When Vice President Kamala Harris entered a Planned Parenthood clinic in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in March, she knew her visit would grab headlines. It was history-making—the first time a sitting vice president or president had toured a clinic that provided abortions.
The visit, part of her “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms Tour,” was a bold move for a politician who, in recent years, has sometimes been criticized for playing it safe. Gone, or at least tamed, were the hesitancy and second-guessing that have sometimes crept into her appearances and remarks—what David Axelrod, the former senior strategist for President Barack Obama, described to The Atlantic in November as looking “as if she didn’t know where to plant her feet. That she wasn’t sort of grounded, that she didn’t know exactly who she was.” But as Harris spoke in the clinic’s lobby, her voice crisp and measured, her brown eyes earnest with occasional flashes of anger, she seemed to know exactly who she was—and what the moment called for. “In this environment, these attacks against an individual’s right to make decisions about their own body are outrageous, and in many instances, just plain old immoral,” the former prosecutor said. “How dare these elected leaders believe they are in a better position to tell women what they need, to tell women what is in their best interests.” Pausing and raising a finger for emphasis, Harris concluded, “We have to be a nation that trusts women.”
On the day after the Minnesota visit, The Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker penned a column calling for the vice president to quit the 2024 ticket. Parker’s stale complaints of Harris’s “sometimes inane, rambling remarks” and “a laugh that erupts from nowhere” not only ignored the self-assurance on display in the Twin Cities but the renewed energy and confidence on the campaign trail and in policy arenas with which she does not have a long history.
Speaking in February at the Munich Security Conference, she prefaced her planned remarks reaffirming the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to Ukraine and NATO with a statement about the death of Alexei Navalny, which had just been announced, in which she laid the blame directly at the feet of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Several weeks later, during a trip to Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Harris spoke about the ongoing struggle for racial justice before shifting to address the deteriorating conditions in Gaza. Her pointed criticism of Israel’s conduct was not a case of a frustrated underling going rogue but of a high-ranking official signaling a subtle yet significant shift in the administration’s approach to the protracted conflict that she underscored in a recent interview with ABC.
Harris is hitting her marks with skill and precision as the general election campaign begins. Democratic House candidates are requesting her presence at their campaign events. Remarkably, after the avalanche of bad press the 59-year-old endured during her first two years in office, fellow Democrats treat Harris not as a liability but as a secret weapon who can drive headlines, stir enthusiasm, and open wallets.
“I think people are paying a lot more attention to her,” said a member of Harris’s circle not affiliated with the campaign, who observed that the vice president was “raising her head and her voice a little louder and a little higher” in recent months.
Harris didn’t hesitate to lead the charge against Robert Hur, the special counsel in the Joe Biden documents case, in the wake of his report that harshly questioned Biden’s age and cognitive state. (The Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney also recommended that no charges be brought against Biden for his handling of classified documents.) As The Wall Street Journal reported, after the Hur report was released on a Thursday, White House strategists asked Harris to defend Biden on a Sunday news program, but she didn’t wait that long. She instead used a previously scheduled event on Friday to take questions from reporters and push back. Invoking her background as “a former prosecutor,” she declared the report “politically motivated” and “gratuitous.” Harris’s clip was played on a constant loop on cable news channels all weekend and was widely seen as more effective than Biden’s hastily arranged gaggle the evening before. For many, Harris’s takedown served as a reminder of how effective she can be in prosecuting a case.
“Some of [that skill] is just natural instinct and gut,” Harris’s close associate told me. “I don’t think she was scripted when she was talking about Hur. I think she understood the case; she understood what they were trying to do to the president, and that’s why she was able to pivot so quickly. And I think you will probably see her doing a lot more of that.”
Harris is putting flesh on the bones of the campaign’s core message—that democracy is on the line. Biden, in his January speech at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, that kicked off his reelection bid, declared, “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time. And it’s what the 2024 election is all about.”
Critics of this message have argued that, as January 6 has faded from prominence, democracy is too abstract an issue to reach moveable voters. Or, as Axelrod recently observed to The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, “I’m pretty certain in Scranton they’re not sitting around their dinner table talking about democracy every night.”
Harris, though, seems to have already been tuned into that critique. She has calculated that while voters in Scranton or Kenosha or any number of places might not engage in philosophical dinner conversations about the nature of democracy, they are more likely to discuss what she has described as “fundamental freedoms.”
“The Vice President has been making the case that Donald Trump’s threat to our democracy is not an abstract concept,” said Sheila Nix, Harris’s chief of staff on the campaign. “Trump and his allies are actively trying to rip away fundamental freedoms, from reproductive rights to the freedom to vote. These are hard-won freedoms that impact people’s everyday lives in real ways. The Vice President will continue connecting these dots and pointing out the direct harms inflicted by Trump’s extreme agenda.”
For a prosecutor, building a case involves making those connections plain and digestible. In a January appearance on The View, Harris touted the administration’s achievements and spelled out the election’s real-world implications. “Frankly, I think most people don’t think of [what’s at stake in the election] in terms of democracy as much as freedom,” she explained. “The freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body. The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride. The freedom to be able to be free from gun violence…The freedom to have access to the ballot.”
