The race is on to define Kamala Harris.
Harris’ campaign rallies are a clear change from those held by President Joe Biden, the man she is replacing at the top of the Democratic ticket. The soundtrack is Beyoncé’s “Freedom” and songs like the “Cupid Shuffle.” Megan Thee Stallion performs. They’re brat — or at least trying to be. The vice president likes to say she’s running a “people-powered campaign” and would oversee “a people-first presidency.”
While the atmospherics are meant to bring some energy back to the Democratic Party, she has also introduced herself to the country as a prosecutor out to press the case against former President Donald Trump.
“I was elected a United States senator. I was elected attorney general of the state of California. And I was a courtroom prosecutor before then,” she said at her first campaign rally, in Wisconsin on July 23. “And in those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds — predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”
But the Trump campaign is rushing to define Harris differently.
“Weak, failed, too liberal,” Trump senior adviser Brian Hughes said. “The agenda that brought a border invasion when she was border czar.”
The Trump campaign’s overall messaging strategy that will play out in the coming weeks can largely be seen as multipronged: tying Harris to Biden administration policies, questioning her authenticity and race, focusing on the fact she was in charge of trying to fix the flow of migrants coming across the southern border, and what the Trump campaign will frame as a record in the Senate that is much more liberal than the records of her Democratic colleagues.
Harris is an unprecedented presidential candidate, thrust into the top spot roughly 100 days before the election. She’s not the incumbent, and she didn’t have to go through a grueling primary process. Some voters are still learning the details of her biography: her background, policies she supported and how she’s different from Biden.
And both sides are eager to make sure their image of Harris is the one that sticks with voters.
“She knows this is going to be a very close race,” Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Harris’ campaign manager, said in an interview. “We are quickly getting our operations up and running. So we are all in constant communication, especially as we move into the next phase of the campaign.”
She added that the campaign is working to make sure it has the resources nationally and locally to keep the momentum going.
“The biggest priority is continuing to build out our infrastructure in the states and continuing to do the hard, methodical work that we know we need to win,” Chávez Rodríguez said.
Still, a source familiar with Harris’ thinking said, “There are only about 90 days left … so a lot of the work is just making sure the record is correct as the other side seeks to define her.”
The Harris approach
This week, two ads went up that underscored the war to define Harris. The Trump team debuted an ad blaming her for what it characterized as deadly failures at the southern border. Harris, meanwhile, launched a $50 million preconvention ad buy, with its first spot making the case that she had a stellar career as a “fearless” prosecutor who held murderers, abusers and financial fraudsters accountable. Future Forward, the main super PAC backing Harris, is advertising similar amounts and with similar themes.
Leading Harris’ efforts will be Chávez Rodríguez, who stayed on as campaign manager, and Jen O’Malley Dillon, who also stayed on as chair of the campaign after Biden dropped out.
Chávez Rodríguez and Harris have been close for nearly a decade, since Chávez Rodríguez first took a job as state director for Harris’ Senate office in 2016.
Back then, Harris saw Chávez Rodríguez’s job, which was based in California, as the “tip of the spear of some of the resistance against Trump and the policies that we knew he was going to enact,” Chávez Rodríguez told NBC News. She later ended up working on Harris’ presidential campaign in 2019 as her traveling chief of staff.
Chávez Rodríguez said she got to “see every aspect” of Harris’ leadership and style in action, from her “dancing to music” to cooking Bolognese using herbs from her garden to making calls to grassroots organizations and Democratic leaders to showing that she “cared deeply about the work that she does and who she’s fighting for every day.” It is that “multidimensional” Harris whom the campaign will seek to lean in to.
“There is a kind of nurturing aspect of her,” Chávez Rodríguez said. “She is extremely caring and sort of motherly, if I may say so. She is constantly thinking about the well-being of others. I think that the joy kind of is a big piece of that, making sure we are able to have fun while we’re still doing the hard work that we need to do.”
Ashley Etienne, who formerly worked as Harris’ vice presidential communications director, said a two-pronged approach of both attacking Trump and laying out a plan for what Harris will do in office will be key to winning the election. She said the 1% to 2% of voters who are likely to decide the election “want more.”
“They have Trump fatigue. She’s going to have to chart out a vision that has absolutely no relationship to Donald Trump,” Etienne said of voters and Harris. “She clearly has grown and developed and feels so much more comfortable and fortified in who she is. You can see that. I think the challenge is going to be can you articulate a vision that’s compelling and inspiring, that’s unifying and that makes people want to come out and vote for you. And I can tell you, that’s a hard thing to do.”
Etienne added that, with Election Day looming, time is certainly of the essence and that Harris needs to find a way to define herself before Republican messaging sticks.
The Trump approach
Meanwhile, as Harris tries to paint herself as a person with a positive vision for the country, the Trump campaign hopes to paint a picture of her that is just the opposite. Its ad released Tuesday called her “failed,” “weak” and “dangerously liberal.”
