Kamala Harris has capped off the flying start to her presidential campaign with a passionate, powerful and polished speech to the Democrat faithful, but the toughest part of her battle with Donald Trump is about to begin.
Harris’ acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was the biggest and best of her career, and the 59 year old used it to try to tell the story of who she is, what she stands for and why voters should choose her over the former president.
The nub of her optimistic pitch was that she was the candidate for the future offering a fresh start and generational change from Trump’s failed record and dark vision of America.
Harris is selling herself as the unity candidate who will best protect freedom by reinterpreting freedom through the Democrat lens of personal freedom from Trump-backed abortion bans, assault weapons and attacks on health care, welfare and middle class families.
She frames the contrast between herself and Trump as the prosecutor versus the convicted felon, good versus evil, joy versus darkness, optimism versus pessimism, the future versus the past.
The successful two-card trick that Harris and the Democrats have employed at the DNC this week is to campaign as if she – after three and a half years as Vice President – represents a “new chapter” while treating the challenger Trump as the incumbent.
It was a strategy which worked well in Chicago as the Democrats quickly consigned the president Joe Biden to the scrap heap, applauding him on the first night of the DNC before all but pretending that he did not exist for the remaining three nights.
This allowed Democrat leaders to try to sell Harris as someone who really had nothing to do with Biden’s record and who could therefore promise a new and more optimistic vision of America in stark contrast to Trump’s divisive pessimism.
Whether voters are convinced by this remains to be seen, but Harris’s speech is further proof that she is a far more formidable campaigner now than she was during her failed 2019 presidential bid.
This week’s DNC will fuel her momentum – at least in the short term – after every senior Democrat, past and present, loudly endorsed her. This was bookended by blistering attacks on Trump, most notably by Barack and Michelle Obama.
But there is still a risk for the Harris campaign that this moment could be their high point rather than a launching pad towards victory. Harris now enjoys a narrow lead over Trump in national polls and in most battleground states, which is a remarkable achievement given that she started this race as a clear underdog after being catapulted into it by Biden’s eleventh hour withdrawal last month.
But even during this week’s DNC, the betting markets, which had favoured her, swung back to narrowly favour Trump because of the expectation that independent candidate Robert F Kennedy junior, who enjoys around 4.8 per cent support in the polls, would quit the race and endorse Trump.
With the DNC now behind her, Harris will have to face her most difficult tests. The most important will be how she performs when she submits herself to her first sit-down interviews, something she has not done since June when Biden was still the candidate.
This is the moment when Harris will have to explain her agenda, which she has yet to outline in any detail, and also why she has changed her views on several key issues.
These include her previous support for a ban on fracking, the elimination of private health insurance and claims that those who cross the border illegally should not be charged with crime.
Her recent repudiation of each of these progressive positions is a sensible move towards the political centre where elections are won. But explaining a change of heart is never an easy task for a politician and Harris can be prone to delivering so-called “word salads” when she is under pressure.
Harris’ other key test will be how she defends the weakest parts of the Biden-Harris record such as the failure of border security and the high cost of living.
Harris has so far only rolled out parts of her agenda during her campaign speeches, but she has already indicated she will be far tougher on border security as president than Biden was. And yet Harris, as a Vice President who was given partial responsibility for the border, was complicit in Biden’s failed border policies. It’s a tough sell for Harris to now portray herself as tough on the border without admitting that she and Biden got it wrong.
Harris has been criticised by Republicans for so far failing to lay out her policies in any detail, leaving voters with little idea of what sort of president she might be.
The Harris campaign will seek to strike a balance here because it is politically untenable between now and November 5 to give so little detail about her policy proposals. But if she gives too much detail, Harris opens herself to misjudgements, mistakes and counter-attacks by Trump.
For example, in Harris’ first speech on economic policy last week, she backed the controversial concept of a federal ban on price gouging in the food and grocery industries to keep grocery prices down. This sort of big-government intervention to control prices has never worked in America and is so contrary to the ethos of a free market that Trump quickly denounced the proposal as ‘communist,’ referring to Harris as ‘comrade,’ and reinforcing his argument that she is too left-leaning for most Americans.
There are still two and a half months to go before the election and as the last month has shown, anything is possible. Just a month ago, Trump was riding high in the polls against the ageing Biden, having survived an assassination attempt and bathing in the lovefest of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Now he is arguably the underdog in this election.
Harris has started well, and, as reinforced by this week’s DNC and by her electrifying speech, she is riding a wave of enthusiasm from liberal America which has not yet slowed down. It is her election to lose, and so far, she has campaigned better than Trump who cannot shake his habit of giving undisciplined meandering speeches. But there is a long way to go and Harris’ biggest tests still lie ahead of her.
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