Kamala Harris is betting on a surge of Democratic enthusiasm to propel her campaign for the White House, casting the election as a fight to protect “freedom” in the United States from Donald Trump.
Harris hit the campaign trail this week with the wind in her sails, securing her position as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, raising more than $100 million (€92 million) and signing up nearly 60,000 people to volunteer to help get her elected in November, all in a little over 24 hours.
Her main messages to voters are already developing: that she is an agent of generational change, while Trump represents the past; that as a former prosecutor she can take him on as a convicted felon; that on the economy she is a more genuine defender of the middle class; and she will be a fierce champion for individual liberties against Republican extremism.
“Ours is a fight for the future. And it is a fight for freedom,” she said on Tuesday at a packed high school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the swing state city where Trump had won the Republican presidential nomination last week. The ecstatic crowd cheered and chanted, “we are not going back” – repeating one of the lines from her speech.
Harris is already making the case for the Democrats to retain the presidency more crisply and energetically than Joe Biden, who abruptly stepped down from his re-election fight on Sunday.
[ Opinion: Kamala Harris should have been given the chance to prove herselfOpens in new window ]
But with just over 100 days to go until the election, she faces an uphill battle if she is going to defeat Trump.
While few national and swing state opinion polls have been conducted since Harris entered the race, a snap Morning Consult poll on Monday gave Trump a two-point lead over Harris, 47-45. A Reuters/Ipsos poll on Tuesday gave Harris a slight edge. The vice-president’s nationwide approval ratings hover just under 39 per cent, according to the latest FiveThirtyEight average.
In a call with reporters on Tuesday, Trump said Harris “won’t be too tough” to beat, pointing out that her previous presidential campaign in 2020 was unsuccessful, with the then-US senator abandoning her primary bid a month before the Iowa caucuses.
But Democrats are optimistic about the promise of a 2024 Harris campaign and are furiously mapping out a path to victory.
“There is a tremendous amount of enthusiasm, energy and interest that, quite frankly, did not exist 72 hours ago,” said veteran Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi. “In a matter of hours, it went from a sure-loss election to now looking like an election that can be won.”
Democratic operatives see Harris as a trailblazer whose relative youth and diversity will energise important segments of the party’s coalition. At 59, she is roughly two decades younger than the 81-year-old Biden and 78-year-old Trump.
If elected, Harris would be the first female president in US history. She would also be the first Asian-American president – her mother was an immigrant to the US from India – and only the second black president, after Barack Obama.
[ Analysis: Where Kamala Harris stands on five crucial issuesOpens in new window ]
Amandi’s polling company, which advised both of Obama’s successful presidential campaigns, conducted a survey earlier this month, several weeks before Biden dropped out, showing Harris leading Trump by one point in a hypothetical match-up. Amandi said he expected those numbers to improve as Harris’s campaign gets under way.
“The poll showed a lot of room for growth with a range of voters, whether they be women, black voters, Hispanic voters and younger voters,” he said. “I would anticipate those numbers are going to rise.”
Trump’s own pollster, Tony Fabrizio, said in a memo on Tuesday that he also expected Harris to experience a polling bump in the weeks to come.
Fabrizio said a “Harris Honeymoon” would be a “manifestation of the wall-to-wall coverage Harris receives from the [mainstream media]”, adding: “The coverage will be largely positive and will certainly energise Democrats and some other parts of their coalition, at least in the short term.”
But Democrats insist the enthusiasm surrounding Harris will continue and the grassroots effort to elect her and defeat Trump will help supercharge her three-month sprint of a campaign.
“If you have a great organisation, with enthusiastic volunteers, who are going to do whatever they need to make sure they vote, their family votes, their neighbours vote, that is worth three to five points alone,” said longtime Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh. “That is the difference between winning and losing.”
Marsh and other Democrats are also confident Harris has the potential to win over at least some of the electorate who dislike both Biden and Trump. Surveys have shown that as many as one in four US voters identify as “double haters”, rejecting the current and former president.
“There are a lot of voters out there who said, ‘I don’t like my choice.’ Well, now they have a different choice,” said Marsh.
While Biden spoke often about Trump as a threat to American democracy, Harris is pitching her argument differently, with the stakes being individual freedoms. Beyoncé's song Freedom was blaring on the loudspeakers as she walked on stage in Milwaukee.
She spoke about voting rights and safety from gun violence and made clear she would focus on abortion – a big issue for Democratic voters after three Trump-appointed US supreme court justices in 2022 helped to strike down the constitutional right to an abortion.
The Democrats consider Harris an effective messenger on the issue, which helped secure the party’s electoral victories in the 2022 midterms and subsequent special elections.
“I think it’s powerful coming from a woman,” said Jess O’Connell, a longtime Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s and Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaigns. “It’s powerful coming from someone who has been making the case for this from the beginning, and isn’t new to this issue. It’s about freedom.”
Democratic strategists say as Harris energises the Democratic base she must also court the moderate, swing and independent voters who could ultimately decide the election.
“She’s got to focus on the middle. That’s where the election will be won or lost,” said Matt Bennett of Third Way, a centre-left group in Washington.
Still, many Democrats acknowledge that Harris’s run for the White House could also be handicapped by some voters’ implicit or explicit sexism against a female candidate.
“There is no playbook to elect a woman president. There are lots of plans, but we have yet to do it,” said Marsh. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
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