuesday, over 100,000 new volunteers signed up with the campaign. On Thursday, nearly 140,000 white women piled into a Zoom call of their own. Top Democrats who’d spent years dismissing Harris anonymously to any reporter who’d listen were tweeting out their rapturous support. In some cases, they were now enthusiastically on her payroll.
Those around Harris know three months can be an eternity in an election year, but they can’t stop marveling at what just happened. One longtime friend called me a few hours after it was clear she’d locked up the nomination. “It’s crazy,” he said, “how fast she went from a drag on the ticket, totally unelectable, to suddenly being as presidential as can be.”
Now comes the hard part: turning around a losing campaign in 100 days.
For over a year, Biden’s campaign argued that once voters woke up to the stark choice facing them — it’s him or Trump returning to power — his prospects would improve. It never happened, but Harris’s ascension has rekindled that hope. “We now have a person who fights for reproductive rights versus a person who eliminated them; we have a prosecutor versus a criminal,” said Schatz. “And so the contrast is like built in a lab to be easy to make. It doesn’t guarantee a victory, but it does guarantee in my view that the Democratic Party is going to be able to make its case both for what we would do with another four years and to remind people of the danger Trump poses to ordinary people.”
In particular, high-ranking Democrats close to Harris expect to see her talk about abortion more than Biden, who struggled to mention it even as his campaign advertised heavily to remind voters that Trump has claimed credit for the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Harris has been the administration’s primary voice on reproductive rights and has closely tracked how ballot measures and candidates defending abortion rights have won all over the country since the Dobbs decision two years ago. Harris “taps directly into that vein,” Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren told me. “She is fluent in the arguments of abortion. She doesn’t have to learn it, she doesn’t have to be prompted; she knows it, and she knows it at a gut level.”
Not much polling is available yet about the presumptive nominee, but early indications are that she is more competitive with Trump, though he’s still probably favored. (The gold-standard New York Times–Siena College poll had the race effectively tied on Thursday, a considerable improvement over Biden’s previous six-point deficit.) It also appears that any bounce Trump was expecting from his convention and his near assassination was quashed by the ticket switch. Initial research from Priorities USA, a Democratic super-PAC, showed young people leaning Democrat were now clearly more likely to vote than before, and that Republicans’ enthusiasm edge had disappeared.
To strategists atop the party, it seems clear that many of the core Democrat voters who’d been turned off by Biden were now, suddenly, back in play with Harris. In a “path to victory” memo it circulated this week, the campaign highlighted her notably high approval rating with Black voters, especially compared to Trump, who had been making gains with that group, and singled out early polling from Nevada suggesting that Harris was already making up ground with Latino voters. The memo argued that only about 7 percent of voters are undecided and that they are “disproportionately Black, Latino, and under 30.” It’s easy to read that statistic as implying that these voters are inclined to vote for a Democrat, just not Biden. During the Biden campaign’s dire last few weeks, it signaled his hopes were down to defending the “Blue Wall.” Now, however, the Harris campaign sees hope expanding beyond just Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, with paths running through Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia.
The memo was written by its chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, a Biden political hand and former Obama aide whom the president installed atop his campaign to steady the ship earlier this year. When Harris visited campaign headquarters, she assured the staff that O’Malley Dillon and Julie Chávez Rodriguez, the campaign manager and one of Harris’s own former staffers, would stay in their roles. Below the surface, though, there’s still some tension between the old campaign and its new candidate. Some of Biden’s loyalists have for four years kept Harris outside of the president’s innermost circle of trust and doubted her ability to win over independent voters in particular. Many people close to Harris say that while she almost certainly won’t seriously reshape the campaign operation, she needs to bring in some of her own trusted allies. “I have tremendous faith in the VP’s abilities and skills,” said one very senior Democrat who has worked closely with Harris. But “I also have some doubts about the team,” she said, referring to Biden’s famously small and insular leadership group that insisted nothing was seriously wrong for months, even after the debate disaster. And, she added, those hires needed to happen soon: “Time is not on her side.”
Already, it seems likely that Harris will not ask Mike Donilon to stay in the campaign’s leadership. Biden’s quiet longtime strategist, confidant, and ad-maker, he fiercely protected the president for decades and was accused by the president’s critics, in the final weeks of the campaign, of shielding him from political reality.
Still, whom Harris will rely on remains less obvious. She has few aides who have followed her from job to job throughout her career and keeps in touch with vanishingly few advisers from the top of her own failed 2020 campaign. In recent days, she has been traveling with her brother-in-law, Tony West, a top Uber lawyer and ex–associate attorney general who has previously provided her with political and policy advice. And what’s even less certain is what role Maya Harris, Kamala’s sister who is married to West, will play. A former Hillary Clinton aide and chief of the ACLU’s Northern California branch, she was the chair of Kamala’s 2020 campaign, which unraveled before voting even began. Within Kamala’s orbit, some are resigned to the fact that Maya is never more than a phone call away. Though she is a trusted adviser to her sister, she is also often blamed for Kamala’s politically damaging sprint to the left in her last campaign. It started the day after her splashy campaign launch, when she squandered her considerable political momentum by appearing to advocate for eliminating all private health insurance in an uncomfortable interview on CNN.
