Has Kamala Harris got what it takes to win the US presidency?

Suddenly, as of last week when Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy from the US presidential race and in the wake of an assassination attempt on his Republican rival Donald Trump, the drama has only intensified.

Seen from the Democrats’ perspective it’s as if a long time long jam in their campaign had suddenly been breached. Biden’s subsequent endorsement along with that of both Barack and Michelle Obama of vice president Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee, has only added to the momentum.

Barely a week into Harris’s unexpected campaign for the White House, not only has she secured endorsements from major players, but raised hundreds of millions in campaign dollars and closed some of Biden’s gaps in the polls against former President Trump. 

Newly energised behind Harris, the question now with barely 100 days until American voters cast their ballot, is can the Democrats maintain that drive and Harris go all the way and win the presidency?

For their part the Republicans for the moment appear oddly on the back foot, almost as if they didn’t anticipate this happening. The GOP it seems is still coming to terms with the fact that they now face an election they could lose, even if the Democrats and Harris remain the “underdogs” as Obama pointed out in his phone call to her when confirming his endorsement. 

As a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial last week observed, the Republicans seem to be grasping for attack lines that are only backfiring on them. 

“One bad argument is that Ms. Harris is “a DEI candidate.” the paper said referring to the diversity, equity, and inclusion designation.

“That may literally have been true in 2020 when Mr. Biden promised to appoint a woman as his running mate. But diminishing her in this way now, after she’s been VP for four years, will alienate women and the minority voters the GOP is trying to attract” the WSJ concluded. Calling out Harris for being childless, as a resurfaced 2021 comment from Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has done, is another “false note,” the paper criticised in its editorial. 

Toxic as such attacks are, they are only the opening salvoes in what is sure to be a bitter campaign as it counts down first to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August and then the election itself in November. 

For the moment though Harris will be buoyed not just from the backing of Democratic Party heavyweights, but that of several labour unions, and 40 former Justice Department officials who served presidents of both US parties

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee will also take encouragement from hard polling data. Among the best for Harris was a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted on Monday and Tuesday last week - before the Obamas’ endorsement – that showed her opening up a marginal two-percentage point over Trump in a national poll. 

(Image: Getty Images)

Stark contract

Other national polling such as the New York Times/Siena poll released on Thursday showed her trailing to Trump with a tight margin by one point, 47 to 48, a stark contrast with the six point lead the Republican nominee held over Biden in the same poll at the beginning of July.

The shift in polling has made Republicans edgy and resulted in Anthony Fabrizio, Trump’s pollster and strategist issuing a memo last week warning about the coming “Harris Honeymoon” in the polls. 

As the WSJ observed this is “highly unusual for a campaign that never concedes a polling disadvantage. It suggests the campaign knows the enthusiasm gap that had favoured Republicans may have vanished.”

What is notable say some political observers including a Financial Times (FT) analysis, is that Harris’s boost is not coming from previously decided voters switching their allegiance, but from winning over previously undecided and third-party voters, particularly the young, Black and Latino electorates that Biden had been struggling to persuade.

This is a significant factor because these were perhaps the three most troubling groups for a Biden-led Democratic ticket. While these groups have favoured Democrats by substantial margins for decades, evidence showed that Biden for some time has been performing poorly among them.

Harris many believe will do better than Biden among non-white voters, putting states with particularly large Black populations like Georgia and North Carolina or Hispanic populations like Arizona and Nevada back into contention.

In a memo last week Jen O’Malley Dillon, the architect of Biden’s successful 2020 campaign insisted that Harris, the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, would be able to galvanise support from Black voters, Latino voters, Asian-American voters and women voters in particular.

“This campaign will be close, it will be hard fought, but Vice President Harris is in a position of strength – and she’s going to win,” O’Malley Dillon wrote.

Harris has other strengths too say some political observers. As a recent analysis by The Economist magazine noted, “her identity as the first black and South Asian woman to run for president could, if handled right, make her a compelling symbol of the American dream.”

War chest

The US website Vox news also pointed to other strengths - albeit with certain important caveats - the most obvious being that as the  Democratic nominee, she has largely inherited the Biden campaign apparatus and election war chest and would have some version of the incumbency advantage as the sitting vice president. 

“Harris would be able to tout her role in the Biden administration’s wins - like the Inflation Reduction Act, which will help lower prescription drug costs and invest in climate initiatives, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which includes historic funding for bridges and roads, “ Vox noted.

“She’d be able to point also, to the experience she’s garnered as vice president and how it’s prepared her to become commander-in-chief,” the news website added, pointing out that this is the same strategy that Biden himself successfully employed in 2020, when he linked himself to the Biden administration’s achievements. Harris - as Biden did before her - could emphasise how she was often “the last one in the room when key decisions were being made.”

