Vice President Kamala Harris will make history Thursday night as the first woman of color to accept a major party presidential nomination. nomination. But did you know she worked at McDonald's in college and stood up to a bully when she was 4?
As Harris says Campaign attempts to reintroduce it to the country at this week's Democratic National Convention, they seek to balance the excitement of a Pioneer candidate with the need to paint her in three dimensions. That means highlighting her origin as a middle-class daughter of a single mother as much as her status as a First female and mixed-race vice president.
“Their story is your story,” former first lady Michelle Obama said Tuesday. “It’s my story. It’s the story of the vast majority of Americans trying to build a better life.”
Polls and focus groups suggest that many Americans know who they are. Harris But there’s not much to say about it. The compressed nature of the campaign puts more pressure on the party convention to define it in positive terms before former President Trump, who held his convention before President Biden stepped aside last month, can cast it in a negative light.
Americans have fairly fixed opinions about Trump, who has served one term as president and has been in the public eye since the 1980s, including on the reality show “The Apprentice,” which framed his image as a successful business magnate. About 43% of them view him favorably, according to the FiveThirtyEight.com poll average, a figure that has remained fairly stable throughout much of his political career, except for a drop of 4 to 5 points after the January 6 insurrection.
Harris, by contrast, has remained in the background as vice president after a brief and unsuccessful campaign for president in the 2020 Democratic primary. Her approval rating has risen from less than 38% to more than 44% in the month since Biden dropped out of the election and endorsed her — a big shift for a national politician in the heat of a presidential contest.
“The thing about vice presidents is that the disadvantage is that nobody knows who you are. The advantage is that nobody knows who you are,” David Axelrod, former President Obama’s chief strategist, said at a University of Chicago Institute of Politics event on Wednesday.
“You have a chance to define yourself,” Axelrod added. “She’s a candidate who’s turning the page right now, and the fight right now is whether the Trump people can get her back to incumbent status and hold her accountable for the things that Biden has done.”
Harris has more room to grow than Trump, as 47% of voters view her unfavorably, compared to 52% of voters who say they disapprove of Trump.
“She's a blank slate,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who conducts focus groups periodically.
To fill in those blanks, Democrats have been bombarding local audiences with videos and testimonies about Harris’s biography, including old photographs of her late mother, Shyamala, who for a time raised Harris as a single mother on top of a daycare center, as well as Harris’s time as a prosecutor and California attorney general, going after predators, gangs and big banks.
During her 2020 election campaign, Harris eschewed her role as a tough prosecutor amid backlash from the party’s base. This week, she’s being praised for putting rapists, child molesters and murderers behind bars while creating a diversion program for nonviolent offenders.
The glimpses into his personal life also mark an evolution for a politician who has been selective in revealing it.
Harris’s relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown in 1994 and 1995, chronicled in local gossip columns, has made her more private for much of her career. In her 2019 memoir, she did not mention Brown but wrote about the pressure she felt as a single professional woman in her 40s in the public eye when she began dating Doug Emhoff, whom she married in 2014.
On Tuesday, the second gentleman recounted awkward moments of their courtship, including a voicemail he left her before their first date and the call she received while he was eating lunch at his desk.
“We talked for an hour and laughed. Well, you know that laugh? I love that laugh,” Emhoff said, noting they would celebrate their 10th anniversary on Thursday.
On Monday, her childhood best friend, Stacey Johnson Batiste, spoke from the podium about the scar Harris received above her eye when she confronted a “bully” who broke Batiste's pottery project on the playground.
She is in a race to define her image with Trump, who has used hyperbolic language to paint her as an unqualified “communist.”
“People don’t know who she is,” Trump said last week at a news conference at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. “She’s a radical left-wing socialist. But beyond that, I mean, she's way beyond socialism, which is going to destroy our country. And when they find out, I think we're going to see something.”
But he has also found it difficult to focus on a single line of attack. “I’m a lot better looking than she is,” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend.
“Kamala wants World War III,” her campaign wrote in a fundraising email Tuesday.
Sarah Longwell, who runs an anti-Trump Republican political group that holds regular focus groups, said at the Institute of Politics event that many voters who shared negative impressions of Harris months ago revealed in their comments that “they didn’t see her, they didn’t know her, they didn’t know what she was doing,” leaving a gap. But she needs to overcome preconceptions.
“'San Francisco liberal' is a buzzword that [to] “It hits the conservatives right in the heart, or even people on the centre-right,” he said. “They have no idea what it means, but they know how it feels. And it’s bad… And that’s what she needs to let go of.”
Democrats have launched their own attacks on Trump throughout the week while trying to single out Harris, sometimes in the same speech.
“One candidate worked at McDonald’s while in college” at Howard University, said Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas. “The other was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and helped his father in the family business: housing discrimination.
“She became a career prosecutor, while he became a career criminal, with 34 felonies, two impeachments and a porn star to show for it,” he continued.
Crockett also told a personal story about how Harris counseled her about her doubts about public life a few years ago, when they first met at the vice president’s residence. It was one of many speeches that treated Harris’ status as a woman of color as background, a basis for relating to another person who was doubted because of how others viewed her.
This is a shift from Harris’s 2020 campaign and Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, when their status as trailblazing women was central to their appeals to voters. Gender remains on the ballot this year, but it has taken a different form: as a call to arms against the loss of abortion rights at the Supreme Court and a sense of angry defiance against gender-based attacks by Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, who has railed against “childless cat ladies.”
Clinton, who spoke on Monday night, She traced Harris's historical line from Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to seek a major party presidential nomination in 1972, and Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman on a major party's presidential ticket in 1984 when she ran unsuccessfully for vice president, to her own failed bid in 2016.
Much of Clinton's speech was devoted to breaking the last glass ceiling, but she also included a warning to Democrats about the danger of letting Trump define Harris.
“It’s not surprising, right, that he’s lying about Kamala’s record. He’s making fun of her name and her laugh,” he said. “Does that sound familiar?”
