U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris is officially campaigning for herself now – and reintroducing herself to an American public still forming opinions about her.
In a brand-new presidential campaign, Vice President Harris’ initial public forays offer a glimpse into how she’ll guide her messaging and image-crafting – and potentially her presidency – now that she can focus on speaking for herself rather than on primarily being a cheerleader for President Joe Biden.
Why We Wrote This
Kamala Harris has the opportunity to rebrand herself in the eyes of voters, but Republicans are attacking her record. Already it’s clear her focus will include protecting abortion rights – and drawing a contrast to Donald Trump on justice.
While polls of Americans show many have strong opinions of the vice president, those numbers clearly aren’t set in stone. After she trailed Donald Trump in hypothetical polling for most of the past year, recent surveys now show her pulling into a statistical tie nationally and in key swing states, with more undecided voters than before in many of those polls.
With just over 100 days to go until the election, the race is on for her to redefine herself – before Republicans do it for her.
From abortion to economic fairness, Ms. Harris is already showcasing issues that will likely feature strongly as she vies with former President Trump – while there are other issues that she appears inclined to avoid.
Vice President Kamala Harris is officially campaigning for herself now – and reintroducing herself to an American public still forming opinions about her.
In a brand-new presidential campaign, Vice President Harris’ initial public forays offer a glimpse into how she’ll guide her messaging, image-crafting – and potentially her presidency – now that she can focus on speaking for herself rather than primarily as a cheerleader for President Joe Biden.
While polls of Americans show many have strong opinions of the vice president, those numbers clearly aren’t set in stone. After she trailed Mr. Trump in hypothetical polling for most of the past year, recent surveys now show her pulling into a statistical tie nationally and in key swing states, with more undecided voters than before in many of those polls.
Why We Wrote This
Kamala Harris has the opportunity to rebrand herself in the eyes of voters, but Republicans are attacking her record. Already it’s clear her focus will include protecting abortion rights – and drawing a contrast to Donald Trump on justice.
With just over 100 days to go until the election, the race is on for her to redefine herself – before Republicans do it for her.
Here are six issues Ms. Harris focused heavily on in her first two speeches as the likely Democratic standard-bearer against former President Donald Trump: a pass-the-torch event with President Biden at her newly inherited campaign headquarters in Delaware and a rally in Wisconsin.
The issues Kamala Harris wants to talk about:
Abortion
In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned a national right to abortion that had stood for half a century, after Mr. Trump appointed three conservative justices to the bench. Polls show it’s one of the issues where Democrats fare the best with voters. Mr. Biden had been an imperfect messenger – a devout Catholic with a mixed record on abortion who seemed hesitant to talk about it. Ms. Harris has been a vocal abortion-rights supporter throughout her career.
In one of her few specific legislative pledges in either speech, Ms. Harris promised in Wisconsin that if “Congress passes a law to restore reproductive freedoms, as president of the United States, I will sign it into law.”
Without evidence, she also accused Mr. Trump of planning to sign a national law banning abortion, even though he’s repeatedly insisted that the issue should be left to individual states.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/AP
Former President Donald Trump appears at Manhattan criminal court during jury selection in New York, April 18, 2024. He became the first former president with a criminal conviction, after a guilty verdict on falsifying business records with the intent to commit crimes including influencing the 2016 election. He has said he’ll appeal the ruling.
Donald Trump’s legal troubles
Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor and California attorney general, made it clear she plans to draw a sharp contrast with Mr. Trump, who has faced felony charges in four different criminal cases in the past year and has decades of legal battles over his business dealings and accusations of sexual assault.
“In those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said to cheers in suburban Milwaukee before attacking Mr. Trump for being found liable by a jury for committing sexual abuse, running a for-profit university that was forced to pay $25 million to settle fraud accusations, and promising to back Big Oil in exchange for campaign donations.
“During the foreclosure crisis, I took on the big Wall Street banks and won $20 billion for California families, holding those banks accountable for fraud. Donald Trump was just found guilty of 34 counts of fraud,” she concluded.
Democracy and voting rights
Ms. Harris did not specifically mention Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss, which led to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot where his supporters attacked Congress. Instead, she stressed Republicans’ move to push restrictive bills that make it more difficult to register and vote.
The only bills she referenced by name in either speech were the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act, a pair of voting rights bills backed by Democrats that she promised to fight for as president.
