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Vice President Kamala Harris could not have asked for a better rollout week.
President Joe Biden endorsed her. Most labor unions got behind her quickly, she’s raised a trove of cash and on Friday, she secured the endorsement of former president Barack Obama. Polling shows she’s performing better in some swing states than Biden did.
“So this is, and long has been, a vibes election, it is not a list-making election,” Jon Reinish, a Democratic strategist, told The Independent. “It's not just Kamala Harris and the campaign that she is quickly building and or has inherited. It's down ballot. But, I mean, it's also that, it's in the White House, on the government side, on the policy side.”
The Harris campaign has also hit the Trump campaign for the former president pulling out of the second debate. In the same token, on Thursday evening, a Zoom call titled White Women for Harris featured tons of would-be donors and celebrities such as actress Connie Britton and athletes like soccer legend Megan Rapinoe and retired WNBA superstar Sue Bird all joined it, as did gun control activist Shannon Watts and Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrowsuch raising a trove of cash for the vice president, generating jokes on social media about it being “Karens for Kamala.”
Felicity Pereyra, a former data director for the Democratic National Committee, was on the White Women for Harris call and a separate Latinas for Harris Zoom call.
“You can't manufacture this, this is all organic,” Pereyra told The Independent. “This is all real. And again, like she can her campaign can harness this.”
By the same token, Republicans have been forced to recalibrate. As Inside Washington reported earlier this week, Donald Trump’s campaign is labeling Harris’s jump in the polls as the “Harris Honeymoon.” And indeed, Republicans seem to have found two weak spots where they can attack her: crime and immigration.
On Thursday, House Republicans distracted from the fact they have been utterly unable to pass the necessary spending bills by introducing a resolution condemning Biden and Harris specifically in her capacity as “border czar.” Republicans harping about the influx of immigration at the US-Mexico border is not news; they’ve done that since Biden took office.
What is new is that six Democrats--including three who represent districts that voted for Donald Trump--voted to condemn her. Down ballot, Republicans are trying to tie Democrats who immediately backed her to some of Harris’s more left-wing policies to thereby position vulnerable incumbents as radicals.
Harmeet Dhillon, a member of the Republican National Committee for California, told The Independent that she planned on hitting Harris for her work on crime going back to the days when Harris was a district attorney for San Francisco.
“I actually voted for her because she ran on a tough-on-crime platform, and then, you know, four months in, she betrays her voters,” she told The Independent, noting how even Democrats like then-senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein criticized her for not pursuing the death penalty for the killer of slain police officer Isaac Espinoza in 2004.
“You can go out there and laugh and change the subject and talk about your race and whatever, and dance and be goofy,” she said. “ But ultimately, this is the you know, sweepstakes here, running for president, the leader of the free world, and she is not going to get a free pass. Maybe from the fawning media.”
When Harris ran for president in 2019, she received criticism for being too tough on crime, creating the meme that “Kamala Harris is a Cop,” at a time when many progressives began to mistrust police.
“Both things can be true,” Dhillon said. “So you can rack up your numbers by imprisoning people for relatively low-level offenses. That's what she did, all right? So that's what pisses people off.”
But both Harris and her opponents will have to act fast because the campaign has slightly more than 100 days left.
“She's been in politics in the biggest state in the country, as vice president, of course, but she's still not the 100 percent well-known figure with deeply baked-in opinions that Donald Trump is,” Reinish told The Independent.
“They have an opportunity to potentially move a lot of folks once they start telling her story, communicating the record, communicating the vision, it,” Pereyra said.
That means that Harris will need to have a spring to the finish line, from the convention to potentially debating Trump to get-out-the-vote efforts.
“I think her next big thing is picking a vice president that definitely balances out her, while also kind of building on that momentum and enthusiasm behind her,” Atima Omara, a Democratic strategist in Virginia who is a member of the Democratic National Committee, told The Independent.
Pereyra said that the veepstakes gives Democrats an opportunity to engage with voters.
“’Is it going to be Senator Kelly? Is it going to be Pete Buttigieg? Like, who is it’ to sort of keep people tuned in there all the way through until the convention, announce it at the convention,” Pereyra said. “They should probably do, you know, do some sort of effort to get people engaged with the campaign and, like, sign up for text messages.”
Ultimately, though, Pereyra said the big challenge will be keeping voters engaged and feel like they have a voice in the campaign.
“So when they harness this right, like harness this natural, organic energy, they have to harness it by deputizing all of these people that are coming out of the woodwork to essentially be deputy organizers for the campaign,” she said. “That’s how they win.”
