CHICAGO — Kamala Harris often leans on a favorite phrase to focus her team before they embark on a major project: “What kind of work are we trying to accomplish here?”
In deciding what to say in her keynote speech Thursday, the vice president offered three answers, aides said: tell her life story, present her battle with former President Donald Trump as a battle between the future and the past, and reclaim the flag of patriotism for the Democratic ticket.
Harris is taking her speech at the convention so seriously that she held rehearsals with an autocue in three different time zones.
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Shortly after she became the presidential candidate a month ago, she told advisers that she saw this speech and all the fall debates as the most important moments of the abbreviated race, according to three people familiar with her thinking. But in reality, she saw this speech as pivotal for even longer than that. The first draft of her convention speeches first circulated when Harris was just a vice president seeking a second term as President Joe Biden’s No. 2.
The revised speech will be Harris’ biggest move on the national stage since her sudden rise to the top of the Democratic Party, as she prepares to take on Trump in the election just 75 days away.
The preparations for both her message and her speech were intense. Adam Frankel, a former speechwriter for former President Barack Obama and now an adviser to Harris, is the lead writer of the speech, taking input and suggestions from a wide range of others. But the vice president herself has crafted the speech almost line by line, according to two people familiar with the preparations.
This week, she has held rehearsals and teleprompter discussion sessions at the Park Hyatt hotel in Chicago, at Howard University in Washington and in Arizona during her first campaign trip to a swing state, when several advisers traveled to a downtown Phoenix hotel to join her.
“She understands how important it is,” said Cedric Richmond, an adviser to Harris. “I think she probably over-understands how important the moment is.”
The first of the speech’s three themes, according to campaign officials with knowledge of the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly ahead of the speech, is telling the story of her own life. Harris is expected to describe her own middle-class upbringing, and to present it in a way that better understands the needs and struggles of today’s middle class. And she is expected to tell voters about her pre-vice presidential career: her early work as a prosecutor that rose to become California’s attorney general.
“This is an opportunity for her to tell the American people who she is,” Brian Nelson, a senior policy adviser to Harris who has worked with her since her time as attorney general, said Wednesday at a Bloomberg Newsmaker event.
The second goal is to present the race as a battle between the future and the past, contrasting her promise to protect freedoms and write a more positive new chapter with the dark warnings about Trump’s agenda and Project 2025, which Democrats have turned into an all-encompassing source of concern.
The third is to appeal to patriotism. The party has been handing out “USA” signs to delegates throughout the week, and Harris is expected to present himself as a president for all Americans. “We love this country,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, said in his own speech Wednesday.
Harris’s relatively humble roots have been a recurring theme during the convention. Speaker after speaker has referenced her early days at a McDonald’s to contrast them with Trump’s inherited wealth as a New York City real estate developer. “We have a chance to elect a president who is middle-class, because she is middle-class,” as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York put it in her speech Monday.
Notably, Harris has so far only rolled out her own agenda, separate from Biden, on the economy, focusing on mundane issues like the cost of housing and groceries.
“She’s thinking about how she speaks to the American people so that they know that she understands what they’re going through,” Richmond said of the speech. “That she cares about what they’re going through, that she wants to provide a solution to what they’re going through, and that she’s going to do the hard work to do that.”
In just a few short weeks as a candidate, Harris has already perfected a regular campaign-trail speech that has inspired eager participation from her audiences. They cheer “we’re not going back” and wait for her witty remark linking her past as a prosecutor to Trump: “I know his type.”
But those rules are largely given to the Democratic audience. And while the convention hall will surely be packed with those voters, television viewers offer Harris a chance to appeal to a broader electorate, including independents and open-minded Republicans.
Harris is trying to walk a tricky tightrope to present herself as a new leader for the country, even as part of the current administration. She is also trying to counter the Trump campaign’s portrayal of her as a “dangerously liberal” and has backtracked on some of the more progressive positions she took during her 2020 presidential campaign.
Harris has built a reputation more as a sharp debater and judge of Senate witnesses than as a high-profile speaker.
But Nathan Barankin, her former Senate chief of staff, said that was an underestimation of her skills.
“To the extent that people have the impression that giving speeches is not a strength, that is a product of her reading words that other people have put in her mouth,” he said. “When she is directly involved, she makes the content and the delivery better.”
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