The last mission hapless Harris can afford to fail: wooing Gen Z
Kamala Harris’ critics complain the US vice-president has been invisible in office, but all will be forgiven if she can get her young fans to vote.
The US vice-president had one audience in particular in mind. “I’m going to give a particular shout out to the Gen Z,” Kamala Harris cried. As cheers and applause duly rang out, she let loose her distinctive laugh. “I knew I’d get that response,” she said.
Harris, 58, has rarely looked as assured during most of the last two and a half years, which have been marked by low personal approval ratings and sometimes perceptible friction between her team and the White House.
As her speech to a Hispanic educational foundation in Washington last week showed, though, she may finally have found a role just in time to play a central part in the 2024 election.
Young voters backed the Democrats almost two to one in 2020, helping to push President Biden and Harris to victory. The party needs them to turn out again and the vice-president’s polling ratings are better among younger voters than with older ones. Incumbent presidents often do a lot of their campaigning from the White House. Biden’s advanced age means he is even less likely than his predecessors to go gallivanting across the country. Harris will have to hit the road.
She has been warming up with a “Fight for our freedoms” college tour where she is assured of a warm welcome railing against Republican resistance to student loan relief, access to abortion, climate change measures and gun control.
Biden helped increase her visibility on Friday at a rare joint press conference where he put Harris in overall charge of a new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, saying “she’s been on the front lines of this issue her entire career, as a prosecutor, as an attorney-general and a senator”.
However, her attempted re-emergence comes amid a renewed bout of Democrat agonising about Harris and Biden as the clock ticks down on the final chance to replace either of them.
“I don’t think Biden and Harris should run for re-election,” wrote David Ignatius, a longstanding admirer of Biden (but not Harris) in a Washington Post article. “If he and Harris campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement - which was stopping Trump.”
Biden, 80, is publicly committed to chasing a second term, although he appears to be suffering age-related stumbles more frequently recently, irking President Lula of Brazil in New York last week by walking off stage without shaking his hand and causing Lula to wave his arm in frustration.
Most Democrats say that they do not want the president to run again and for them the last glimmer of hope that he might gracefully withdraw rests with the traditional Thanksgiving gathering of Bidens in Nantucket, Massachusetts, where family decisions are made around the dinner table. This is where the clan signed off last year on Biden running for re-election. There is a tiny chance that family members could pressure him to retire, but sources say that these events are usually about Biden explaining his decisions at some length, rather than taking counsel. That has intensified the focus on his vice-president.
Removing her from the ticket would risk alienating black women, probably the Democrats’ single most reliable voting demographic.
Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker, stoked intrigue earlier this month with a less-than-convincing endorsement when asked on CNN if Harris was the best option as running mate. “He [Biden] thinks so,” Pelosi replied. “And that’s what matters.”
Jamie Raskin, a respected congressman from Maryland, fanned the flames the next day by telling the same network: “I don’t know whether President Biden has named his running mate. We’re going to a convention next summer. It’s, you know, a year away from now, then we’re going to go through that process.” Raskin eventually said that Harris “would be an excellent running mate” but it was a strangely noncommittal answer given that Biden last year confirmed her as his sidekick for 2024 and she appeared 13 times in the video launching their re-election campaign in April.
Senior Democrats are reluctant to go on the record over their concerns about Harris, partly because they do not want to be seen to be undermining their party’s ticket and partly because she could become president at any moment if Biden suffers a health crisis.
“She’s just not been impressive,” a White House employee under President Obama said. “There’s been a concerted effort to bolster her but there are too many jokes and memes out there.”
He was referring to the clips of Harris’s occasional “word salad” of meaningless phrases or the much-maligned Kamala cackle – the laugh that grates with some voters. Harris has spent an age searching for a defining role after bungling the big task Biden initially asked of her: tackling the root causes of immigration at the Mexico border. This was simply dropped by Harris, according to The Last Politician, a recent book on the first two years of Biden’s presidency by The Atlantic writer Franklin Foer.
Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief-of-staff, “felt Harris kept making life excessively difficult by imposing all sorts of constraints on herself”, Foer wrote. “She told him that she didn’t want to work on women’s issues or anything to do with race.” She was “constantly in search of a portfolio but reluctant to accept them when they were suggested to her, she asked to be placed in charge of relations with Scandinavia - away from the spotlight”.
The Supreme Court ruling to end the Roe v Wade guarantee of access to abortion last summer finally seemed to galvanise Harris with a mission to defend the range of liberal rights under attack from Republicans. She has been travelling around the country this year, attracting enthusiastic Democratic crowds and shoring up her position in the party.
Dave Nagle, a former chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, said: “She’s become more visible and when she came to Iowa at the end of July for a pro-choice rally I was, frankly, astonished by the depth of the reception that she got, she was very well received.”
Still, her average approval rating of 39.6 per cent remains lower than Biden’s 40.9 per cent and Trump’s 40.8 per cent, according to the FiveThirtyEight polling website. A CBS poll this month looked deeper into feelings about her. A combined 45 per cent of voters overall described themselves as “enthusiastic” (14 per cent) or satisfied (31 per cent) with her as Biden’s choice of running mate but this rose to 62 per cent among under-30s.
Even so there are limits to Harris’s appeal to idealistic young voters. Her message to the crowd of young Hispanic leaders last week packed a powerful moral punch, particularly on abortion, but for some of those present, it was insufficient to truly win them over.
Kaylie, 22, said: “She’s diverse, she’s a good speaker, but a lot of experience from before she was vice-president in her home state just doesn’t resonate with me.” This was a reference to Harris’s career as attorney-general of California. “A lot of people my age would like to see someone more progressive,” Letitia, 24, said. “Someone like [New York congresswoman] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, someone who is not afraid to be more aggressive and leftist.”
Joel Goldstein, a professor at St Louis University in Missouri and expert on the vice-presidency, predicted that Harris would face numerous challengers if Biden stepped aside or if she ran for the 2028 nomination. “A sitting vice-president can’t expect that he or she is going to be the nominee in the future,” he said. “It’s definitely a boost but, it doesn’t mean that you’re across the finish line.
The Sunday Times
More Coverage
Nobel winner issues AI alert
After receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics, British-Canadian AI pioneer Brian Hinton, who shared the prize with John Hopfield, warned that the technology he helped create could lead to the subjugation of humanity.
Israel is right to fight but I just can’t trust Netanyahu
The only response to October 7 was to destroy Hamas, but any peaceful aftermath will require an act of imagination on Israel’s part.