Harris tries out new ways of reaching voters, but she’s running out of time

ROYAL OAK, MI — Within one small community theater in the suburbs of Detroit, Vice President Kamala Harris was asked at a recent forum to talk about her life for the benefit of voters who are still getting to know her.

It was the kind of question typically asked of a new candidate. But here, Harris got it less than two weeks before the Nov. 5 election and after millions of people had already voted. Her response perhaps underscored the defining challenge of her campaign for the White House.

“How much time do we have?” Harris joked.

The fact is: not much.

Any candidate’s most valuable resource is time, and from the start, Harris has historically been limited. The Democratic candidate has only been in office for three months Democratic President Joe Biden dropped out of the raceand Harris is still confronting voters who say they want to know more about who she is or how she will govern.

Her public events tended towards large gatherings where the crowd rides high on the vibes and Harris delivers variations on her standard stump speech. But in the past week she has added events in more intimate settings, quiet church services and black box theater sessions where the conversations can be more revealing.

“I’ve lived a full life,” Harris told the audience in Michigan. “I am a woman, I am a mother, I am a sister, I am a godmother. I like cooking.”

Harris, 60, is a relative newcomer to the national political scene.

Much of her career, she often reminds voters, took place outside Washington, in California as a prosecutor and attorney general. That was followed by a four-year stint in the Senate and a flameout in the 2020 race for the White House. Her time as vice president boosted her profile, but nothing like what a traditional candidate would do at this stage of the race. to have.

“Harris is still such a relatively unknown quantity as a candidate,” said Kevin Madden, a political strategist who has worked on three presidential campaigns. “It takes years to build the kind of national profile that can withstand the brutality of a president. presidential campaign.”

Biden ran several times before winning the nomination and had three decades of public service on his resume, including eight years as vice president. Democrat Barack Obama began building his profile during John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and the 2006 midterm elections, before his two-year quest for what would be his first term in the White House. On the Republican side, the Bush family brand was built over multiple presidential campaigns over two decades.

“It was always going to be a big, big challenge to build and execute a presidential campaign unique to Harris in 108 days,” Madden said.

Republican Donald Trumpmeanwhile, is a known quantity. He had near-universal name recognition even before his 2016 campaign, thanks to his time on reality television. He has essentially been campaigning since he lost the 2020 election to Biden — a fact he refuses to acknowledge to this day.

For Harris and her aides, the shortened campaign has presented benefits and challenges. But with no way to change the reality of that political timeline, all they can do is try to make the best of it.

That creates an endless series of difficult choices: where to go, what to talk about, who to talk to. These challenges emerge in the final weeks of every campaign, but for Harris they were central to her sprint.

Assistants designed the campaign in different phases.

During the opening days, Harris prioritized locking down the nomination and fend off any challengers. She then tried to introduce herself to the audience on her own terms. That meant talking about her biography, but also her governing philosophy, especially on economic issues, while potential voters complained they didn’t know what she was about.

Along the way, she has returned to Washington for duties related to her office, in an effort to strengthen the administration’s competence in responding to natural disasters and demonstrate its national security credentials as it approaches wars abroad.

“The hill was a little steeper for her to climb because of the short nature of the race, but that’s why she’s doing everything she can,” said Eric Schultz, who served as deputy White House press secretary under Obama.

In recent weeks, Harris has spoken more candidly about summer Sunday when Biden dropped out of the race and handed her the keys to the campaign. She offered voters a new perspective on her faith and sought to leverage a profound political moment into an opportunity to connect with voters.

“It was an extraordinary day that Sunday when the president called me, and I instinctively understood the gravity of the moment, the gravity of the moment.” she said during a town hall on CNN.

So she called her pastor, she said. “I needed that spiritual connection, I needed that advice, I needed a prayer.” She added that she prays every day.

The event in suburban Detroit was one of three events in crucial Midwestern states over the past week in which Harris participated by Liz Cheneya prominent Republican critic of Trump who has endorsed the Democrat answered questions from a moderator and an audience of undecided voters. It was a different version of the vice president than the one you saw at her meetings, more relaxed and talkative.

Rita Peterson, 48, said she was impressed by Harris’ ability to connect.

“I think if you come from a place of joy and you come from a place where you want to work together to move forward, I think there’s a lot of people who want to be a part of that and move forward together,” she said .

The talks with Cheney were aimed at attracting Republican voters, those worried about a second Trump presidency, especially in the wake of the election. Trump’s failed attempt to overthrow this the vote of 2020 and beyond the violent riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021as his supporters beat and bled law enforcement officers in an attempt to stop the certification of Biden’s victory.

In the final days of her campaign, Harris is focusing on creating a contrast with Trump. She will return to the spot near the White House where Trump helped incite the crowd on January 6, hoping that this will crystallize for voters the battle between defending democracy and sowing political chaos.

She will give a speech at the Ellipse on Tuesday – a week before election day – to urge the nation to ‘turn the page’.