Within a year of the Democratic presidential primary in 2019, Kamala Harris went from being an admired former attorney general who had been talked about as the “next Obama” to an impotent, mockable vice-president who lacked gravitas and polled poorly. Twenty thousand people amassed at her presidential campaign launch that year, but soon she was a muse for online trolls and late-night TV sketch writers. But Harris could soon become the Democratic nominee, and therefore president of the United States.
Democratic elites, such as Nancy Pelosi and the Clintons, endorsed Harris within hours of Biden standing down. Donald Trump’s strength and the imminent election meant many Democrats favoured unity and a speedy nomination over a drawn-out contest. Possible rivals such as California Governor Gavin Newsom and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker dropped their shadow campaigns. Donations to Harris’s bid have topped $100m since Biden dropped out of the race.
But Harris, 59, is no panacea for the Democrats. She polls as well as her opponent, a 78-year-old convicted felon. Throughout her career, she has been celebrated for being the first of many: the first woman, the first black American and the first South-Asian American to become vice-president. She was the first South-Asian American senator and the first black female district attorney in California. If she became president, she would be the first female. But being the first is not a plan for the country.
Harris is the daughter of two immigrant academics, her mother from a Tamil Brahmin family and her father from Jamaica. As a baby she was taken to civil rights marches in her pram. Despite her mixed heritage, Harris has said her mother saw herself as raising two black girls. Race is central to how she views the world. She has said Aretha Franklin’s “Young, Gifted and Black” was one of the songs of her youth. When she showed a journalist around her painting collection in the vice-presidential residence, she spoke only about the artists’ ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender.
In 2018 Harris was on the Senate Judicial Committee during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing as Trump’s third Supreme Court Justice nominee. She pressed Kavanaugh on whether he had discussed Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election with anyone at a law firm run by Trump’s lawyer. Kavanaugh squirmed and evaded the question for eight minutes. Harris’s sharp interrogation went viral; it built her reputation on the national stage. Here was the mooted future of the Democratic Party holding a man accused of sexual assault to account. Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, said her questioning made him “nervous”. She repeated her prosecutorial style in a vice-presidential debate against Mike Pence, cutting through the guff with calm, deliberate attacks.
Compare that to her performance since. Vice-presidents wield the White House’s grandeur, if not its power, at dinners, galas and charity events. In truth, vice-presidents can offer little more than their title. For three years, social media has been replete with clips of Harris repeating the mystifying phrase: “What can be, unburdened by what has been.” Her diction has been ineloquent and convoluted. She rambles and resorts to therapeutic language: “[We must] let them know that we see them”; “To see the moment in time in which we exist and are present”; “Let’s speak truth.” Her peculiar style may endear her to a meme-addled youth, but it also makes her vulnerable to Trump’s unassailable bullying.
Biden has embraced state intervention in the economy, imposing tariffs on foreign goods and giving huge subsidies to green initiatives. But, despite travelling the country to talk up the administration’s infrastructure programme as vice-president, Harris is not associated with Biden’s economic programme.
Instead, she has been responsible for a voting reform bill that did not pass the Senate, as well as a plan to stop migrants from reaching the southern border – a brief she never wanted. In a White House meeting she reportedly suggested the administration seek to reduce poverty in Central America in order to prevent migrants leaving their home countries. Biden gave her responsibility. But Harris panicked – perhaps she was fearful that it would prove a political liability.
In her first foreign trip as vice-president she travelled to Mexico and Guatemala, but in a subsequent interview with NBC was thrown by a question about why she had not visited the border. The error was a gift to Republicans, who have portrayed her as the administration’s “border tzar”. She became saddled with the Democrats’ key vulnerability.
Her policy achievements before entering the White House are equally unflattering. It is hard to discern a coherent position. In the Senate she co-sponsored a bill to address the cash-bail system, by which suspects can be released from pre-trial detainment in exchange for money, but reportedly supported high bails as a district attorney. In California she both resisted calls for the death penalty in a case where a policeman was shot and later fought to retain the punishment. Her position on mandatory reviews of police shootings was similarly confused.
Her calls for regulation of the rapacious tech giants have always been muted and half-hearted. She made progress on combatting “revenge porn”, but her proximity to Silicon Valley made any opposition seem tokenistic: Harris is part of the Californian elite. Her brother-in-law Tony West is Uber’s chief legal officer. She has taken big donations from Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, as well as the financiers John Doerr and Ron Conway.
When she was asked what she thought Trump’s greatest vulnerability was, she replied: “His policies.” You could say the same about Harris. She flits around an already shallow pool of chosen topics, opposing a policy one minute and changing her position the next. Such flexibility – or fickleness – gives her space to define herself in the coming months, but she is running out of time.
Her stance on abortion is a different story. Two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade, polling shows that two-thirds of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and that it is the most important issue for one in eight voters. Trump has sensed the danger, claiming the issue should be left to individual states. Biden, a Catholic, made protecting abortion rights central to his campaign, but he is uncomfortable with the topic. In contrast, Harris has consistently fought for the right to abortion both in the Senate and as a presidential candidate. She can capitalise on this in the election campaign.
She heads into the contest with a shallow record. Yet she will energise the party and inspire activists, and has boosted donations – all improvements on Biden. Her early campaign comments suggest she will lean in to abortion. That is a problem for Trump. But it’s not enough.
Kamala Harris represents a Democratic establishment which Trump beat in 2016. The lesson from that election was that identity politics could not defeat a man whose economic and tribal nationalism chimed with voters who were angry at a globalised world and an insecure life. That is even more true today.
[See also: Can Kamala Harris save America?]
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This article appears in the 25 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2024