One of Harris’s most obvious strengths and strategic assets in the campaign will be her continuing ability to speak out strongly for women’s reproductive rights, which has already shown itself to be a solid vote winner. 

This has been the case for the Democrats since the US Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022.

According to the FT, Democratic party insiders are convinced Harris will be a more effective champion of reproductive rights than Biden. As an observant Catholic, Biden earlier in his career favoured more restrictions on access to abortions. 

On this issue Harris too is likely to train her sights on the record of JD Vance, Trump’s running mate who in the past has supported a national ban on terminations and opposed exceptions in the case of rape or incest.

(Image: Getty Images)

But of course just as Harris has strengths, so too does she have political weaknesses. To begin with in the view of some, she remains at times a maladroit communicator, struggling sometimes in speeches and interviews and guilty of what some have derided as sounding like “word salad.” That said, so far on the stump she’s performing better than she did in 2019 or in her early days as vice president.

Critics also argue Harris hasn’t always defined herself - and what she stands for - that clearly. In that regard she potentially then faces the danger of making too much of the record of the Biden administration and her part in it. 

She is after all as vice president –  and in Republican eyes at least - lumbered with Biden’s record on immigration, inflation and crime.

According to the WSJ, Harris’s biggest vulnerability is that “she is a product of California’s progressive political hothouse.”

“She has never had to appeal to moderate voters nationwide. This shows in the many left-wing positions she took as a state Attorney General and Senator that are unpopular in middle America,” the paper highlighted last week. 

It’s a weakness others also point to, with The Economist warning that, “a West Coast centrist is not a centrist in the battleground states she must win.”

Writing recently in the political and public policy journal, American Prospect, its editor at large, Harold Meyerson, suggests that there’s “not much in Harris’s history to suggest she’s the cure for the Democrats’ growing weakness among working-class voters - most particularly, the white working-class voters who’ve been trending Republican for a very long time.”

In making his case, Meyerson asks, “Would a Gretchen Whitmer or a Josh Shapiro (or a Sherrod Brown were he not now running to hold his Senate seat) be better positioned than Harris to win enough working-class votes in swing states to win the presidency?” 

“Probably,” Meyerson concludes, “but by the time Biden had decided to drop out, it was too late to have the kind of contest that the party’s smartest politician, Nancy Pelosi, could have devised.,” he goes on to answer. 

Much of course will depend on who Harris chooses as a running mate. Josh Shapiro, the eloquent governor of Pennsylvania, could help in a must-win state. Mark Kelly, a senator from Arizona, another battleground state, would also add to the ticket - and as The Economist wryly noted last week, “it would rile Mr Trump to face an ex-astronaut.” 

Any of Harris’s vulnerabilities of course will determine the Republican campaign’s line of attack on her. Already Trump  has set out to frame Harris as a “dangerous radical.”

“I really believe she’s a San Francisco radical. She’s actually, I think, a much worse, in a way, a much worse candidate than (Biden),” Trump told Fox News on Thursday. 

“She also wants to defund the police, and she really wants to do it more than any other person. She’s the most radical person probably that we’ve had in office, let alone the office of the presidency,” Trump added.

In an editorial last week the WSJ suggested that most likely the “Republicans will have reams of video to inform voters about Harris’s extreme views.” The paper also recalled how the Republicans turned “Massachusetts Democrat” into an epithet to defeat Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, suggesting they will likely do the same again with Harris’s California history. 

(Image: Getty Images)

Last Thursday the Trump campaign said it would not agree to a debate with Harris “until Democrats formally decide on their nominee,” claiming in a statement that that there “is a strong sense by many in the Democratic Party … that Kamala Harris is a Marxist fraud who cannot beat President Trump, and they are still holding out for someone ‘better.’”

Team Trump allies have also wasted no time in pouring another $32 million into attack ads aimed at defining Harris as an architect of the administration’s immigration and border security mistakes before she has time to respond as the Democratic nominee.

In all of this there is a real sense that the Trump campaign fears a loss of its momentum. As The New York Times pointed out, “for the first time since Trump was indicted in the spring of 2023, he has lost his grip on the news cycle and - temporarily at least - his message,” because of the attention on Harris.

Instead of commanding morning-to-night media attention, the former president and his allies suddenly find themselves reacting to their opponents. In doing so they are attempting to tie her to Biden’s record and her own record as California’s Attorney General, in short, anything that will undermine Harris’s own current campaigning momentum.

At her first official rally, in Milwaukee on July 23rd, what America saw in Harris’s speech stood in stark contrast to the halting and sometime excruciatingly embarrassing verbal gaffes of Biden. 

This was not the uncertain candidate of four years ago during her presidential campaign, but a more assured and experienced performer. Harris will need all those assets and more going up against Trump. Whether she and the Democrats have what it takes to beat him in November only time will tell. But if one thing is certain right now, it’s that the Democrats are back in the running and team Trump is looking a little more nervous than it has for a while.