The Reintroduction of Kamala Harris

The soundtrack suggested a Beyoncé concert. The light-up bracelets evoked the Eras Tour. And the exuberant crowd—more than 14,000 strong, lining up in the rain—resembled the early days of Barack Obama. Inside a Philadelphia arena on Aug. 6, Vice President Kamala Harris was greeted with a kind of reception a Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t gotten in years. Fans packed into overflow spaces, waving homemade signs made of glitter and glue as drumlines roared. When Harris introduced her new running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the cheering lasted more than a minute.

If you’d predicted this scene a month ago to anyone following the race, they would never have believed you. But Harris has pulled off the swiftest vibe shift in modern political history. A contest that revolved around the cognitive decline of a geriatric President has been transformed: Joe Biden is out, Harris is in, and a second Donald Trump presidency no longer seems inevitable. Democrats resigned to a “grim death march” toward certain defeat, as one national organizer put it, felt their gloom replaced by a jolt of hope. Harris smashed fundraising records, raking in $310 million in July. She packed stadiums and dominated TikTok, offering a fresh message focused on the future over the past. Volunteers signed up in droves. Trump’s widening leads across the battleground states evaporated. Over the span of a few weeks in late July and early August, Harris became a political phenomenon. “Our campaign is not just a fight against Donald Trump,” she told the cheering crowd in Philadelphia. “Our campaign is a fight for the future.”

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Where has this Kamala Harris been all along? For years, Democratic officials questioned her political chops, pundits mocked her word salads, and her polling suggested limited appeal. Her performance in the 2020 presidential primary was wooden, and her turn as Biden’s No. 2 did little to inspire confidence. Even this summer, as party insiders chattered about possible replacements if Biden stepped aside, “it was explicit from some of the major donors that she can’t win,” says Amanda Litman, the co-founder of Run for Something, an organization that trains young Democrats to run for office. “They didn’t think people were ready to elect someone like her.”

Judging from the past few weeks, Harris’ own party underestimated her. Maybe the crowded 2020 primary just wasn’t the right race for Harris to showcase her talents; maybe the vice presidency wasn’t the right role. Suddenly, she seems matched to the moment: a former prosecutor running against a convicted felon, a defender of abortion rights running against the man who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, a next-generation Democrat running against a 78-year-old Republican. Perhaps above all, she has given Americans the one thing they overwhelmingly told pollsters they wanted: a credible alternative to the two unpopular old men who have held the job for the past eight long years.

Harris may still be the underdog. Trump has arguably the clearer path to 270 electoral votes and an edge on the issues that voters say are most important to them. Harris will have to answer for the Biden Administration’s record, including on inflation and border security. Republicans are casting her as a coastal elite, pointing to positions she took in the 2020 primary—arguing for gun buybacks, a ban on fracking, and an overhaul of the health-insurance system—that may indeed be too liberal to win over many of the swing voters who decide elections. Harris has yet to do a single substantive interview or to explain her policy shifts. (Her campaign denied a request for an interview for this story.) She has to repair ruptures in the party coalition, galvanizing the Black, Hispanic, Arab American, and young voters who migrated away from Biden. Though her early polling numbers are far better than Biden’s were, she lags his 2020 support with some key demographic groups she needs to win.

Harris has less than 90 days to prove that she can convert the momentum of her successful launch into a tough, smart operation capable of beating a former President with a dedicated base of support and a knack for commanding the stage. She inherited a campaign infrastructure and policy record from her predecessor, but the energy is all hers. Picking Walz as a running mate over more conventional choices signals a belief that this race is as much about feelings as it is about fundamentals. Harris’ brand shift—the happy-warrior attitude, the viral memes, the eye roll at Republican “weirdos”—has already done what no Trump opponent has ever been able to do: snatch the spotlight away from him.

She may seem like an overnight sensation, but Harris’ moment was years in the making. Quietly, her small team of top aides had been laying the groundwork for a future presidential run. After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, the Vice President added reproductive rights to her portfolio. Abortion was never a comfortable issue for Biden, a devout Catholic, but it was a natural fit for his No. 2. Harris believed that with Roe gone, Republicans would turn their sights to restricting both birth control and IVF. In the months after Dobbs, she traveled the U.S., talking about abortion rights as a matter of “reproductive freedom.” As far back as the 2022 midterms, aides say, she argued for making this the core of the party’s national message, even as the White House focused on jobs and the economy.

