San Francisco Chronicle (Sunday)
Harris a much different candidate than in ’20
WASHINGTON, D.C. — One of the many insults Donald Trump hurled during last week’s presidential debate was a dig at Kamala Harris’ failed 2020 run for president.
“She got zero votes. And when she ran, she was the first one to leave because she failed. And now she’s running. I don’t understand it but I’m OK with it — because I think we’re going to do pretty well,” Trump said.
Harris has been widely hailed as the winner of the debate, the latest in a string of successes since launching her campaign in late July, including an enormous fundraising haul — $361 million in August alone — record attendance at rallies and boosting the hopes of candidates in critical down-ballot races.
It’s a far cry from that 2020 run, when her campaign struggled with personnel disputes, unclear political ideology and flawed decision-making, leading to a dearth of funds and her eventual withdrawal.
The unique, rushed nature of this election and the current political climate has made Harris appear more confident, comfortable and sure of her instincts than she has in her past elections, nearly a dozen current and former advisers, allies and political analysts told the Chronicle.
Nearly four years as vice president has helped Harris hone her campaigning skills, and the short election cycle has helped blunt some of her past weaknesses, they said.
“She’s got 31⁄2-plus years of life experience and job experience and hardening that I think is reflected in that confidence that you’re seeing right now,” said Brian Brokaw, who managed Harris’ successful 2010 and 2014 campaigns for attorney general, was a senior adviser to her 2016 Senate campaign and ran a super PAC supporting her 2020 presidential campaign. That experience “gives her a little bit more freedom to perhaps try to be herself a bit more in a way that’s authentic and true to who she is,” he said.
During Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Harris marched across the stage to Trump — who had stopped behind his lectern — extended her hand and introduced herself. At her rallies, she basks in the applause, cracks jokes and belly laughs. She struts on stage to Beyoncé’s 2016 song “Freedom.” When she and President Joe Biden held their first official joint appearance since he dropped out of the race, she played up her own role in policy successes.
This time around, Harris appears less scripted, more confident and more willing to buck the prevailing D.C. ideology when her instincts tell her otherwise, something Democrats say is a good sign amid the incredibly close race and the high stakes of the election.
“She is able to really be — she is herself. She is Kamala prosecuting Donald Trump. And I think when you have a convicted felon as your opponent, you can lean on more of your experience,” Long Beach Rep. Robert Garcia, who has known Harris since 2010, told the Chronicle.
Harris is still the same person as before, but “there is a seriousness about her that I think is reflective of the seriousness of the moment,” Brokaw told the Chronicle.
Harris has, however, continued to demonstrate two key vulnerabilities: difficulty with interviews, and in communicating her political ideology. She’s also facing an opponent whose supporters have shown a cult-like loyalty, and are unlikely to abandon him regardless of how he performs.
Right person, right time?
Harris’ initial year and a half as vice president was marred by the narrative around her staff turnover; a portfolio of thorny issues like voting rights and immigration; and being tethered to Washington, D.C., both due to COVID and because of her role as a tiebreaker in the evenly split Senate.
But things changed when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
She traveled all over the country trumpeting the importance of reproductive rights, appearances that served as a crucial warm-up for a campaign in which abortion remains arguably the biggest issue.
During those stops, she became more comfortable going off script, changing her remarks at the last minute and showing more of her emotions, as she did in March 2023 at a castle in Ghana where slaves were held before being put on ships to North America, and in Jacksonville, Fla., the day after Florida changed its Black history curriculum.
During the carefully coordinated trip to Africa, she deviated from her prepared remarks in a rare, unguarded moment. “The horror of what happened here must always be remembered,” she said. “It cannot be denied. It must be taught.”
The Florida trip was a lastminute decision to respond to an issue she felt she could speak best to.
“The liability that a lawyer carries into public office is a tendency to engage in tightly reasoned, factually based argument without a capacity to generalize back out, to empathize with audiences, and to engage in compelling narrative,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Public Policy Center. Harris is now “managing to do both,” she said.
As people “move to greater and greater levels of responsibility, they become more comfortable being the person who has that responsibility and projecting it,” Jamieson said, and Harris’ roles have “drawn out those facets of her personality and have developed that capacity.”
While she may have changed or improved as a candidate, “If what it takes to win in a particular election year doesn’t sync up with who you are, you’re just wrong person, wrong time,” said Nathan Barankin, who served as Harris’ chief of staff in the California attorney general’s office and Senate and was a senior adviser to her 2020 presidential campaign.
Biden ran two unsuccessful campaigns before winning his third, he noted.
Biden was “the wrong person at the wrong time right up until 2020. And then you really could not have pulled a better candidate out of central casting,” Barankin said.
The Supreme Court’s abortion decision, Trump’s continuing hold on the Republican Party and Biden’s advancing age have all combined to make this a more opportune moment for Harris.
“She was transformed, almost overnight, from somebody who many people thought was a drag on the ticket to all of a sudden a candidate running neck-andneck with a former president for the highest office in the land,” Brokaw said.
Instead of wondering whether Harris has improved as a candidate, people should consider that it may be that the environment around her has changed, California Sen. Laphonza Butler told the Chronicle.
