Democrats are leery about the prospect of Vice President Harris putting out anything close to a fleshed-out agenda, believing they must make the 2024 election about the former president — not the current vice president.
Instead, they’re hoping Harris will run a largely atmospheric campaign — one with limited policy substance — to make the race more of a referendum on former President Trump than on her administration’s record.
One Democratic senator who attended the Democratic convention in Chicago said Harris’s strategy is to remain vague on issues ranging from fracking, which is important in Pennsylvania, to how she would handle the war in Gaza, which has divided the Democratic Party.
“What Barack [Obama] did when he ran is he wasn’t very detailed. People read into him every hope and dream. I know that Kamala probably isn’t going to be drilling on public lands, is probably going to greenlight some fossil projects, but I can hope right now she’ll be stronger than Biden has been in terms of recognizing that you cannot stop climate change if you don’t stop the extraction of fossil fuels,” the lawmaker said.
“I can hope that right now because she hasn’t been explicit and people can read into her their hopes and dreams. We know the difference between her and Trump. We know the difference in style and the importance in integrity,” the source added.
Democrats acknowledge most voters around the country know relatively little about Harris, even though she’s served nearly four years in the nation’s second-highest office.
But they argue that’s a strength in a race against Trump, who voters know very well after his years in and out of the office. They say it helps Harris shape the race as more of a referendum on Trump than President Biden, even though it is the latter who is now in office.
“The fact that the president stepped down, it’s now a referendum on Trump,” said Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist.
“That’s one of the most important dynamics that’s happening. We were headed toward a straight-up referendum election” on Biden before he ended his campaign.
Manley acknowledged things can change fast in a race as Republicans spend tens of millions on attack adds to define Harris negatively.
“Despite the unbelievable momentum that they built up over the last four weeks, there are plenty of danger signs out there in the key battleground states,” Manley observed. “I for one remain concerns that pollsters haven’t worked out all the kinks and Trump votes are underrepresented.”
It has mostly been Republicans and conservative media figures pressing Harris to offer more specifics on her plans. But some Democrats have joined those calls.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a leading House progressive, said he’s hoping Harris will unveil a boldly liberal agenda, even though she has substantially reined in some of her more liberal stances since becoming vice president.
“I think that she has the opportunity to bring forth a progressive agenda, and we’re waiting to see the details of that,” he said. “I would like to see at least a commitment to universal child care, a commitment to expanding Medicare, to including dental, vision, hearing,” he said.
Khanna said he would also like Harris to make “a commitment to taxing wealth in this country, a commitment to free public college, a commitment to ending the awful war in Gaza.”
“I think she has an opportunity over the next few weeks to define” her vision, he said.
The Democratic nominee has yet to sit down for a wide-ranging media interview or to address tough questions at a press conference about her past support for Medicare for All, the Green New Deal and a fracking ban, three hot-button issues from which she has since backed away.
Harris’s convention speech focused on biographical details, sharing with the nation her memories of her mother and other family memories and of learning how to make gumbo and play chess. She touched broadly on issues such as Social Security, Medicare, abortion rights and border security but offered little detail.
Instead, she pledged to voters and delegates that her election to the Oval Office would be “a chance to chart a new way forward.”
While Democrats are trying to define their candidate as a hopeful change candidate without delving much into specifics, Republicans will spend the next two months working hard to define her as a far-left California liberal.
“They’re running a great campaign because they’re not allowing the candidate to speak extemporaneously, because once she does, she’s much more of a flawed candidate,” Republican strategist Ron Bonjean said of Harris’s tightly scripted campaign.
He said Republicans are waiting for Harris to make a mistake so they can define her as a gaffe-prone leader without a clear leadership vision.
He said voters “know who Donald Trump is, they’re trying to figure out who Kamala Harris is.”
Trump and his allies are trying to seize on Harris’s positions from the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, when she was competing with rivals to pick up support from the party’s liberal base.
Harris’s team is trying to distance her from her most liberal positions and tack toward the center by embracing the Biden administration’s accomplishments, which include a major bipartisan infrastructure investment law and the most significant law addressing gun violence in decades.
“The race to define Harris right now is on,” Bonjean said. “Voters know her name, but they have no idea who she is.”
Harris’s campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told The Washington Post that the next two months of the campaign will be an “opportunity to define who she is and her leadership” and stressed that she will run on more than Biden’s record.
“We know that the American people don’t know that much about the vice president, and so we really have an opportunity to fill that in for them,” she said.
For example, a national survey of Latino voters conducted Aug. 6-10 by the Hispanic Federation and the Latino Victory foundation found that only 33 percent of those voters said they were well-informed about Harris’s policy agenda, while 30 percent said they were not too informed or not at all informed.
Steve Jarding, a Democratic strategist, said being largely unknown two months before Election Day would be a problem for most candidates, but he argued it’s an asset for Harris, given how widely known and how unpopular her opponent is.
“If she were running against Mitt Romney or Nikki Haley, that’s a problem because they’re not as polarizing as Trump is,” he said, citing moderate Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.
“It’s less of a problem” now because Trump is “so well-defined and not necessarily very favorably outside his core MAGA group,” he added.
“A lot of Americans would say ‘I may not know her, but that’s OK because it’s an alternative to Trump, and I’ll give her a chance.’ The difference with Biden is those same Americans that might do that for Harris just looked at him and said, ‘No, he’s too old,’” Jarding said.
He warned that Harris’s biggest danger is to let herself get dragged by Trump into a personal, insult-laden fight that would let the GOP nominee define the race on his terms.
“One of the things that’s most impressed me about her is that she hasn’t really taken the bait when Trump tries to beat her up. She kind of laughs it off, and I think that’s a really good approach because that just gets under his skin, and he gets mean and gets off message,” he added.
“If it looks like it’s getting her and cutting into her, that’s a problem. If I were advising her, I would say keep smiling. Keep laughing at his craziness,” Jarding said. “Don’t do what Rubio did and talk about the small hands. … Then you’re playing on his turf and he’ll probably beat you.”