Gun control
In both speeches, Harris pledged to push for more gun control, framing it as an issue of “the freedom to live safe from gun violence.” She promised to fight for universal background checks, red flag laws, and an assault weapons ban.
Trump’s tax plan
Ms. Harris also promised that “building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.” And she repeatedly blasted Mr. Trump’s plan for further corporate tax cuts. “America has tried these economic policies before,’’ she said. “They do not lead to prosperity. They lead to inequity and economic injustice, and we are not going back.”
Project 2025
Democrats have spent months attacking Project 2025, a playbook for the Trump administration written by former Trump staffers and close allies and spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with close ties to Mr. Trump. The former president and his campaign have sought to distance themselves from the work’s most controversial elements, though some of those in the Project 2025 group remain involved in his campaign.
“He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class,’’ Ms. Harris said. “We know we’ve got to take this seriously. And can you believe they put that thing in writing? Read it. It’s 900 pages.’’
What she doesn’t want to talk about:
Immigration and border security
Back in early 2021, President Biden tasked Vice President Harris to work with Mexico and Central America to address the root causes of immigration in hopes of stemming the flow of people into the U.S.
Ms. Harris had a rough interview that year with NBC News’ Lester Holt, where she grew defensive for not having visited the U.S.-Mexico border, then promised to go.
Migrants of different nationalities walk along a road in a caravan toward the U.S., in Tapachula, Chiapas state, Mexico, July 23, 2024.
Republicans jumped on that, branding Ms. Harris the “border czar” even though no one in the administration actually called her that, and attacking her for the surge in migrants that have come into the U.S. since 2021.
Mr. Trump made clear Tuesday that this would be his campaign’s opening salvo against his new opponent.
On a hastily organized press call, Mr. Trump accused Ms. Harris of a “willful demolition of American borders and laws” and warned that if she became president, she’d make the “invasion” of immigrants “exponentially worse.”
Polls have consistently found that border security is one of the top issues for voters in this election, and they give the Biden-Harris administration poor marks on that count.
The Biden-Harris administration
Ms. Harris heaped praise on what she called a Biden record of achievement “unmatched in modern history.”
“In one term, he has already surpassed the legacy of most presidents who served two terms in office,” she said in Delaware. In Wisconsin, she gave Mr. Biden credit for getting the COVID-19 pandemic “under control” and overseeing the creation of 15 million new jobs during the pandemic rebound and beyond since his inauguration. “Joe has stood up for democracy at home, and he has stood up for democracy abroad, and he has always stood up for what he believes is right,” she said.
But the vice president didn’t dwell long on the administration’s work, seeming happier to gain a bit of daylight from the outgoing president and his sagging poll numbers and casting herself as a fresh choice.
It’s clear Republicans want to make sure that this election remains a choice between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, however, and plan to tie Ms. Harris to her boss.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/File
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris walk together on the grounds of Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia, Jan. 11, 2022.
Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio laid out some of these coming attacks in a memo that the campaign circulated on Tuesday that warned to expect a polling bounce for Harris. “The Democrats deposing one Nominee for another does NOT change voters discontent over the economy, inflation, crime, the open border, housing costs not to mention concern over two foreign wars,” he wrote in the memo.
Her 2020 presidential campaign
Ms. Harris spent plenty of time talking about her political biography as a former prosecutor. But in both speeches, she didn’t once mention her lackluster 2020 campaign for president, in which she began as a front-runner but dropped out before a single vote was cast after taking a number of liberal positions in an attempt to woo progressive voters, then sliding in the polls and running out of money.
Republicans are already using some of the positions she staked out in that race in attack ads.
Her time in the Senate
Maybe it’s because senators haven’t done all that much in the current polarized and dysfunctional Congress, but Ms. Harris didn’t talk specifically about any work she’d done there. That includes the grillings of top Trump administration officials and judicial nominees like now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh that first put her in the national spotlight.
Israel and Gaza
Israel’s war in Gaza has divided Democrats, creating a schism that makes President Biden’s support of Israel a huge problem with some base voters. Republicans have tried to turn his occasional criticism of Israel into a wedge issue with Jewish voters and a motivator for conservative Evangelicals. Ms. Harris has been a bit more critical of Israel than Mr. Biden – but she avoided the thorny topic in her initial campaign speeches.
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