The View, America’s most popular daytime talkshow, was on commercial break. Kamala Harris sat writing absence notes for students who were missing class to attend the live broadcast. “Is it just today, right?” the vice-president laughed.
She handed over the letters written on notepaper headed “The Vice President”. One said: “Dear teacher, please excuse Dani from class today. She was hanging out with us. Best and thank you for being an educator. Kamala.”
It was an unscripted moment that the studio audience loved but TV viewers wouldn’t see. Harris, running the shortest presidential campaign in modern US history after being unexpectedly plunged into the fight when Joe Biden dropped out, is exploring ways to reveal herself to a wary nation.
Still a relatively unknown quantity, the former California attorney general and US senator is trying to make the electorate feel comfortable about the prospect of President Kamala Harris.
In less than three months the vice-president has raised a record-breaking billion dollars. She has tried to put daylight between herself and the unpopular incumbent figure of Biden, and turn the election into a referendum on her opponent, former US president Donald Trump. She has sought to bring positive vibes to a country that seems to have anxiety in its bones. She has set out to persuade America to do something that it has never done before in its 248-year existence: elect a woman to the White House – and a woman of colour to boot.
Harris has done it while carrying the burden of the hopes of millions in America and beyond who fear the return of Trump to the White House would herald a new dark age for American democracy and the planet. Opinion polls suggest the race is currently a dead heat.
Last week the Guardian joined her for three days on the campaign trail, flying hundreds of miles across country on Air Force Two, trailing her motorcade as it halted traffic in Manhattan and putting questions to her in two off-the-record gatherings with reporters. The Democratic nominee was lawyerly on some topics and disarmingly open on others. She could display righteous anger, for example about Trump’s affinity with dictators, but also a light touch and homespun wit. She was comfortable in her skin.
No presidential candidate has enjoyed the use of Air Force Two since Democrat Al Gore in 2000. At first glance it resembles the presidential plane, Air Force One, painted blue and white with the typeface for the legend “United States of America” similar to the one used in the Declaration of Independence.
But inside it is a less glamorous affair: dated decor of dark brown chairs, white cabin walls, a blank TV screen. Inside a seat pocket was a tatty, dog-eared leaflet entitled: “C-32A. Boeing 757-22 safety”. There is no wifi or inflight entertainment. The main clues as to its special status is a vice-presidential seal on a wall and on phone handsets beside windows.
Another clue: the frequent appearance of Harris, after boarding but before takeoff, to ask reporters “what you got?” on an off-the-record basis with aides keeping watch. The 59-year-old stands at 5ft 4in and a quarter, her makeup and clothing immaculate, her gaze fixed on each reporter as they ask and she answers. The mood is convivial. The charisma factor is high. The responses are enlightening rather than revelatory.
Harris’s willingness to hold such interactions might explain a mismatch between her perceived media shyness and a more generous attitude among some journalists. She was long criticised for dodging interviews, a topic the Guardian raised with her in person. But a candidate’s willingness to engage with reporters behind the scenes can add a frisson of exclusivity; doing so off the record can give the impression of authenticity.
Notably, in the days before she was a candidate, Harris would often struggle to attract media interest in her travels, sometimes flying with a solitary reporter. Some allies believe this explains why she was underreported and underappreciated for so long.
This week, however, she launched an intense media blitz. Having told her story at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, and prosecuted the case against Trump at their only debate in Philadelphia, she was now on a kaleidoscopic interview tour designed, as CNN put it, to project “in four words, ‘I’m a normal person.’ (And that Trump is not.)”
Frank Luntz, a political consultant and pollster, said: “The secret of this campaign is that Donald Trump needs to say less and Kamala Harris needs to say more. The more that Trump says, the worse he gets; the less that Harris says, the worse she gets. Just as their politics are exactly the opposite, so are their strategies.”
Harris appeared on 60 Minutes, a heavyweight current affairs programme on the CBS network that has interviewed every major presidential candidate for more than half a century (Trump agreed but then backed out). She went on the podcast Call Her Daddy in an appeal to young women who follow host Alex Cooper’s frank conversations about sex and relationships (a recent episode was entitled “Heather McMahan: Blow jobs, hall passes, & frat daddies”).
