Exclusive: How Harris Is Pivoting From Biden’s Campaign Message

In her first two stump speeches this week as a presidential candidate, Kamala Harris made clear she was overhauling the Democrats’ pitch to voters. In both speeches, the Vice President offered a sharper message that largely left out the long recitations of Biden administration accomplishments that often bogged down the stump speeches she and Joe Biden had been delivering for months. Instead, Harris emphasized her vision for the country, while also framing the contest as between a convicted criminal in Trump, and herself as a prosecutor

The scant mention of her administration’s policy wins was no accident. The Vice President purposely used those initial speeches to center her comments around her own vision for the future “because she’s now running for President of the United States,” said a Harris aide. Upcoming speeches will incorporate more of what the Biden administration has gotten done, the aide said, including one she’s delivering Wednesday afternoon in Indianapolis at the annual convention of the influential historically Black sorority Zeta Phi Beta.

Still, the overall focus of a Harris campaign speech is likely to be more forward-looking than Biden’s have been in recent months. Polls showed that Biden struggled to break through to voters with long descriptions of what he’d done, and his efforts to define Trump as an existential threat to democracy had fallen flat. Biden also increasingly stumbled over his words and often struggled to deliver clear, clean sound bites to ram home his points in video clips shared online and in news broadcasts.

Read More: A Guide to Kamala Harris’ Views on Abortion, the Economy, and More

Harris is taking a different tack. On Tuesday afternoon in Wisconsin, Harris tested her newly-honed stump speech in front of 3,500 people packed into the gym at West Allis Central High School on the outskirts of Milwaukee, drawing a crowd larger and more boisterous than any Biden addressed in recent months.

Harris called hers “a people-powered campaign” and said her administration would be a “people-first” presidency. Trump, she said, wants to give tax breaks to corporations and billionaires, make working families pay for it and strip away protections in the Affordable Care Act. “America has tried these failed economic policies before and we’re not going back,” she said.  The crowd began chanting “We’re not going back!”

Harris framed the choice for voters this way: “Do we want to live in a country of freedom, compassion, and rule of law, or a country of chaos, fear, and hate?”

A day earlier, Harris delivered her first speech as the head of the ticket at Biden’s campaign headquarters, which had suddenly become her headquarters. She spoke about building up the middle class, reducing health care and child care costs, and expanding access to abortion. She did not explicitly mention any Biden administration accomplishments.

“This campaign is not just about us versus Donald Trump,” she said, describing a Harris administration as ushering in “a future where no child has to grow up in poverty.”

Read More: The Kamala Harris Campaign Is Embracing the Memes

Having quickly locked up enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination, Harris is hop-scotching her way across the country this week, speaking in Indiana on Wednesday, at a teachers union conference in Texas on Thursday and at a fundraiser in Massachusetts on Saturday. Team Harris believes their brand new campaign is in “a position of strength,” Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a campaign memo Wednesday.

Polling on Harris is showing gains in several parts of the Democratic base that had cooled on Biden, and that she will be able to reach more voters by emphasizing what she will do to protect access to abortions. Harris runs 54 percentage points ahead of Trump with Black voters, according to Quinnipiac University polling conducted over the weekend, and is more popular than Trump among undecided and independent Latino voters, according to internal campaign polling. The campaign said Harris has better favorability ratings among women and leads Trump with young voters by 25 points.  

Trump’s campaign is bracing itself for Harris gaining momentum in the coming weeks and eclipsing Trump in the polls. Trump’s lead pollster, Tony Fabrizio, sent a memo Tuesday describing an expected “Harris Honeymoon” in press coverage and a bump in her poll numbers. Fabrizio said that would be temporary and “the fundamentals of the race stay the same.” Voters are still unhappy about the economy, inflation, crime, Biden’s border policy, housing costs and ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Fabrizio said, predicting that voters will eventually “refocus on her role and Biden’s partner and co-pilot.”

Read More: How Trump Plans to Run Against Harris

Trump has started attacking Harris in earnest. On Tuesday, he described her on his Truth Social platform as “Lyin’ Kamala Harris.” That same day, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff was asked by a reporter if he had a response to Trump’s name calling. “That’s all he’s got?” Emhoff said, pointing out Harris has laid out the case against Donald Trump “directly and in a compelling fashion but she also laid out a vision for the future.”