Kamala Harris hopes her roots, legal background and pro-women record will help her beat Trump

President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid at 1:46pm on July 21, posting a letter on social media from his vacation home in Delaware. At 2:13pm, he endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor. In those 27 minutes, Harris spoke to nearly a dozen key Democrats, persuading them to back her, and all of them did. At 4:48pm, she filed the first application with the Federal Election Commission about the change atop the Democratic ticket, marking the formal transition of the campaign.

Harris was ready. She was at her Naval Observatory residence in Washington, DC, when Biden told her about his decision to quit. She immediately summoned her team, which had an inkling that something momentous was happening. By the time they called it a day, Harris had contacted more than 100 Democratic stalwarts, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Congressional leaders and, most importantly, her potential rivals for nomination—Governors Gretchen Whitmer, J.B. Pritzker and Josh Shapiro. Her team simultaneously worked the phones to convince convention delegates, numbering around 4,000, who have the mandate to choose the nominee.

In less than two days, Harris won over 3,100 delegates, secured endorsements from prominent Democrats, cleared the field of every serious contender and raised nearly $125 million (approximately Rs 1050 crore). By quickly sealing the nomination, she killed the demand for an open convention, which was said to be preferred by at least a few in the party, including Obama. (Michelle and Barack Obama endorsed her three days later.) Harris has all but clinched the Democratic nomination; technically, she has to wait till the Democratic Party completes its formal roll call of delegates to finalise its candidate, which could happen latest by August 7.

“Harris is really good at clearing fields, at the whole shock and awe thing,”  journalist Dan Morain told New York Magazine, explaining how quickly she outmanoeuvred the competition and locked up the nomination. “She is underestimated. She came out of pretty much nowhere to become district attorney (2004). And when she ran for attorney general of California in 2010, she was certainly the underdog.” Harris went on to become a senator and then vice president, defying odds. She now has about 100 days to define herself as a candidate for the general election, develop a voter-friendly policy platform and get her messaging right.

The swift coronation of Harris was also a message to her Republican rival Donald Trump, who sounded upset about the switch. He said it was unfair that he was being forced to start all over again after spending time and money fighting Biden. On social media, he railed that he should be reimbursed for the expenses incurred.

As the race begins to heat up, one of the major advantages that Harris enjoys is that she could inherit much of the existing infrastructure from the Biden campaign. Another factor is, ironically, her age. While it had been the biggest vulnerability for the Democrats with Biden as their candidate, it has now become a weapon they could deploy against Trump, who is now the oldest presidential nominee in American history. “The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the one that wins this election,” former Republican candidate Nikki Haley said in January. Harris is expected to make Trump's age and acuity a campaign issue and she will take heart from the fact that nearly 60 per cent of the voters now say that Trump is too old to serve. She will also benefit from the support of the so-called ‘double haters’—voters who want neither Biden nor Trump.

Some Democrats suggest that they should be somewhat tactful about the age issue, as they had spent months and years defending Biden, but Harris can be really ruthless when she wants to, evident from her swift takeover of the Democratic Party. Ambitious is an adjective that has stuck to her, like burrs to a sari. Some even call her opportunistic. Republicans still talk about her brief, torrid affair with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown back in the 1990s, which they allege gave Harris her first political opening.

Brown was one of California’s most powerful politicians, while Harris was a 29-year-old up-and-coming prosecutor. He gave her political career a push by nominating her to the California unemployment insurance appeals board and to the medical assistance commission. More importantly, he introduced her to the rich and famous of San Francisco. The connections came handy when she ran for district attorney. She used the opening to make more influential friends, such as billionaire philanthropist Laurene Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs. These networks helped her immensely when she ran for California attorney general in 2010 and 2014, and for senate in 2016.

Harris first got noticed nationally during her tenure as attorney general as she led a campaign on behalf of the Californians who had lost their homes in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. The Obama administration pushed for a settlement among states, the federal government and the banks over the predatory mortgages. While the banks wanted to offer as little compensation as possible, Obama wanted the crisis to go away, and fast. In January 2011, soon after she took over as attorney general, Harris confronted the Obama administration as she felt that homeowners were being shortchanged. She called the proposed settlement inadequate and walked out of the negotiations.

The Obama White House, which realised that California’s withdrawal would scuttle the whole process, tried its best to woo Harris. She was offered a personal meeting with the president and also an invitation to sit in the first lady’s box for the State of the Union address. She politely declined, took the banks head on, and ultimately won a $20 billion settlement for her state’s beleaguered homeowners. Obama himself praised Harris afterwards. “She is tough, and she is exactly what you'd want in anybody who is administering the law," he said.