During the interview, Cooper asked about the Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s comments that the vice-president “doesn’t have anything keeping her humble” because she does not have biological children of her own. Harris responded pointedly: “I don’t think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble.”
On Tuesday, as Harris’s motorcade wended its way, streets in midtown Manhattan were temporarily closed down. Hundreds of bustling New Yorkers stopped and stared, learning the art of patience or taking pictures or videos on their phones.
The View is based in new studios in New York’s Hudson Square, with a fast-talking, microphone-wielding warm-up artist keeping the audience amped up. Harris entered to the strains of Beyoncé’s anthem Freedom (a striking contrast to Trump’s lineup of ageing white rockers) and was cheered to the rafters as she embraced Whoopi Goldberg and other co-hosts. She unveiled a policy plan to help the “sandwich generation” caught between caring for ageing parents and children.
But history has shown that so-called softball interviews often lay the biggest traps. Harris, whose campaign is an awkward dance of trying to bask in Biden’s legislative accomplishments while shrugging off his perceived failures, was asked if she would have done anything differently from him over the past four years.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of – and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact,” she replied. Trump scented blood. With characteristic misogyny, he called it Harris’s “dumbest answer so far” and complained: “The Lamestream Media doesn’t want to pick up the story, the dumb women on the show wish they never asked her the question that led to that Election Defying answer, but the Internet is going WILD.”
A chorus of Trump allies joined in but they were not alone in detecting a gaffe. Steve Schmidt, a Trump critic who worked on Senator John McCain’s 2008 campaign and first floated the idea of Sarah Palin as his running mate, invoked misstatements by past presidential candidates who went on to lose.
Schmidt wrote on Substack: “The question is whether this quote joins John Kerry’s ‘I voted for it before I voted against it.’ Or John McCain’s ‘the fundamentals of the economy are strong.’ Or Mitt Romney’s 47% quote: ‘There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.’”
He called it the Harris campaign’s worst day by far since her entry into the race. “It follows a trend line of creeping incoherence and contradiction within the core message that could be politically fatal if not arrested – immediately.”
Still, as Harris left the View studios, a group of students let out a noise that was half-cheer, half-shriek. She proceeded to an office block containing the satellite radio station SiriusXM and sat with Howard Stern, whose show has an audience that is 73% male and 85% white. It was her most personal interview of the campaign yet.
Among the snippets: she ate a family-sized bag of Doritos after Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016. She works out on an elliptical every day and liked Special K cereal. Her first job was cleaning test tubes at her mother’s laboratory and she got fired. Her favourite Formula One driver is Lewis Hamilton. She went to see the band U2 at the Sphere in Las Vegas and recommends going with a “clear head” – meaning not high on drugs – because “there’s a lot of visual stimulation”.
There was also a rare insight into the weight on her shoulders. Harris said: “I literally lose sleep, and have been, over what is at stake in this election. I mean, honestly, I end the day pretty much every day, these days, asking myself, what can I do more? Because the stakes are so high.”
Harris has been reluctant to indulge identity politics and embrace her status as the first Black woman and first woman of south Asian heritage to be a major party nominee. Stern asked if there were people who will not vote for a woman because she is a woman. Harris replied: “Listen, I have been the first woman in almost every position I’ve had, so I believe that men and women support women in leadership and that’s been my life experience and that’s why I’m running for president.”
It was a far cry from Hillary Clinton describing her own nomination as “a milestone in our nation’s march toward a more perfect union” and issuing a clarion call for women to break “the highest, hardest glass ceiling”. Kate Cohen, a columnist for the Washington Post newspaper, wrote: “This time, we’re quiet – from superstition, maybe, or from knowing how hope can plant a land mine in your heart. Kamala Harris is keeping it quiet, too, campaigning in unisex Converse sneakers rather than in heels.”
The past two elections have been dominated by class and race. This one might be determined by gender A recent NBC poll found that men favour Trump over Harris by 12 points, 52% to 40%. Among women, Harris led Trump by 21 points: 58% to 37%. That adds up to a historic gap of 33 points.
