On Friday, Barack and Michelle Obama formally endorsed Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president, completing the set of high-profile party leaders who have publicly given her their support.
Her ascent to the nomination appears to have gone much more smoothly, and with her party much more united behind her, than anyone imagined before Biden stepped aside.
But the disastrous Biden campaign is a low bar for comparison – and Trump still holds plenty of cards. Here’s what you need to know as the Harris campaign moves from being a novelty act to the new normal.
Her messages on the campaign trail
Even though she’s been vice-president for more than three years, Harris is still relatively undefined for most voters, and so this is a crucial moment to set up the rest of the campaign.
Her first campaign ad sought to draw a sharp contrast with Trump through the prism of freedom: to the tune of Beyoncé’s song of the same name, she talks about “the freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body.” Trump’s vision of America, she meanwhile said, was “a country of chaos, of fear, of hate”.
She struck a similar note in an address to a teachers’ union in Houston, saying: “We are in a fight for our most fundamental freedoms” and warning that “we want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books”. And in a speech to more than 6,000 Black women in Indianapolis, she said: “Ours is a fight for the future and a fight for freedom.”
In her first rally in the battleground state of Wisconsin a couple of days earlier – which saw a hasty venue change because it was so oversubscribed – she set up what is likely to be the consistent contrast drawn with Trump in the months ahead: she is a prosecutor, he is a convicted criminal. “I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she said. “So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
Two slogans, meanwhile, have come to the fore – and they have a vigorous, defiant tone that sounds like it’s meant to enthuse the Democratic base. She led the fired-up crowd in Wisconsin in a chorus of “When we fight, we win.” And when she said: “America has tried these failed economic policies before, but we are not going back,” the crowd chanted: “Not going back! Not going back!”
How the Trump campaign has responded
One analysis of Harris’s impact on the campaign came from Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, who sent a memo to staffers acknowledging a “honeymoon” with “wall-to-wall coverage … from the mainstream media” but added: “the fundamentals of the race stay the same”.
But that seems obviously untrue: Harris is a very different candidate to Biden, and is invulnerable to the case that the Trump campaign has been set up to make – that their opponent is too old.
Trump’s own approach was crystallised at the Bojangles Coliseum (real name) in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he held his first campaign rally since Biden’s exit. He called her the “ultraliberal driving force” behind Biden’s policies and said she was a “radical-left lunatic who will destroy our country”. He also branded her “lyin’ Kamala Harris” and repeatedly pronounced her name wrong. While immigration is meant to be a central line of attack, he did not mention it once in an interview with Fox News last Monday. Fox News contributors, meanwhile, seem to be obsessed with her view on plastic straws.
All of that suggests that the Republicans are yet to settle on a message that is likely to appeal to swing voters, although that’s not to say they won’t: “They’re road testing a lot of different messages, have not really narrowed down what resonates, what people care about,” Republican strategist Jason Roe told Politico.
How Democrats have reacted
The scale of the fundraising improvement – $200m in the week since she was endorsed by Joe Biden – is well documented, but also important is where it comes from: the Harris campaign said that 888,000 grassroots donors made donations of less than $200 in the first 24 hours. About 66% of the weekly total came from first-time donors, according to the campaign, opening up a potential new revenue stream in the months ahead. Late last week, Harris’s team hosted a zoom call with 160,000 attendees which appeared to break records in donations.
Meanwhile, Future Forward, the biggest Democratic political action committee – which operates independently of the campaign – said it raised $150m in the first 24 hours.
The campaign also said that 100,000 people had signed up to volunteer by Wednesday, and 2,000 had applied for campaign jobs. As supporters waited for new Harris for President signs – her design team came up with six options in three hours last Sunday and had to take them to campaign headquarters while they were still wet – some of them made DIY versions by lopping the incumbent president’s name off the top of existing BIDEN HARRIS signs. All of that, along with the memeification of Harris via Charli xcx’s “brat summer”, suggests an early rush of enthusiasm of an organic kind that is gold for political campaigns.
How the polls have changed
The first concrete evidence that the race has changed came in a spate of polls released towards the end of last week, which showed a significant narrowing of the gap between Trump and Harris as compared to Biden’s performance.
A national poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College showed Harris behind 47 to 48 – closing the Biden-Trump gap by five points. An aggregate of 80 polls from the Hill and Decision Desk HQ had Harris 2.1 points behind, where Biden had been trailing by 3.3 points.
Polls in the crucial battleground states, meanwhile, tend to show Trump with leads, but Harris improving on Biden’s position. And the Democrats say that they believe Harris at the top of the ticket can put them in contention in a swathe of states that appeared to be out of Biden’s reach: a memo from Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon argues that her greater popularity with young and minority voters means that North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada – all which were leaning towards Trump – are now in play.
While all of that looks like very good news for Harris, there are strong caveats. Most polls say that Trump is still winning. And the improvement in national polls may overstate her chances because she is less popular with older, white working-class voters than Biden was – and they are the key constituency in the states most likely to decide the election.
It’s also probably true that Harris is enjoying a honeymoon – and her momentum may slow. But the Democratic convention is two weeks away, and she will make more headlines when she announces her pick for vice-president before that. The hope for the Harris campaign is that by the time Trump has the chance to wrest back control of the agenda, she may be in an even better position than she is today.