Harris's prosecutorial background offers a riveting contrast to Trump, whose life and career has been defined by legal woes and now, felony convictions. The liberal media has already given the contest a ‘prosecutor versus perp’ spin. Harris is certain to milk that image as much as possible. A former prosecutor challenging a convicted felon has been the overarching theme of her first few campaign speeches.

“I know Donald Trump's type,” she told staff and supporters at her campaign headquarters in Delaware on July 23. “Before I was elected as vice president… I was a prosecutor. 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,” she said. “So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type. And in this campaign, I will proudly put my record against his.”

Republicans know how tough Harris can get, even when she is not in a courtroom. Memories of the nightmarish grilling of Trump's supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh at his senate confirmation hearing in 2018 still linger. As a member of the judiciary committee, Harris led the Democrats in questioning Kavanaugh, who was chosen by Trump from a list prepared by the conservative Federalist Society. Harris had conducted a mock hearing with aides, to be ready for Kavanaugh. She wanted to figure out how best to raise the point about abortion rights, of how unequal was a law that dictated to a woman how to deal with her own body. She finally came up with a straightforward question, “Is there a law that forces a man to do something that he doesn’t want to do with his body?” Her aides did not have an answer, and neither did Kavanaugh.

She was also quite scathing about the White House's handling of the FBI investigation into sexual harassment allegations about Kavanaugh. Trump later said that Harris was extraordinarily nasty to Kavanaugh. “She was nasty to a level that was just horrible,” he said. “And I won't forget that.”

From the way Harris is going ahead with her campaign, women’s rights could be the winning issue for her. “She talks about abortion rights, and she talks about it unapologetically,” Kelly Baden, public policy expert at Guttmacher Institute, which specialises in reproductive rights, told NBC News. Harris is quite comfortable talking about it, unlike Biden, a staunch Catholic, who once said that he was not “big on abortion”.

Harris was the first vice president to visit a clinic run by Planned Parenthood, one of the biggest organisations that provide reproductive health care. She also undertook a tour across the US to champion abortion rights after the supreme court overturned the Roe v Wade judgment, removing legal protection for abortion.

Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice presidential candidate, is known for his extreme anti-abortion and anti-women views, and one could expect fireworks. His past attack on Harris for not having biological children has led to intense backlash. During his senate campaign three years ago, Vance said on the Tucker Carlson show that people without children did not have a direct stake in the future of the United States. “We are effectively run in this country by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives... so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”

In another 2021 talk show, Vance said childless Americans should be taxed at a higher rate. He has endorsed a national abortion ban, the enforcement of the Comstock Act (a dormant law which bans the mailing of drugs and instruments related to abortion) and Ohio's six-week abortion ban. He now averages a net favourability rating of negative 5 per cent across all polls, lower than any vice presidential nominee in history. Many Republicans—some even openly—are wondering whether Trump erred in his VP choice. Vance has tried to walk back some of those extreme positions, but Harris is unlikely to let him get away easily.

Apart from her firm stand on reproductive rights, Harris is expected to play up her multicultural background. In the first few days after Biden’s withdrawal, Democrats have witnessed a surge in polling, critically among independents and people of colour and women, and Harris could carry it forward by retelling her immigrant story. She said she learned the basic lessons of freedom and justice from her parents, Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris, immigrant academics who loved a good fight for a just cause.

Shyamala came to the United States in the late 1950s, when she was only 19. She chose the US because as a woman, she could not find a place in a graduate programme of her choice in India or even in the UK. In her memoir, Harris describes her mother as a tough taskmaster, who had no patience for self-indulgence. Her grandmother, Rajam Gopalan, too, was a formidable woman. Back in the 1940s, she used to drive across villages in present-day Tamil Nadu on her Volkswagen Beetle, educating women about birth control. She would chastise men who ill-treated their wives. “We’re all diluted versions of my grandmother,” wrote Harris.

Her grandfather P.V. Gopalan started out as a stenographer, but rose to be a senior civil servant. In June 2023, speaking at a luncheon hosted in honour of visiting Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Harris said her introduction to the concepts of equality, freedom and democracy came from her grandfather, with whom she enjoyed taking long walks on the beach during her visits to Chennai.

The heritage of her father, who belongs to a landowning family in Jamaica, too, has influenced Harris. Although her worldview and political philosophy are markedly different from his radical leftist ideology, she said she inherited his conviction to defend the truth, even the uncomfortable ones.

