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Before Joe Biden formally announced his bid for a second term, his dwindling circle of loyalists were privately advocating that he was in a better position to win than Kamala Harris. While they acknowledged that some private polls showed the Vice President performing better against Donald Trump, they argued that this was only because she had not yet faced the intense scrutiny that comes with leading the ticket. As Biden’s own legislative allies in Capitol Hill put it to lawmakers, Harris wasn’t prepared for the onslaught of attacks that would come her way. The numbers, they insisted, didn’t tell the whole story; they would increase before they decreased.
We are about to see what that whole story looks like. While initial polling and fundraising figures have generated tremendous excitement for Harris’ ascent, there remains a significant unknown: Harris herself. Americans still lack a comprehensive understanding of the presumptive Democratic nominee, and operatives from both parties suggest that her true identity remains somewhat elusive.
In the immediate aftermath of Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate, a CNN poll found that a full 17% of Americans had no opinion of the Vice President, who had served as a District Attorney, state Attorney General, and U.S. Senator before joining the Biden ticket in 2020 and becoming his deputy in 2021. Another 6% said they’d never heard of her.
That 17% represents her highest unknown level captured in CNN polls since December of 2018, indicating that despite arriving in Washington almost eight years ago, many view this figure, who is just one heartbeat (or 270 electoral votes) away from the presidency, as something of a stranger.
This makes it difficult to predict how long the “Harris Honeymoon” will last. To many Americans who never paid her much attention before last weekend, she is, in effect, a blank slate. Both sides see an opportunity to mold Harris in their desired image.
Harris’ supporters see this as a chance for them to start fresh with a career prosecutor who has thrice won statewide office in California but remains largely unknown to most of the country. As The D.C. Brief has noted before, Harris is one of the most underutilized players in the Biden orbit. That innate political talent has impressed many who have been observing her this week as she re-introduces herself to the nation.
To be sure, Harris starts out with greater name recognition than Trump’s new running mate. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio is an unknown quantity to 16% of those polled by CNN, and another 22% say they have no opinion of the pick. This is how a fact-check of a dubious claim about Vance’s past association with a couch went viral; no one really knows Vance’s biography well enough to debunk it. His slate is even more blank.
Nevertheless, Republicans are trying to frame their own narrative against Harris, and Trump on Wednesday evening conducted his own real-time message test at a rally in Charlotte, N.C. Trump unveiled his latest nickname of “Lying Kamala Harris,” intentionally mispronouncing her name and labeling her “the most incompetent and far-left Vice President in American history.” These barbs followed repeated Republican attacks on Harris that focused on her gender or race; House Speaker Mike Johnson and others have encouraged GOP colleagues to refer to her as “a DEI hire.”
Trump’s team, meanwhile, seems to share the concerns of Biden’s own aides on the Hill: the “Harris Honeymoon” might be short-lived as voters start to learn more about who she is and what she stands for. It’s one thing to be a hypothetical successor, and quite another to be at the top of the ticket.
While Harris’ mystique may be greater than most, it presents an opportunity. Harris’ backers have cleverly taken her perceived weaknesses—occasional turns of phrase that seem awkward when meme’d and laughter that never fails to trigger misogynists—and transformed them into strengths. See: [link], [link], and [link].
In this context, Biden’s team is trying to leverage the limited knowledge of Harris to their advantage. “The Vice President is well-known but less well-known than both Trump and President Biden, particularly among Dem-leaning constituencies,” campaign chief Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote to supporters in a press release-disguised-as-strategy memo on Thursday morning. “In a highly polarized electoral environment, this shift in the race opens up additional persuadable voters.”
Then, there’s the actual substance. A visit to Harris’ campaign site—a repackaged version of Biden’s landing page repurposed on the fly—reveals no mention of issues. But if you type in the URL for what should be a page for her policy positions (kamalaharris.com/issues), Biden’s stances appear just below a photograph of the incumbent sporting aviator sunglasses. The page is just one reminder of how quickly Harris inherited a massive organization and, as TIME’s Brian Bennett noted, leaves her working furiously to establish some distance between her boss’s platform and her own.
Democrats are swiftly rallying around Harris, and party veterans are coming off the sidelines to contribute in whatever way is needed—including a significant show of support from former President Barack Obama said to be forthcoming soon.
Much like they did with Obama early on, Democrats are rapidly granting themselves permission to project whatever they want to see onto Harris. As one Democratic strategist put it, this is basically “Project Projection Harris”—everyone can see what they need for now in order to achieve their desired outcome. Democrats did this most notably with Obama, who disappointed many liberals when his administration was not as progressive as they had hoped, or with Biden, whose campaign rhetoric against [insert issue], among other issues, often failed to match his results. Ultimately, Democrats fell in line in service of a larger goal of preventing the alternative.
All of which is to say this: Harris is having a very successful rollout, one that is unmatched in recent memory for any candidate’s start, but she may be riding high on borrowed time. She and her new campaign are working overtime to define Harris’ candidacy before rivals and even well-meaning allies can. Ultimately, though, it’s up to Harris to demonstrate to Americans who she is and how she would lead. While it’s still early days, it seems Harris has found her footing and an open-minded audience who still want to know more about her. She just needs to make up a lot of ground in a short window.
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