By this point, the vice president was on a roll, describing what motivated her to become a prosecutor—the Californian’s discovery, in high school, that a close friend was being assaulted by her stepfather—before turning to the cost of living and the administration’s success in capping insulin prices for seniors. Undergirding her argument was this point: Freedom from want, to use Franklin Roosevelt’s famous phrase, is also at stake in November. “These issues,” she said, “in terms of how we are doing on a daily basis and how our democracy and country is doing, are inextricably linked.”
As with all things Harris, Fox News took notice. But this time, the reaction was different and telling. In a through-the-looking-glass moment, Kayleigh McEnany, the co-host of Outnumbered and former White House press secretary for Trump, characterized Harris’s interview as “very powerful” and noted her ability to appeal to Democratic constituencies and to attack Republicans on abortion. McEnany, at least temporarily, seemed to recognize Harris’s strengths. As Emily’s List President Jessica Mackler explained to me, “What she has is an ability to really distill an argument and be really clear about the stakes and impacts that are felt by the policies when we’re talking about them. These are not just words on a paper or something esoteric…These are policies that impact real people.”
The member of the vice president’s circle puts it a different way. If Biden is “the Empather in Chief”—relying on his famously deep reservoir of empathy to reach the public—then Harris can function as “the Explainer-in-Chief.” Beyond her aptitude for distilling an argument, say allies, she can paint a vivid picture ensuring an issue is plainly understood. The vice president, in other words, isn’t afraid to get real.
During interviews and at stops on her reproductive freedoms tour, Harris has described the Dobbs decision and state abortion bans in graphic language, speaking of women she has met who had miscarriages in toilets. Her intent, Mackler said, is to “[center] the people that are affected by these policies.” But they also serve as the lead-up to Harris’s indictment of Trump and the GOP. Reminding her audiences of Trump’s 2016 promise to appoint justices who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, she charges, “The former president is the architect of this healthcare crisis.”
Mackler, whose group has committed millions to support Harris this election, said she expects the vice president to continue prosecuting the case against Trump: “Putting Kamala Harris in a position to play on her strengths and her effectiveness is really smart strategically.”
But just how visible a position is the question. As compelling as Harris’s arguments seem, as primed as they are to shore up the Democratic base and reach swayable voters—and as much as she has worked to change media and public perceptions of her—there are also lingering doubts. Her critics point to sagging approval ratings as evidence that she is a liability or should be dropped from the ticket altogether. According to a recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll, 52 percent of registered voters disapproved of the job she is doing, while 36 percent approved. The numbers are similar to the ratings of both Biden and Trump, which raises an essential question: Can anyone truly be popular in today’s political environment?
Joel Goldstein, a vice presidential scholar and emeritus professor at Saint Louis University School of Law, says context matters when looking at Harris’s numbers. “The trajectory of her vice presidency strikes me as being very positive,” he told me. “There’s been a lot of talk about Harris being a liability, and I’m not at all convinced that that’s the case. Her low ratings are a function in part of the polarized times we live in.” He also noted that “vice presidential favorability tends to track presidential favorability.” If Biden’s numbers improve, hers will likely do so as well.
There is also, Goldstein added, her identity as a groundbreaking figure: the first woman, and the first woman of color, to hold the office. “She faces a bigger hurdle than other vice presidential candidates have in making people see her as the president because, in effect, she’s running against history—or she’s running against the pattern of our history and what people are accustomed to.” Harris, he said, has also suffered from the lack of an opponent. “If you have a concern about [Biden and his age], down the line, then the question is how do you compare Trump versus Harris? How do you compare Harris versus [Representative Elise] Stefanik or [Senator Tim] Scott or [Representative] Marjorie Taylor Greene or [former presidential candidate Vivek] Ramaswamy or any of these people they’re talking about [as Trump’s running mate]. I think she’s likely to measure up pretty well against those comparisons.”
The member of Harris’s circle also pointed to the role the Californian played in the 2022 midterms, when Democrats exceeded expectations by expanding their slim hold on the Senate and nearly retaining the House, as a measure of her potential. “She was very high profile in the midterms. I would argue that a lot of the work that she did, raising the question of reproductive rights, paid off. It absolutely paid off,” says the Harris insider.
The reelection campaign team appears to view the reinvigorated, more assured Harris as a trusted set of hands. Part of her elevated role includes targeted outreach to the very audiences she and Biden will need in November: women, people of color, young voters, and those wavering over U.S. involvement in the war in Gaza, to name a few.
Away from the cameras, Harris is playing a higher profile role within the campaign. As CNN reported, she recently convened six Democratic governors to discuss the campaign and its messaging. While someone close to her refutes the story’s claim that the vice president was concerned about the campaign’s direction, they confirm she is committed to acting as a sounding board and intermediary. “It’s not like she’s sitting in a room saying, Okay, you tell me this, you tell me that,” said Harris’s close associate. “No, [it’s] let me hear what you have to say. And so, all of this feedback that she’s gathering just makes the campaign stronger. It doesn’t make it weak. You gotta kick the can and the tires. It’s a lot at stake here, and we can’t be put in a position to feel sensitive about losing our place in America if we do this wrong.”
A source close to one governor at the meeting agreed with this characterization. “Who wouldn’t reach out to any source of intel they had? A smart campaign reaches out to many sources—especially ones that have been successful.”
The feeling among Harris’s allies, as they survey her string of successful appearances, is that she is just getting started. “She’s going to be,” Mackler said, “an incredibly effective litigator of the case against Donald Trump.”
