The Memo: Both sides race to shape voters’ views of Kamala Harris

The race to define Vice President Kamala Harris is on, with roughly 100 days left until the presidential election.

Republicans are pounding their message hard, the overarching accusation being that Harris is “dangerously liberal.” They have massively outspent their Democratic counterparts in the days since President Biden announced he is dropping his reelection bid.

Trump and his allies clearly see Harris’s early, prominent role within the Biden administration on immigration as a political liability. A Trump campaign email to reporters on Friday contended that Harris had been “complicit in fueling an invasion at our border.”

Democrats, meanwhile, are surfing a wave of enthusiasm for Harris as their de facto nominee after the weeks of crisis that enveloped Biden. The Harris campaign’s first ad — soundtracked by Beyoncé’s “Freedom” — cast the vice president not only as a defender of democracy but as an advocate for economic fairness, reproductive rights and gun safety.

The Harris team more broadly is trying to cast her career in law and politics — she is a former prosecutor and was later California’s attorney general — as being animated by a willingness to fight powerful interests on behalf of regular citizens. The framing carries an echo of her campaign slogan when she first sought the presidency in 2020: “Kamala Harris For The People.”

Of course, her 2020 campaign proved deeply underwhelming, with Harris dropping out before the Iowa caucuses — something that gives more skeptical Democrats pause as they ponder her chances against Trump.

The initial spate of polling since Biden dropped out shows that Harris has speedily narrowed the advantage that Trump had been enjoying — but she has not entirely closed it, at least in most polls.

A Wall Street Journal poll released on Friday showed Trump up by two points on Harris, 49 percent to 47 percent, among registered voters. Biden had trailed Trump by six points in a poll from the same organization at the start of this month.

A New York Times/Siena College poll released the previous day showed Trump leading by one point among likely voters, 48 percent to 47 percent. The Times poll had shown Trump leading Biden by six points roughly a month ago.

Strategists in both parties believe opinions are less calcified about Harris, who was only elected to the Senate eight years ago, than they are about Biden, who has been a fixture on the national political scene for a half-century.

In a public memo this week, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon — who had served in the same role in the now-defunct Biden campaign — argued that the vice president would be able to expand the support Biden received in winning the 2020 election.

The campaign chair contended that the near-certainty of Harris becoming the nominee “opens up additional persuadable voters who our campaign can work to win the support of. This race is more fluid now – the Vice President is well-known but less well-known than both Trump and President Biden, particularly among Dem-leaning constituencies.”

Republicans naturally see it entirely differently — and are putting their money where their mouths are.

According to an Associated Press (AP) analysis, Team Trump has outspent its pro-Harris counterparts by an enormous margin of about 25-1 on TV and radio advertising in the week since Biden announced his decision to drop out. 

The AP found that the pro-Trump side had booked more than $68 million in ads during those days whereas Harris and her allies had booked only $2.6 million in ads.

The Trump team is clear about the narrative it wants to drape around Harris. 

“Kamala Harris is just as incompetent as Joe Biden and even more dangerously liberal,” the Trump campaign’s national press secretary Karoline Leavitt told this column. 

“She was the tie-breaking vote in the Senate for Joe Biden's most disastrous policies. Not only does Kamala need to defend her support of Joe Biden’s failed agenda over the past four years, she also needs to answer for her own terrible weak-on-crime record in California. A vote for Kamala is a vote to continue inflation, open borders, high gas prices, and war around the world.”

Leavitt also contended that Harris “failed at her job as border czar” and is “dangerously liberal.”

Immigration is clearly a vulnerability for Harris given that it is one of the weakest issues for the Biden administration. Polls often show voters disapproving of the president’s performance on the border by around a two-to-one margin.

The question of where Harris stands on the ideological spectrum — an enigmatic question that is widely seen as having hurt her 2020 primary campaign — won’t be easily resolved either.

On Friday, her campaign told The Hill’s Rachel Frazin that Harris would not support a ban on fracking it elected president, despite having backed such a ban as a 2020 candidate. 

The previous day, Harris’s remarks after a meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemed to telegraph greater sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians than Biden typically expresses. But it’s unclear what substantive changes Harris would bring if the conflict drags on beyond next January, when the next president is inaugurated.

In fairness to Harris, she is in a tricky spot when it comes to differentiating herself from Biden on any issue, given she now wears two hats as incumbent vice president and presumptive nominee. She is the first sitting vice president to seek the top job since Democrat Al Gore in 2000. 

There is, too, still some fluidity in exactly how each side is trying to define Harris. 

Her allies have not yet come up with an obvious “bumper sticker” slogan, beyond the “Freedom” ad. 

For Trump’s part, he has cycled through several nicknames for the vice president without yet settling on one — generally a sign that he isn’t quite clear about his best line of attack.

In a tight race, with a small universe of undecided voters, whoever wins the battle to define Harris might well also win the broader war.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.