Harris recovered from that period enough to become Biden’s running mate, but not to entirely rescue her reputation among the D.C. cognoscenti. For much of Biden’s term, some Democrats considered her overly cautious, a poor manager, and prone to a comically elliptical speaking style — a disappointing turn from her prominent role as prosecutor when grilling Trump allies in the Senate. The reputation was partly the product of the office, a famously thankless one, but also because of her unglamorous chosen policy portfolio, her uneven performance in interviews — none worse than when she got defensive with Lester Holt in 2021 about not visiting the border — and her cycling through staff at a high rate in the administration’s first two years. Perhaps most important, though, was her unwillingness to play a specific kind of inside game of courting new allies and building power centers within D.C. She entered the White House intent on remaining an ally to Biden, so she hired few political operators and instructed her staff to not let her look like she was angling to run in 2024. “It’s almost been like a religious thing, not wanting anything to be about ’24,” one senior Democrat close to Harris told me early on in the administration. “They thought about where the line was and they walked back eight feet, not a foot.”
As a result, when many lawmakers, donors, and campaign pros scrambled to figure out who should replace Biden after the debate, so many were focused on other possible saviors, like Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom, instead of her. Once it became clear that the party would unite only behind Harris, some in the administration started calling her associates for reassurance: Was she ready? In the days since, as it became clear the answer was clearly yes, much of this crowd has turned from skeptical into full-on Kamala stans.
Shortly after former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s name was first floated for some kind of role with Harris, someone who’s known her for decades and worked on her campaigns mused that she needs someone like him atop the campaign. “There has to be someone like him who has the stature and gravitas to stand up to the Biden people who haven’t exactly been hugging her. You gotta put your own imprint on it. I do believe that people are going to be brought in who are OG,” he said. That means people who’ve worked with Harris before but also people who’ve helped steer presidential campaigns. And with the campaign itself already up and running, and such a short runway before Election Day, “you don’t necessarily need architects.”
If Harris’s new electoral strength is supposed to come from young, Black, and Latino voters, the most significant question for the party’s top strategists is how white working-class voters will respond to her. These are the voters who Democrats fear will be skeptical of elevating a Black woman to the presidency and who may consider her too liberal. The campaign and super-PACs are soon expected to start blitzing battleground states with ads aiming to both savage Trump and reintroduce Harris. Despite a term as vice-president, she’s unknown to broad swaths of the country, and she’s about to be the subject of an onslaught of attacks.
Republicans have made no secret of their plans to portray her as unacceptably left-wing for most voters. On Tuesday, Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dave McCormick shared a video that provided a blueprint; it calls Harris “the most liberal nominee ever” and features clip after clip of her sharing controversial and unpopular progressive opinions, usually from her time as a candidate in the last Democratic primary. It starts by showing her revealing that “I am prepared to get rid of the filibuster to pass a Green New Deal,” before reminding voters of her promise not to “treat people who are undocumented who cross the border as criminals.” (She has backed down from most of this.) Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, has been painting her as a San Francisco radical and Biden’s “border czar,” a nod to her portfolio addressing the roots of the migrant surge at the southern border.
For her part, Harris has been content to lean into the cop-versus-criminal frame in the campaign’s first days. If her previous campaigns — for president, for the Senate, for attorney general and district attorney — are any indication, she will likely spend the next few weeks leaning on her record but not her personal life — despite her aides’ frequent pleas over the years to open up about her childhood and growth and let voters really get to know her.
The message will be fine-tuned in the coming weeks. More immediately, she’s already facing her campaign’s biggest question: Who should be her running mate? Within hours of taking over the campaign, Harris tasked former attorney general Eric Holder with vetting potential candidates. Liberal commentators and newly interested voters are busy debating pros and cons — Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s an ex–fighter pilot and astronaut married to Gabby Giffords, and he’s from a border state, but he’s not pro-union enough; Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro is a dynamic speaker, but perhaps too pro-Israel; North Carolina governor Roy Cooper’s friends with Harris and has purple-state appeal but is relatively uninspiring.
It’s all the source of significant intrigue, but it also feels slightly beside the point. Barring some scandal, the pick won’t gain or lose any voters. Now, for the first time, she’s the point.
“The bar of expectations has been set artificially low for her, and she kind of did it to herself,” said a friend who’s known Harris since the ’90s. “But I think she’s going to do great for a couple weeks, then she gets a VP, which is another boost, then you get the convention, which you really have to fuck up not to come out of strong. Then it’s September.” And then it’s the homestretch.
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