WASHINGTON – She’s the sitting vice president who has been in office for 3 1/2 years. She’s also the presidential candidate of just five weeks promising a “new way forward.”
Kamala Harris is having it both ways as she hits the campaign trail after the Democratic National Convention, taking credit for parts of President Joe Biden's record in rallies staged in front of Air Force Two while casting herself as a new leader who rails against “the politics of the past."
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In every presidential cycle candidates run on experience or freshness, but Harris so far appears to be successfully harmonizing two seemingly competing messages, much to the frustration of former President Donald Trump and his allies.
“She has this powerful and unique and interesting advantage that we have never seen before in our politics,” said Patrick Gaspard, CEO of the Democratic-leaning think tank Center for American Progress Action Fund and a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee under President Barack Obama.
“She is both an incumbent,” he said, and “she’s been able to seize the ‘change’ banner away from Donald Trump.”
Harris’ vision for the country has leaned heavily on Biden plans, to the point of not rewriting those plans even after Biden dropped out. The platform approved by the DNC was passed last week with frequent — and outdated — mentions of a Biden “second term.”
Her presentation as someone offering a “new way forward” relies in large part on being someone 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 nation's first female president and first Black woman or person of South Asian descent to serve.
Two-thirds of Democrats wanted Biden to drop out after his debate performance against Trump, which crystallized longstanding concerns among the public and many prominent Democrats in private about his readiness.
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, said Harris’ ability to embody change has “a lot more to do with her age, her race and her gender, than it has to do with any policy positions that she’s articulated.” He added, “That shouts change.”
In the view of her aides, Harris is offering what voters seem to have been craving all year: a new messenger, but one thus far offering modest evolution of the Biden-Harris record.
“She is her own leader, of course,” Brian Nelson, her senior campaign policy adviser, told reporters at a Bloomberg event at the DNC. “But she’s a leader who has been a partner to President Biden for these last three and a half years,” adding, they have “shared values and principles.”
The Trump campaign has attacked her lack of policy specifics and tried to portray her as someone far more liberal than she’s letting on. Perhaps trying to set expectations before new polls emerge, the campaign predicted on Saturday that Harris would see a post-convention bump in her polling and blamed what it called the “Harris Honeymoon.”
"We’ve certainly had a front row seat to the ‘honeymoon,’" wrote Trump pollsters Tony Fabrizio and Travis Tunis. “In fact, the Media decided to extend the honeymoon for over 4 weeks now.”
Harris' campaign announced Sunday that it raised $82 million during the week of the Democratic National Convention and a staggering $540 million since Biden quit the race and endorsed her on July 21.
Harris has sought to take credit for parts of Biden's foreign policy record. In her convention address, she said she had met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “to warn him about Russia's plan to invade” five days before Russia launched its full-scale attack. They met at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, at a time when the U.S. had been warning publicly and privately for months about an invasion and already working with Ukrainian forces to prepare.
Trump will continue trying to stick Harris with the less rosy parts of the Biden record. On Monday, he is expected to visit Arlington National Cemetery to pay his respects to service members killed in the bombing outside Kabul airport three years ago during the calamitous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trump will then go to Michigan to address the National Guard Association of the United States conference.
Harris confirmed to CNN in August 2021 that she was the so-called last person in the room when Biden made his decision to withdraw.
“This is a president who has an extraordinary amount of courage,” she told the network then. “I wish that the American public can see sometimes what I see, because ultimately – and the decision always rests with him – but I have seen him over and over again make decisions based exactly on what he believes is right. Regardless of what maybe the political people tell him is in his best self-interest.”
Implicit in Harris' messaging now is the argument that Biden was also part of the politics of the past — even as she takes credit for his record and lauds him publicly. Harris’ first national ad after the convention aims to lean into the generational contrast with Trump. “Instead of being focused on the politics of the past, we need to be thinking about the future.”
Voters, said former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer, "are thirsting 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.