WASHINGTON (AP) — She is the vice president in office for 3 1/2 years. She is also the presidential candidate of just five weeks who promises a “new path forward.”
Kamala Harris needs both as she campaigns after the Democratic National Convention, taking credit for parts of President Joe Biden’s policies at rallies outside Air Force Two while casting herself as a new leader pushing back against “the politics of the past.”
In every presidential cycle, candidates play on experience or freshness, but Harris so far seems to be able to reconcile two seemingly contradictory messages, much to the frustration of former President Donald Trump and his allies.
“She has a powerful, unique and interesting advantage that we’ve never seen before in our politics,” said Patrick Gaspard, CEO of the Democratic-leaning think tank Center for American Progress Action Fund and former executive director of the Democratic National Committee under President Barack Obama.
“She is both a sitting president,” he said, and “she has managed to take the ‘change’ flag away from Donald Trump.”
Harris’ vision for the country relied heavily on Biden’s plans, to the point that he didn’t rewrite them even after Biden withdrew. The platform approved by the DNC was adopted last week with frequent — and outdated — mentions of a Biden “second term.”
Her presentation as someone who offers a “new way forward” is based in large part on the fact that she is someone who is different from the norm. The 59-year-old daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants replaced an 81-year-old white man who first ran for president 36 years ago. She is running to become the country’s first female president and the first Black woman or person of South Asian descent to serve.
Two-thirds of Democrats wanted Biden to withdraw after his performance in the debate against Trump, underscoring concerns among the public and many prominent Democrats privately about his willingness to vote.
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, said Harris’ ability to embody change “has much more to do with her age, her race and her gender than it does with the policy positions that she has articulated.” He added: “That’s what creates change.”
Harris, her advisers say, offers what voters seem to have expected all year: a new messenger, but one who offers a modest evolution of the Biden-Harris record so far.
“She is, of course, her own leader,” Brian Nelson, her senior campaign policy adviser, told reporters at a Bloomberg event at the DNC. “But she is a leader who has been a partner to President Biden for the last three and a half years,” adding that they “share values and principles.”
Trump’s campaign has attacked her lack of policy specifics and tried to paint her as far more liberal than she lets on. Perhaps to set expectations before new polls come in, the campaign on Saturday predicted Harris would see a post-convention surge in her polls, blaming what it called the “Harris Honeymoon.”
“We certainly had a front row seat to the ‘honeymoon,'” Trump pollsters Tony Fabrizio and Travis Tunis wrote. “In fact, the media has decided to extend the honeymoon by over 4 weeks now.”
Harris’ campaign announced on Sunday that it raised $82 million in the week of the Democratic National Convention and a whopping $540 million since Biden dropped out of the race on July 21 and endorsed her.
Harris has sought to take credit for parts of Biden’s foreign policy. In her convention speech, she said she met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “to warn him about the Russian plan to invade” five days before Russia launched its all-out attack. They met at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, at a time when the U.S. had been publicly and privately warning about an invasion for months and was already working with Ukrainian forces to prepare.
Trump will continue to tease Harris about the less rosy parts of Biden’s record. On Monday, he is expected to visit Arlington National Cemetery to pay his respects to the service members killed in the bombing outside Kabul airport three years ago during the U.S.’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trump will then travel to Michigan to address the National Guard Association of the United States conference.
Harris confirmed to CNN in August 2021 that she was the alleged last person in the room when Biden decided to withdraw.
“This is a president with an extraordinary amount of courage,” she told the network at the time. “I wish the American public could see sometimes what I see, because ultimately — and the decision is always his — but I have seen him time and time again make decisions based on what he thinks is right. Regardless of what the political people may tell him, it is in his best interest.”
Implicit in Harris’ message now is the argument that Biden, too, was part of the politics of the past — even as she takes credit for his record and publicly praises him. Harris’ first national ad since the convention is aimed at playing on the generational contrast with Trump. “Instead of focusing on the politics of the past, we need to think about the future.”
Voters, said former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer, “are hungry for a new, more hopeful politics.”
“If she can prove to people that she can turn the page, then Kamala Harris will win,” she said.
