Kamala Harris will try to win over voters who don’t know much about her

In her keynote address to the Democratic Convention, Kamala Harris will try to accomplish something she’s struggled to do since her unsuccessful presidential bid in 2019 – explain who she really is.

Kamala Harris speaks at the campaign rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Picture: AFP

Kamala Harris frequently recalls her mother telling her that she might be “the first to do many things” but to make sure she isn’t the last. Yet as Harris formally accepts the Democratic nomination today, the vice president won’t dwell on the historic nature of her candidacy.

Instead of leaning too much into what her campaign believes is obvious, the 59-year-old former California senator and prosecutor will try to accomplish something she has struggled to do since her unsuccessful presidential bid in 2019: provide a clear case to Americans of what she stands for – and why.

“She’s not running because she wants to break a glass ceiling,” said Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.), a longtime Harris friend. “She’s running because she thinks America needs healing right now, that this tribalism is tearing us apart and we’ve got to get back to pragmatic, problem-solving leadership.”

Her aides said she would use the prime-time address to pitch Americans on her central campaign message since replacing President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket: portraying former President Donald Trump as a threat to freedom, arguing she has a more forward-looking agenda on protecting abortion rights and expanding economic mobility for the middle class. Harris’s team also plans to showcase elements of her biography – her upbringing by a middle-class, immigrant mother – to cast her as an authentic and relatable messenger on her priorities.

Part of Harris’s task will be maintaining the momentum of the first month of her candidacy while continuing to characterise Trump – who is about two decades older than her – as a relic of the past. Her team will also need to deny Trump the mantle of an outside change agent at a time when Harris remains closely tied to Biden’s policies and surveys show many Americans yearning for change.

“Trump locked himself into a conversation about age and acuity and strength. And so now he’s got to live in that frame, and she’s got to be able to show that he is old, he is out of touch,” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican consultant, said at a gathering during the Democratic National Convention. “So much of this new enthusiasm is about age. It is about change.” David Axelrod, a top strategist to former President Barack Obama’s campaigns, said Harris could make a compelling case. “She is the turn-the-page candidate right now,” Axelrod said.

“The fight right now is whether the Trump folks can push her back into the box of being an incumbent and hold her accountable for the things that Biden has done or whether she can continue on this path as the choice to turn the page,” Axelrod added.

Harris, who as the only woman or person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president would notch those firsts again as commander in chief, will face steep challenges in trying to unite a divided electorate around her vision for the country.

With early voting beginning in some states in about a month and Election Day just over two months away, she has limited time to reintroduce herself as a leader in her own right. Biden stepped away from the race in July, making her the first vice president since 1968 to have their boss end his re-election bid.

Although Harris’s popularity has surged since her whirlwind ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket, a recent CBS News poll showed that over a third of voters said they didn’t know what she stands for.

In recent days, Harris has begun rolling out her agenda, releasing a broad vision to make housing more affordable while lowering the cost of groceries. Harris’s aides said they want her agenda to provide a contrast with Trump without reading like a think-tank white paper.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, who became the first Black governor of his state this past year, pointed to Harris’s call for a $6,000 child tax credit to the parents of newborns as a proposal that could strike “the greatest blows to child poverty that our country has ever seen.” “These are big, bold ideas that I can tell you, as a chief executive, I’m excited to see happen,” Moore said.

Republicans, who have at times struggled to form a consistent line of attack against Harris, have criticised the vice president for not providing detailed plans and tried to cast her as an out-of-touch liberal, pointing to her past support for the Green New Deal and Medicare For All.

Trump supporters have also tried to tie her to Biden’s policies on the economy and inflation and decisions such as the chaotic withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, which have been unpopular with voters.

“She is worse than (Biden) because she’s actually a radical left Marxist, ” Trump said in a phone interview with “Fox & Friends” on Thursday. “That’s what she is. That’s what she’s always going to be.”

Polls show that Harris and Trump are locked in a tight race, with the vice president gaining on the former president in most surveys, which had previously shown Biden lagging before he bowed out of the race. Harris leads Trump by 2.7 percentage points in the FiveThirtyEight.com average of public polls.

But her lead in most polls is within the margin of error – and she trails in many polls of the battleground states. “This is a dead heat, in the margin of error race,” said Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’s campaign chair, during an event this week. “And we are winning some battleground states and we are losing some.”

Ahead of Harris’s speech, her campaign used friends, colleagues and video testimonials throughout the DNC to give voters a glimpse into Harris’s life and record, showcasing her career path as a prosecutor and as a wife, daughter and stepmother.

On Tuesday, Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, described a warm, family-focused person, who his children know as “Momala” and who officiated at his son’s wedding.

The quest for America to elect the first woman to serve as president – the party’s best opportunity since Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 – will be an implicit, perhaps explicit, part of Thursday’s programming.

Rep. Annie Kuster (D., N.H.), who is retiring from Congress after a dozen years, said Thursday that she and many House Democratic women will wear suffragist white inside the United Center as they have during past State of the Union addresses since the rise of Trump.

“I have been waiting my entire life. It makes me really tearful,” Kuster said, noting her late mother’s long involvement in New Hampshire politics. “We’ve given our lives to this.”

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