Vice President Kamala Harris is set to begin a 106-day sprint to the November election. Photo / Doug Mills, The New York Times
ANALYSIS
In a sprint of a race, Kamala Harris is poised to attack Donald Trump on his felonies and, in a 2024 twist, his age, but Republicans will be galvanised to fight her, too.
Vice President Kamala Harris swiftly established herself as the Democratic front-runner to take on Donald Trump within hours of President Joe Biden’s exit Sunday, fundamentally rewiring the presidential contest at warp speed.
Now the race has been transformed into an abbreviated 106-day sprint that more closely resembles the snap elections of Europe than the drawn-out American contests. The tight timeline will magnify any missteps Harris might make but also minimise the chances for a stumble.
And in a race that Trump had been on a trajectory to win, Harris immediately becomes the ultimate X-factor.
Biden quickly endorsed Harris, who would be a barrier-breaking nominee as the first woman, the first Black woman and the first person of South Asian descent to serve as president. As the Democratic Party rallies behind her – the loudest voices of dissent were simply those not publicly endorsing her – here are six ways her candidacy holds both promise and peril.
During the Republican primaries, Nikki Haley had warned everyone who would listen that the first party to swap out its octogenarian candidate – Trump will turn 80 while in office if elected to a second term – would win. She was making the argument for herself but the logic applies to Harris, too.
Unlike the 81-year-old Biden, Harris, 59, is not old – and just that fact neutralises what has been one of the most potent Trump lines of attack.
Within minutes of Biden’s quitting, Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans were questioning Trump’s capacity to govern into his 80s, a daring attempt to reframe an age debate that has been so damaging to Democrats.
“She can make the issue of age and fitness a liability for Trump,” Erin Wilson, Harris’ deputy chief of staff, said on a call Sunday with the group Win With Black Women.
Polls have consistently shown that voters have not been overly concerned with the 78-year-old Trump’s age. But simply taking the issue off the table may be enough of a victory for Democrats. They were facing the stiff headwinds of three-quarters of Americans thinking Biden was too old – a view shared widely even before his doddering debate.
Harris is also expected to give Democrats a far more vigorous campaigner. Her day job is not nearly as demanding as Biden’s, and she can barnstorm the country at a pace far faster than Trump has undertaken.
Harris has often been at her best politically when she has taken on the role of prosecutor-in-chief, whether on the debate stage when she first bore into Biden in June 2019 over busing or as a senator on the Judiciary Committee where her intensive cross-examinations went viral.
When she ran for president, among her tag lines – and her struggling campaign cycled through a few catchphrases – was that she was best positioned to “prosecute the case” against Trump.
Now she will have the chance to do so in the same year in which an actual prosecutor in New York scored 34 felony convictions against him and Trump still faces more than one future criminal trial.
People who have worked with Harris believe that framework could allow her to play to some of her strengths – and expose some of Trump’s weaknesses. Polls have shown a noteworthy share of voters think Trump has committed crimes yet were still planning to vote for him.
If Biden was widely seen as too elderly to lead, he had other advantages built up over 50 years in the public spotlight. Namely, he has long been viewed as a more moderate Democrat who pushed back against the more extreme elements of his party. It helped him appeal to the political middle.
“Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?” he fumed at one point in the 2020 race. His image was such that at times Republicans opted to attack him by suggesting he was being directed by other forces.
Harris does not have that advantage.
Instead, Harris got her start in politics as the district attorney of one of the nation’s most famously liberal cities, San Francisco, before winning statewide in one of the nation’s most famously liberal states, California. (Trump, notably, was among her donors then.)
And while Harris did not carve out a reputation in California as an outspoken progressive – her tagline as DA was about being “smart on crime” – when she ran for president in 2020 she regularly staked out positions to Biden’s left, including embracing a “Medicare for All” system that he had avoided.
As Biden’s partner for the last three-and-a-half years, Harris faces the added burden of supporting the agenda of a president who has become deeply unpopular.
The Trump team has already signalled they plan to attack her on immigration in particular. The question is whether Harris can successfully find a way to campaign on some of the Biden-Harris administration’s most popular accomplishments without the current unpopularity of the man who previously led the ticket.
Trump and his advisers were not looking to shake up a race he was winning by almost every metric. As Republicans gathered last week in Milwaukee, they were downright jubilant about the direction of 2024, seeing Trump as almost a candidate of destiny days after he had survived an assassination attempt.
Now his team must shift to run a very different race against a very different candidate. Harris has the ability to potentially energise the Democratic base – especially some of the core constituencies who had felt alienated – in ways Biden no longer seemed capable of. The president had struggled, relative to his 2020 performance, among Black voters and younger voters in particular, constituencies that Harris’ historic potential candidacy would seem poised to improve upon.
In an early sign of the Democratic appetite for a change, donors contributed more than US$60 million ($100m) online Sunday – the third biggest day in the history of ActBlue.
It was also notable that Trump cast doubt on a future debate with Harris after he had so eagerly sought to share a stage with Biden, suggesting a venue change from ABC to Fox News.
In the 2020 primary, Democratic voters wrestled for months with the question of who would be the strongest candidate against Trump. They wondered, often aloud, about the idea of nominating a woman.
Trump, after all, had just defied expectations and defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. The party ultimately selected an older white man in Biden.
For much of the Trump presidency and beyond, Democrats have benefitted from a gender gap. Women voted for Democrats by a bigger margin than men favoured Republicans. But Trump has swelled his advantage so much among men of late that the gender gap has been suddenly favouring the GOP.
Harris has a chance to reverse that and has already proved herself a far more compelling messenger than Biden on the issue that Democrats believe can win them the 2024 race. Biden rarely would say the word abortion; Harris visited an abortion clinic.
Harris faces other distinctive challenges as a Black candidate and a woman, in a country and a political system where both groups are often held to different standards. And in Trump, she faces an opponent with a history of exploiting stereotypes for his own advantage.
One of the notable facts of Harris’ speedy rise to the pinnacle of Democratic politics in a little more than a decade is how few loyalists have been along for the full ride.
If Biden surrounded himself with a small, sometimes insular, coterie of advisers – a recent Biden inner-circle addition could have served him for a decade – Harris has relatively few similarly long-standing aides. Early on as vice president, her staff turned over significantly.
She has few advisers dating back even to her days in the Senate, let alone her time as attorney general of California. She parted ways with a swath of the senior team on her 2020 presidential primary run, which was wracked with infighting.
Those who have worked both for and against her say she has few equivalents when she nails a big speech, or delivers an acerbic line on the debate stage or a committee hearing. But they also say she can get in her own head, retreat back to canned comments and make tentative, self-inflicted mistakes.
Now she is inheriting Biden’s enormous campaign apparatus. And she has little more than 100 days to capture both the Democratic nomination and the presidency.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Shane Goldmacher
Photographs by: Erin Schaff, Dave Sanders, Doug Mills and Yuri Gripas
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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