Her immigrant background clearly helps in opening up new pathways for Harris to win 270 of 533 electoral college votes required to be declared winner. Latest New York Times poll (conducted from July 22 to 24) shows her trailing Trump by just one point nationally (47 per cent to 48 per cent). But she leads Trump among Black voters—78 per cent to 15 per cent—an 8 per cent edge over Biden. Among Hispanic voters, she is up by 47 per cent to 45 per cent, while Biden was trailing by 9 per cent. Harris also finds favour with voters under 35—she leads Trump 47 per cent to 43 per cent. Trump was up against Biden by 7 per cent among this cohort.

Biden had nearly given up on the Sun Belt states of Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, which he had won last time. His precariously narrow route to the White House was to retain the three Blue Wall states—Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

With her background and appeal among blacks, Hispanics, women and youth, Harris seems to have opened up the Sun Belt states, even adding North Carolina to the list. Trump won North Carolina by just 75,000 votes (of the total 5.5 million votes polled) in 2020. It is a margin that the Harris team is confident that she could deal with, especially since over 20 per cent of the state’s population is black. They would take heart from what Obama did in 2008, when he trumped John McCain in the state. North Carolina now has more electoral college votes (16) than Wisconsin (10) and Michigan (15). Similar dynamics are in play in neighbouring Georgia as well, which is more good news for Harris.

Added insurance could come from Arizona and Nevada, where nearly 30 per cent of the voters are Hispanics. Moreover, there could be an abortion rights initiative on the ballot in Arizona, which would aid her. In Nevada, she has extensive connections and a thriving poll machinery. She has been quite active in the state for the past few years, building friendships, networks and coalitions. This year alone, she visited Nevada six times.

WHILE HARRIS has so far enjoyed a smooth ride to the top, a general election presents its own unique set of challenges. One of the obvious problems she faces is her association with Biden. Aligning herself closely with the president may get Harris support from those who approve of his policies and leadership, but it could cost her the support of independents who are dissatisfied with certain aspects of Biden's presidency or who expect a different direction for the Democratic Party. No wonder Harris has already displayed an independent streak in at least two issues—she prefers a more proactive abortion policy and she insists on emphasising the humanitarian cost of the Gaza war.

Second, Republicans will try to portray Harris as the candidate imposed from above, brokered and decided by party elites, without even a mini-primary. Additionally, the lack of a rigorous primary contest experience could pose challenges when facing a formidable opponent like Trump. Primary campaigns typically serve as crucial testing grounds for candidates, allowing them to refine their messaging and demonstrate their ability to connect with diverse voter demographics.

Third, Harris has to brace herself for a barrage of below-the-belt attacks from Trump and his surrogates. He has already called her “dumb as a rock”, "totally unlikeable", a "communist," and a “monster". On July 26, addressing a gathering of religious conservatives in Florida, he accused her of trying to impose radical leftist values on immigration and abortion. At the moment, however, Trump is finding it hard to find a line of attack that sticks, but that doesn't mean that he will stop.

Finally, despite the obvious advantages that Harris enjoys, there are palpable concerns about the swing states—whether she would be able to persuade enough white working class voters who carried Biden past the finish line four years ago. Some Democrats worry that her coalition of the women, black and youth voters may not be enough to offset the loss of support among white men. All her individual electoral wins came in a liberal state where the principal challenge was to win over Democratic elites and progressive voters, not centre-right independents who would determine her fate in the Blue Wall states. She would do well to remember that no California Democrat ever has successfully run for president. Her strategists hope that by selecting the right running mate and by adopting a centrist line on controversial issues, she would be able to outperform Trump.

Four years ago, when Biden chose Harris as his running mate, the pandemic was at its peak, and a Zoom meeting of black women was held to build support for her. It attracted just 90 participants. On the night of July 21, however, an estimated 90,000 black women met online in solidarity with Harris. The group, Win With Black Women, mobilised more than 44,000 members to attend a Zoom meeting that went on for hours, finishing past 1am. Zoom typically limits the number of participants to 1,000, but a female executive at its office stepped in to expand the capacity. The group wanted to raise a million dollars in 100 days for Harris, but the target was exceeded in about an hour.

The Harris team hopes that such unprecedented enthusiasm from a critical section of the voters could enable her to beat Trump in the election on November 5. Deborah Delgado, a Democratic official from Mississippi, who was on the Zoom call, could not contain her enthusiasm. “I expect the next few months will see a robust campaign by Harris,” she told the Clarion Ledger. “Hopefully, people who have historically not been excited about voting get that excitement which we need, that we just create a movement that is going to make us victorious in November.”