The shorter timeline created by Biden’s departure from the race also meant Republicans had less time to develop a clear strategy against her. Trump has made racist and sexist attacks against her, which aren’t likely to alienate his die-hard supporters but could turn off undecided voters.
What went wrong in 2020
The unique circumstances leading up to Harris’ ascension to the top of the ticket have also insulated her from some of the dynamics that doomed her in 2020 — including a bruising primary.
“When she was running against Democrats in a primary, I think it’s harder to define your opponents who are also your friends and colleagues. This time, she’s defining someone that literally she’s spent her whole life fighting,” Garcia said.
Harris’ failed 2020 presidential campaign was a “poll-tested disaster,” a former adviser who was granted anonymity in order to speak freely told the Chronicle. One of the biggest problems was the campaign’s tendency to second-guess or poll every single decision made, multiple people who were involved said. Harris came off as inauthentic at times as a result.
Three weeks into her 2024 campaign, however, Harris’ pollsters suggested to her senior advisers that she stop saying, “We’re not going back” and calling Republicans “weird,” CNN reported. Harris and her staff decided to stick with the lines that were resonating with rally-goers and trust her instincts, a senior campaign adviser who was granted anonymity in order to speak freely told the Chronicle.
When political pundits were pushing Harris to pick Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate, she “trusted her gut, not a poll. And no one has done that in Democratic politics in a long time,” veteran campaign strategist Rebecca Katz told New York Magazine.
“She is confident enough in
her own understanding of what the country needs and what she wants to communicate as a candidate that she’s not going to be entirely persuaded by political professionals,” said Kelly Dittmar, director of research at Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “That level of comfort comes from having done this previously and been unsuccessful.”
Butler recalled being with Harris the night the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade leaked. Harris realized how far “the extreme right would go, and she just said, ‘You know what? F— being perfect for everybody else. I’m going to be me because the me that I am is a fighter,’” Butler told New York Magazine.
Running as a woman or a woman of color is “not an either/ or kind of situation. It’s not a (situation where) you can’t relax and it’s not a (situation where) they’re ready to accept you because neither of those are true. And at the same time, both of them are true,” Butler, a longtime Harris friend and ally, told the Chronicle. “It is about running the race
that is most strategic for you.”
Many of the traits Harris’ opponents have criticized — her laugh, being the child of immigrants, her dancing — have racist undertones that have “blunted her willingness to be open and share those things,” said Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, which advocates for Black women in politics.
Harris has also opened up more about her family during this campaign, something Barankin and Brokaw each pointed out as a major change.
During the Democratic National Convention in August, Harris spoke in detail about her life growing up.
“My early memories of our parents together are very joyful ones: a home filled with laughter and music — Aretha, Coltrane, and Miles. At the park, my mother would say, ‘Stay close.’ But my father would say, as he smiled, ‘Run, Kamala, run. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you,’ ” Harris said. “But the harmony between my parents did not last. When I was in elementary school, they split up, and it was mostly my mother who raised us.”
Barankin said he and others have long encouraged Harris to talk more about her family, but
she had been reluctant to do so in the past.
“It has taken her a long time to get more comfortable with opening up in ways that I have seen her open up in the course of the last month and a half,” Brokaw said.
Now “we are witnessing the very things that have been used as weapons against her, and people like her in leadership, are now profound assets,” something that will have implications for the people who come after her, Allison said.
Enduring vulnerabilities
Harris has typically performed well during debates.
When it comes to interviews, however, “she is not as concise and it takes her longer to get to the narrative that is ultimately conveying her point,” Jamieson said. “It may just be a sense of role difference, that in one she’s feeling more like the prosecutor” and not in the other, she said.
It’s a weakness that media pundits and Republicans have latched onto, questioning for weeks why Harris hadn’t done a sit-down interview. When she did her first interview, she was methodical and risk-averse with occasionally winding answers. She also declined to address the
historic nature of her campaign and Trump’s racist attacks, saying “Same old tired playbook. Next question, please.”
Her campaign said Thursday that she would do interviews with local media in battleground states and participate in an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists next week.
Harris has also faced continued questions about her political ideology. She has moderated some of the positions she took during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, including rescinding her support for a federal ban on fracking and decriminalizing illegal border crossings.
One of her 2020 vulnerabilities was that it was unclear what lane she had in the primary, Brokaw said. Harris was initially seen as an alternative to Biden — a newer, fresher, more centrist candidate — but other days ran to the left of Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
When asked about the changes in her policy positions, Harris told CNN her “values have not changed.”
Harris said she was “in favor of banning fracking” during a 2019 CNN town hall. In October 2020, she told “The View” that neither she nor Biden would ban fracking.
Harris was asked about the change during Tuesday’s presidential debate.
“I made that very clear in 2020. I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States. And, in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking. My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil,” she said.
Jamieson said Harris has struggled to clearly articulate why her positions have changed.
“You can evolve positions — people do it all the time — but you have to explain to people how you did it, why you did it and why the person you are right now is the person who believes this,” Jamieson said.
Harris’ political ideology is hard to pin down. Some Democrats see her as too liberal and some as too centrist — which was a liability in 2020, but can also make it difficult in 2024 for Republicans to pigeonhole her, Brokaw said.