Harris on the road to success Biden's Vizin and candidate of change - how does she do it?
As Vice President, she embodies Biden's policies. At the same time, she promises a new way forward in the race for the White House, presenting herself as a fresh face. That sounds like a contradiction, doesn't it?
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- Kamala Harris is presenting herself as a candidate for change in the US presidential election campaign. At the same time, as Biden's Vice President, she has to represent government policy.
- So far, she has managed to reconcile these seemingly contradictory messages.
- Harris manages the balancing act by claiming Biden's successes for herself and at the same time presenting herself as a new leader who is taking a stand against "the politics of the past".
She is the current US Vice President and has already been in office for three and a half years. But for the past five weeks she has also been the Democratic presidential candidate - and promises a "new way forward".
Kamala Harris is running on two tracks, so to speak, in the decisive phase of the election campaign, taking credit for parts of President Joe Biden's work record, while at the same time presenting herself as a new leader who is taking a stand against "the politics of the past".
Trump snatched the "change" banner
It is common in any presidential campaign for candidates to play on the keyboard of experience or freshness, but Harris has so far apparently managed to reconcile two seemingly contradictory messages - to the annoyance and frustration of her opponent Donald Trump and his allies.
"She has this powerful and unique and interesting advantage that we've never seen before in our politics," is how Patrick Gaspard, CEO of the Democratic-leaning think tank Center for American Progress Action Fund and a former director of the Democratic Party Executive Committee, describes it. "She's both an incumbent," he says, and "she was able to snatch the 'change' banner from Donald Trump."
Harris' vision for the country's future leans heavily on Biden's plans, so much so that she made no changes to it even after he dropped out of the presidential race. For example, the party executive committee-approved platform adopted at the recent nominating convention in Chicago included frequent - and outdated - verbatim references to Biden's "second term."
Her self-promotion as someone offering a "new way forward" relies in large part on her deviating from the norm. The 59-year-old daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants replaced an 81-year-old white man who first ran for the presidency 36 years ago. If she wins in November, it will be several firsts at once: she would be the nation's first female president and the first black woman and person of South Asian descent to hold office.
Shared values
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, believes that Harris' ability to embody change has much more to do with her age, skin color and gender than political positions.
According to her staff, Harris brings what voters seem to have been yearning for all year: a new ambassador, but one who so far offers a measured evolution of the Biden-Harris record. She is, of course, a leader in her own right, says Brian Nelson, her senior campaign adviser. "But she's a leader who has been a partner with President Biden for the past three and a half years," and they have shared values and principles.
The Trump camp has repeatedly accused her of not having given any detailed information about her political plans so far and has tried to portray her as a person who is far more liberal than she admits. And perhaps to lower the expectations of their own followers before the next polls come out, the Trump team recently predicted that Harris would increase her approval rating in the wake of the nominating convention.
Half a billion in campaign donations
There was also renewed talk of a "Harris honeymoon" - a honeymoon that would be granted to the candidate - completely unjustified from Trump's point of view. In fact, the media had decided to extend the honeymoon to "over four weeks", wrote Trump opinion researchers Tony Fabrizio and Travis Tunis last Saturday. The Harris camp, for its part, announced on Sunday that it had taken in $82 million (74.5 million euros) in campaign contributions during the party's convention week and a whopping $540 million since Biden dropped out of the race on July 21 and campaigned for Harris.
Harris has tried to take credit for parts of Biden's foreign policy record herself. In her party conference speech, for example, she said that five days before Russia launched its war of aggression in Ukraine, she met with its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to warn him. The meeting took place on the fringes of the security conference in Munich, when the USA had already been warning of an invasion for months and was in the process of helping Ukrainian forces prepare for it.
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A target for Trump
Trump will continue to try to link Harris to the less rosy parts of the Biden record. On Monday, he visited Arlington National Cemetery to honor US soldiers killed in a bombing at Kabul airport during the chaotic troop withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago. Harris had told CNN in August 2021 that she was the last person in the room when Biden made his withdrawal decision.
"This is a president who has an unusual amount of courage," Harris said at the time. She had repeatedly seen him make decisions based on exactly what he believed was right - "regardless of what political people might tell him would be in his own best interest".
Indirectly, her message now echoes the argument that Biden is also part of the politics of the past - even as she publicly praises him and tries to cut herself a slice of the good part of the pie. Her first nationwide ad after the party convention brings up the generational contrast with Trump - who is three years younger than Biden. "Instead of focusing on the politics of the past," Harris says, "we need to think about the future."
