With about 100 days left until the presidential election, the race is on to determine the personality of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Republicans have been hammering home their message, blaming Harris for being “dangerously liberal,” and have significantly outspent their Democratic colleagues in the days since President Biden announced he would not seek reelection.
Trump and his allies clearly view Harris’s early key role on immigration within the Biden administration as a political liability: A Trump campaign email to reporters on Friday alleged that Harris was “complicit in fomenting an invasion of our nation’s border.”
Democrats, meanwhile, are riding a wave of enthusiasm to install Harris as the de facto nominee after weeks of crisis that have besieged Biden. Her campaign’s first ad, with Beyoncé’s “Freedom” playing in the background, portrays the vice president as a champion of democracy but also of economic fairness, reproductive rights and gun safety.
More broadly, the Harris campaign is trying to portray her career in law and politics (she is a former prosecutor and later attorney general of California) as driven by a willingness to take on powerful interests on behalf of ordinary people, a portrayal that echoes the slogan of her first presidential run in 2020: “Kamala Harris for the People.”
Of course, Harris’ 2020 campaign was a disappointment and she withdrew before the Iowa caucuses, giving some Democrats skeptical of her chances of defeating Trump some cause to ponder.
Since Biden’s withdrawal, a series of polls have shown Harris rapidly shrinking the lead Trump enjoyed but not completely overturning it, at least in most polls.
A Wall Street Journal poll released Friday gave Trump a two-point lead over Harris among likely voters, 49% to 47%. A Wall Street Journal poll conducted earlier this month had Biden trailing Trump by six points.
A New York Times/Siena College poll released the previous day showed Trump leading by one point among likely voters, 48 percent to 47 percent. The Times poll had shown Trump leading Biden by six points about a month earlier.
Strategists in both parties believe public opinion of Harris, who has only been elected to the Senate for eight years, is not as solidified as that of Biden, who has been a fixture on the national political stage for half a century.
In a public memo this week, Harris’ campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon (who held the same role in the now-disbanded Biden campaign) argued that the vice president could expand on the support Biden gained during his 2020 election victory.
The campaign chairman argued that Harris’s near certainty as the nominee “gives us more persuadable voters to work with to gain their support. The race is now more fluid. The vice president is well known, but not as well known as President Trump or President Biden, especially among the Democratic base.”
Republicans, naturally, see it very differently and are putting their money where their mouth is.
According to an Associated Press analysis, in the week since Biden announced his withdrawal, the Trump campaign outspent Harris supporters by a wide margin – about 25 to 1 – on television and radio ads.
The Associated Press found that Trump supporters had spent more than $68 million on advertising at the time, while Harris and her allies had spent just $2.6 million on advertising.
The Trump campaign has made it clear what narrative it wants to inject into Harris.
“Kamala Harris is just as incompetent as Joe Biden and even more dangerously liberal,” Caroline Leavitt, national spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said in the column.
“She was the Senate runoff voter for Joe Biden’s most disastrous policies. Not only will Kamala have to defend her support for Joe Biden’s failed policies of the past four years, she will also have to explain her own abysmal weak record on crime in California. A vote for Kamala is a vote for continued inflation, open borders, high gas prices, and wars around the world.”
Levitt also claimed Harris had “failed her job as border secretary” and was “dangerously liberal.”
Immigration is clearly an area of weakness for Harris, given that it has been one of the Biden administration’s weakest issues, with polls frequently showing that voters disapprove of the president’s handling of the border by roughly two-to-one margins.
The question of where Harris stands ideologically – a puzzling question that is widely believed to have hurt her campaign in the 2020 primary – is also not likely to be easily resolved.
On Friday, Harris’ campaign told The Hill’s Rachel Frazin that she would not support a ban on fracking during the presidential election, despite her support for doing so as a 2020 candidate.
Ms Harris’ comments a day after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemed to signal more sympathy for the Palestinian plight than Mr Biden typically expresses, but it is unclear what substantive change she might bring if the conflict drags on beyond the president-elect’s inauguration in January.
Harris, in fairness, is in a difficult position to differentiate herself from Biden on any issue because she is both the incumbent vice president and the presumptive nominee, the first incumbent vice president to seek the top spot since Democrat Al Gore in 2000.
How each side wants to define Harris is also still in flux.
Her allies have yet to come up with a clear “bumper sticker” slogan other than the “Freedom” ad.
Meanwhile, Trump has given his vice president a few nicknames but has yet to settle on one — a sign, broadly, that he’s not clear on the best line of attack.
With the race so close and a small number of undecided voters, whoever wins the battle to define Harris is likely to win the broader battle as well.
This note is a reporting column by Niall Stanage.
