WASHINGTON — The crowd is psychedThe campaign donations are floods inVolunteers are showing up en masse at the field offices.
After a largely smooth start to the two-week campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris heads into a pivotal week as she makes her most crucial decision yet: choosing a running mate. Meanwhile, she struggles with how to keep that early political momentum alive.
Harris, a former prosecutor known for his consultations, effectively has a Tuesday deadline to select who will be her No. 2 from a list compiled stripped down to four governors, a senator and a cabinet official who was also one of her 2020 opponents. It is a decision under high pressure which normally takes several months, but in this case it has been reduced to a matter of just a few weeks.
From there, Harris and her running mate will pursue an aggressive, seven states tour which begins Tuesday in Philadelphia and winds through Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. Her first rallies have drawn thousands of enthusiastic people.
Campaign officials are aware that momentum can be fleeting and are working to capitalize on the energy now, while managing expectations by keeping the focus on the race with the Republican nominee. Donald Trump is tight. But the strong rollout has allowed the Harris campaign to put some states back in play that were feared to be out of reach when President Joe Biden stayed with the at the top of the ticket.
Harris faces new challenges in the coming days as she makes key decisions, including her choice for vice president, and could disappoint elements of the coalition.
She hasn’t faced the level of scrutiny that presidential candidates typically face. While she has kept up a busy schedule of public appearances, she has rarely taken questions from the press or been interviewed in depth. After four years of advocating for Biden’s positions, she will have to take her own positions on the policy controversies that divide Democrats.
Harris’ message is becoming clearer by the day. Her first TV ad last week portrayed her as “fearless” and emphasized what has become a rallying cry for her campaign: “We are not going back.”
She also repeatedly emphasizes the concept of freedom, focusing not only on Trump as a threat to democracy, but also on the freedom to have an abortion and be safe from gun violence.
Meanwhile, her background as a prosecutor has emerged as a central dividing line with Trump. In rallies and ads, she contrasts her record of pursuing hardened criminals and corporate wrongdoers with Trump’s indictments, convictions and civil judgments.
Trump, in turn, has been busy defining her as a soft-on-crime liberal from San Francisco who was tasked with securing the border as vice president and failed. He blames her and Biden for inflation during their tenures. He has also gone after her personally, questioning her intelligence and her biracial identity.
As she and her TBD running mate enter the battlegrounds over the next week, the vice president is planning a renewed push in Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia. The Biden campaign had long identified them as top targets but had begun to abandon hope there in favor of shoring up the so-called “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Campaign Manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez is now focusing more on Arizona and Nevada, as officials say Harris has increased competitiveness against Trump in those two states, both of which Biden won four years ago.
“We are the underdogs in this race,” Dan Kanninen, the campaign manager for the battleground states, told reporters last week, echoing a line Harris himself emphasized. “But the groundswell of support around the vice president is real and meaningful. Our job now is to translate that enthusiasm into action.”
Harris’ campaign says volunteers made 2.3 million phone calls, knocked on 172,000 doors and sent nearly 2.9 million text messages to voters in contested states in 12 days. More than 130,000 people logged into an online organizing event with Harris, and 750,000 people registered for a campaign event for the first time, according to a memo from Kanninen.
Harris herself is remaining quiet in Washington this weekend, with interviews underway for about a half-dozen potential running mates who have effectively auditioned publicly via media interviews. The candidates on her interview list, all white men, include Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Tim Walz of Minnesota, as well as Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, according to people with knowledge of Harris’s selection process.
Harris has revealed little about her considerations, but she will undoubtedly draw on her own experience being vetted and ultimately chosen as Biden’s running mate four years ago. Several Democratic constituencies are lobbying vigorously for — or in some cases against — some of the names on the vice presidential shortlist, based on geographic considerations, past policy positions and voter sentiment.
Harris will formally become the Democratic nominee on Monday, when online voting for delegates ends. There is no suspense there: Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison said in a virtual meeting with supporters on Friday that Harris enough delegates secured to be nominated.
Friday’s hastily announced online gathering at times had the feel of a telethon and was plagued by technical issues, including audio glitches, underscoring that Harris’ campaign is still in its infancy in some ways.
Another big moment yet to come is the Harris-Trump debate – or not.
The two had an argument last weekend about when and where to debate. Trump withdrew from a Sept. 10 debate on ABC in favor of a Sept. 4 debate on Fox News. Harris’ campaign said she was sticking to the original date, and Trump posted on social media: “I’ll see her on Sept. 4 or I won’t see her at all.”