“Joe Biden acted like a California liberal. Kamala Harris is one,” said Hughes, the senior Trump adviser.
The pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. also quickly went up with an anti-Harris TV ad focused on what it said was the “cover-up” surrounding Biden’s mental decline” and her role in the administration’s attempts to fight illegal immigration.
The new ad has run thousands of times across key swing states, according to AdImpact, an ad-tracking firm. So have new ads from Trump’s campaign slamming Harris as Biden’s failed “border czar.”
Altogether, MAGA Inc. and another pro-Trump super PAC are set to answer Harris’ spending before her convention with more than $50 million of their own ads, according to AdImpact. Trump’s campaign has booked at least $15 million more itself, though the numbers are rapidly changing.
The Trump campaign has been heavily leaning in to the border issue.
“Under border czar Harris, illegal aliens are pouring in by the millions and millions and millions,” Trump said at a recent rally in North Carolina.
In 2021, Biden tapped Harris to address the surge of Central American migrants, who came mostly from the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, where violence and organized crime have driven millions to flee the region. “Border czar” wasn’t her title, but the term has been widely used by her critics.
Harris pushed back at a campaign rally Tuesday, saying it was Trump who failed to take action to secure the border. She said Trump “has been talking a big game on securing the border, but he does not walk the walk.”
Harris went on to once again define herself by leaning on her experience as a prosecutor.
“I was the attorney general of a border state,” she said. “In that job, I walked underground tunnels between the United States and Mexico on that border with law enforcement officers. I went after transnational gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers that came into our country illegally. I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won.”
‘Our differences do not divide us’
There is also the issue of race and identity.
Within a day of Biden’s dropping his re-election bid, Trump’s allies were calling Harris a “DEI” candidate. DEI refers to workplace policies promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, but it has become a term the right uses to discredit political opponents who are people of color.
Harris has for years embraced her racial identity — her mom was Indian, and her dad is Jamaican. She also attended a historically Black college, Howard University, in Washington, D.C., and joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first historically Black sorority founded in the nation, while she was in college.
On Wednesday, though, in an interview at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago, Trump sought to paint her as someone who is inauthentic and engages in race-baiting.
“I’ve known her a long time indirectly, not directly, very much,” he said of Harris. “And she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
The comment infuriated Harris’ allies and many of her supporters.
“It’s simply a lie and easily disproved. She went to Howard, for Christ’s sake,” a person close to Harris said. “Kamala Harris has always known who she is. And Donald Trump has always lived out who he is and continues to do so today.”
Harris herself responded during a speech in Houston.
“It was the same old show. The divisiveness and the disrespect,” she said Wednesday night at an event for the historically Black sorority Sigma Gamma Rho. “The American people deserve better. The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth, a leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us. They are an essential source of our strength.”
The Harris campaign also quickly released a statement saying, “All Donald Trump needs to do is stop playing games and actually show up to the debate on September 10.” It was an extension of pushes Harris has been making in defining herself as someone willing to go toe to toe with Trump, who hasn’t yet committed to debating her. That image is also starting to stick, at least among her supporters; the crowd at her Atlanta rally this week chanted: “He’s scared. He’s scared. He’s scared.”
Leaning on allies
Still, there is a campaign to grow. The Harris campaign has launched a website advertising more than five dozen jobs. Two sources familiar with the campaign’s planning said it is looking to hire a chief strategist, as well as an ad maker. There are new people being brought on who have deep ties with Harris. And there are longtime allies, including Democratic lawmakers, working to garner all the help she can get from her party, which has quickly largely coalesced around her candidacy.
For Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., the chair of Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, the way forward will be about maintaining the excitement pulsing through the Democratic Party and doing things like encouraging voters in California to reach out to voters in the critical battleground states.
It will also mean sharing how moved Chu was that Harris called her when Biden dropped out and endorsed her.
“She is Black and Asian American. She could have taken us for granted. But no, she made sure that she touched base with us, and that was a signal that she valued us,” Chu said. “She doesn’t want to make it seem like it’s just a coronation that’s been bequeathed to her. She is going to work hard, like any presidential candidate would, to earn the trust and respect of the American people.”
She added that she hopes voters will come to see the consoling side of Harris that she saw in January 2023 after Harris went to Monterey Park, California, after a gunman opened fire at a dance hall, killing 10 people, before he died by suicide.
“One of the survivors just was so numbed and traumatized that he could barely speak and think, because his friends had been killed and he’d seen them fall down and right in front of his eyes,” she said. “And he wasn’t able to cry until he saw Kamala Harris, because she was so empathetic and consoling.”
Meanwhile, Chávez Rodríguez said, Harris’ ability to bring “joy” and compassion to the job helped them weather tough times, a skill that is likely to be needed again.
“She brings a sense of levity,” she said, “even though we oftentimes are in really stressful situations and high-pressure times.”
