Voters Aren’t Sure Who Kamala Harris Really Is

When President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him on the Democratic ticket, Donald Trump’s campaign saw a threat. The Republican National Committee proposed suing to force Biden to run. Stephen Miller whined on Fox News about how mean the Democrats are being. Trump himself posted a rant to Truth Social claiming that Biden didn’t really mean to drop out of the race.

Trump’s campaign understands that the fundamentals of the race have shifted: Now Trump is the old man in this race, the oldest nominee in history. His campaign is going to spend millions of dollars in the coming weeks to tar Harris as a San Francisco progressive. To win, she needs to offer a compelling counternarrative.

I hold focus groups with voters every week, and their impressions of the vice president have been remarkably consistent over the past three years: They don’t see her. They don’t feel like they know her. They don’t have a clear impression of who she is or what she stands for.

The fact that people feel like they don’t know Harris yet is obviously a challenge, but it could become her greatest asset. She has an opportunity to reintroduce herself to millions of voters. This is crucial, because public opinion is like concrete: It’s malleable at first, and then it hardens. If Harris wants to win over persuadable voters, she needs to define herself before Trump does.

So far, Harris’s anonymity and invisibility have been liabilities. Voters wonder why, if she’s been Biden’s right hand for three and a half years, they haven’t seen her accomplish anything. Voters’ frustration at her perceived lack of substance has been a consistent theme for years.

In the fall of 2022, a Clinton-Biden voter from Nevada who was considering backing Trump said during a focus group, “She does nothing. She’s plugging in an electric car on the news today. And that was it. I’m like, ‘Do something, woman!’”

A year later, a Trump-to-Biden voter said: “After the election, she vanished, so I can’t put my trust in the invisible woman.”

[Elaina Plott Calabro: The prosecutor vs. the felon]

This past May, a Trump-to-Biden voter said: “She disappears and then she’s at schools talking to kids and reading. I mean, that’s very nice, but … it doesn’t pay the bills.”

In focus groups organized after Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Harris, voters have continued to sound these themes.

“I don’t know what she’s done, even as a sitting vice president,” said Drew, a Trump-to-Biden voter from Michigan. “She’s just in the background right now; she’s the backup; she’s on the bench, essentially.”

He went on: “Now is her time to shine. She gets a starting role. So I’ve got to see what she does.”

“Currently, for me, she’s running for my vote. She doesn’t have my vote yet, because I don’t know enough about her yet. So I’m listening to her,” said Dennis, another Trump-to-Biden voter from Pennsylvania. “She’s still applying for the job.”

Despite these negative perceptions, Harris still has time to use voters’ uncertainty about her to her advantage. Biden was the perfect Democrat in 2020 because the largest coalition in American politics—the anti-Trump coalition—could pin its hopes and dreams on him as an acceptable alternative. Now Harris hopes to accomplish the same thing.

To succeed, she has to frame her candidacy around Trump’s vulnerabilities. And she has to cast herself as a competent alternative. This ad from 2020 in which she pitches herself as “the anti-Trump” strikes the right tone. It should be the model going forward.

Time is of the essence, so simplicity is key. Harris doesn’t have long for people to get to know her, so her best shot is to pick a few clear, popular contrasts with Trump and make those the defining points of her candidacy.

One immediately obvious choice is prosecutor versus felon. The Trump campaign reportedly plans to attack Harris as being soft on crime. She can parry by leaning into a new iteration of herself as Kamala the prosecutor.

The other key contrast is old versus young. At 78, Trump is a generation older than Harris, who is 59. With his rambling speeches, Hannibal Lecter invocations, mispronunciations, and overall appearance, Trump now looks every bit the unfit old man he accused Biden of being.

The Trump campaign wanted to make this election about age, and it succeeded. Now that’s the frame Trump himself has to live with.

[Xochitl Gonzalez: What the Kamala Harris doubters don’t understand]

The key point is that this work has to happen now. Harris’s speech in Milwaukee—her first as the presumptive nominee—was a strong start. If she can repeat that message again and again to tens of millions of voters on TV, radio, and social media over the next few weeks, she has a real shot at winning.