The day finished at The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, a comedian whose brand of political satire has had medicinal value in the toxic era of Trump. The late-night show with live band takes place before an audience in Broadway’s Ed Sullivan Theater, which opened in 1927 with a young Cary Grant and hosted the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.
In an amusing 40-minute interview, Colbert gave Harris two implicit auditions. One was the perennial commander-in-chief test. She proved fiercely authoritative, reminiscent of her finest moments at the debate, in eviscerating Trump as a threat to democracy and national security.
“He openly admires dictators and authoritarians,” she said, her voice rising in indignation. “He has said he wants to be a dictator on day one if he were elected again as president. He gets played by these guys. He admires so-called strongmen and he gets played because they flatter him or offer him favour.”
Reacting to an account by the journalist Bob Woodward that Trump sent Covid testing kits to Russia’s Vladimir Putin even as US citizens were in need, Harris urged the audience: “Think about what this means on top of him sending love letters to Kim Jong-un. He thinks, well, that’s his friend. What about the American people? They should be your first friend.”
Colbert’s other test recalled a longtime staple of election campaigns: which candidate would you rather grab a beer with? The host made it literal by pulling out two cans of Miller High Life (chosen by Harris in advance). She took a sip of “the champagne of beers” and said the last time she drank beer was at a baseball game with husband Doug Emhoff.
Soon after, Harris delivered a sharp jab at Trump’s expense: “When you lost millions of jobs, you lost manufacturing, you lost automotive plants, you lost the election, what does that make you? A loser. This is what somebody at my rallies said. I thought it was funny.”
Colbert remarked: “It’s accurate. It’s accurate.”
Harris confessed: “This is what happens when I drink beer!”
Gore’s defeat in 2000 is often attributed to the notion that, stiff and cerebral, he would have been less fun over a beer than his Republican rival George W Bush. Bill Galston, who worked on the Gore campaign, said: “Likability counts in politics everywhere but particularly when you’re dealing with someone who’s going to be a major presence in your life, for good or ill, for the next four years.
“A fair number of people are asking themselves, do I want to spend the next four years with this person in my living room or on my computer? Will I dread or worry about each encounter? Or will it be relatively pleasant even if not always agreeable in substance? That does matter.”
As a candidate, Harris has projected happy warrior, placing a bet that the politics of joy will elevate rather than clash with the national mood. As vice-president, she must still discharge solemn duties. On Wednesday, hunkered down at a New York hotel, she joined Biden on a call with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, (according to Woodward’s book, Biden has previously described Netanyahu as a “son of a bitch” and “bad fucking guy”). She remains under pressure from progressives to distance herself from Biden’s Gaza policy.
Harris also took part in a briefing on preparations for Hurricane Milton and gave phone interviews to CNN and The Weather Channel. Part of her mission was to counter disinformation spread by Trump and his acolytes.
In the afternoon the vice-president flew on Air Force Two from New York to Las Vegas, disembarking in desert heat and beholding the kitsch delights of Sin City including replicas of the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty and Great Pyramid and Great Sphinx of Giza. Earlier that day the Tropicana hotel and casino, a relic of the mob era, had been reduced to rubble in a controlled implosion. Elsewhere, gamblers were still trying their luck at blackjack or in vast arcades of slot machines. It was a metaphor-rich environment for a candidate seeking to prove her authenticity, avoid campaign mishaps and counter accusations that she is risk averse.
She is doing it all in competition with a man about whom little mystery remains. While some Americans are still asking, who is Kamala Harris?, no one, it seems, is asking who is Donald Trump? As the Atlantic magazine noted in an endorsement of Harris this week: “No voter could be ignorant by now of who he is. Opinions about Trump aren’t just hardened – they’re dried out and exhausted.”
Kamala Harris, however, still has a story to tell in her quest to become the 47th president of the United States – even though it cuts against her instincts.
“It feels immodest to me to talk about myself, which currently I’m doing right now,” she admitted to Stern on Tuesday. “A friend of mine actually said, look, this is not a time to worry about modesty because, obviously, you gotta let people know who you are.”