During those travels, Harris’ team assembled a spreadsheet of allies, power brokers, and potential delegates to tap if and when the time came. Every photo line, every VIP invitation, every clutch with labor leaders, every meeting with key constituencies was filed away. The goal, advisers say, was to ensure there would be allies on every delegate slate in every state in the nation. “We had a list,” says one top aide, “and we checked it twice.”

The list was intended for 2028. But when Biden dropped out on July 21 and quickly endorsed Harris, it was instantly pressed into service. The Vice President—clad in a Howard University sweatshirt, munching pizza with anchovies—spent the next 10 hours on the phone, dialing delegates and wrangling endorsements. A day later, the nomination was all but hers. Even though other presidential hopefuls had ties to swing states or big donors, “the list was the thing that we had that they didn’t,” says a top aide. “It wasn’t a fairy godmother waving a magic wand.”

Harris’ ability to sew up the nomination so quickly was a triumph of work ethic and political dexterity that foreshadowed what was to come. “To consolidate the Democratic Party in a matter of hours, to do as many visible events and establish that presence without putting a foot wrong, is a feat,” says Pete Buttigieg, the Transportation Secretary who ran against Harris for the 2020 nomination and was a finalist to become her running mate. “I don’t think anybody expected her to be so flawless.”

With Biden no longer atop the ticket, the moribund Democratic grassroots came to life. Harris was capable of delivering a message that never felt quite right under Clinton or Biden: that theirs was the party of the future, and Trump was of the past. Her campaign raised $200 million in the first week, in what it said was the best 24 hours of any candidate in presidential-campaign history. More than 38,000 people registered on Vote.org in the 48 hours after she became the presumptive nominee, eclipsing the voter-registration surge encouraged by Taylor Swift last year. Within a week, Harris erased Trump’s polling dominance in key states, turning a burgeoning landslide into a dead heat.

“Elections come down to vibes, and Kamala has got the vibes right now,” says David Hogg, co-founder of the Gen Z political organization Leaders We Deserve. After spending his entire political career organizing against Trump and his allies, Hogg explains, it felt good to finally have someone to vote for. “People are feeling the type of energy they felt during the Obama campaign,” says Michigan state senator Darrin Camilleri, who spends his weekends door-knocking in his competitive district south of Detroit. “It feels different than with Hillary, different than with Biden.”

Celebrities like Charli XCX and Megan Thee Stallion came out in support of Harris. Speaking in a packed airplane hangar in Detroit, UAW president Shawn Fain called her a “badass woman.” The campaign’s new Harris-Walz camo hats sold out within half an hour. Grassroots groups are seeing an explosion in fundraising and volunteer sign-ups. “My niece, who called Biden ‘Genocide Joe,’ called me to say, ‘Auntie, I want to do something,’” recalls LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter.

The shift is perhaps most visible in the digital sphere. While millions of hardcore Democrats would crawl over broken glass to keep Trump from re-election, less reliable voters in Gen Z are especially attuned to online trends. For months, President Biden’s online supporters have been on the defensive about his support for Israel’s war against Hamas. Comments about Gaza flooded pro-Biden content posted to social platforms, making it difficult to create what digital strategists call a “permission structure” to support him. To many, it evoked the online mobs who would mock Clinton supporters in 2016, preventing her from building traction on social media. “In 2016, if you wanted to be an online supporter of Hillary Clinton, you did it in a private Facebook group,” says Litman. “In 2024, you blast it on TikTok, and you’re part of the K-Hive and you make your username the coconut tree.”

Even if Washington was taken by surprise, the energetic fighter of the past two weeks matches the Harris whom allies say they have known for years. Louise Renne, a former San Francisco city attorney, recalls that when Harris took over the city’s interest in adoption cases in the DA’s office, she brought an armful of teddy bears to court on her first day. Andrea Dew Steele, a donor-adviser who snacked on wine and cheese with Harris as they typed up her first political bio sheet for her 2003 campaign for San Francisco DA, remembers Harris sitting outside grocery stores with an ironing board stacked with campaign literature. Those who made it through her 2020 primary recall that after she dropped out, she joined the last of her staff in a dance party in the campaign headquarters.

Harris’ early allies in California may have seen glimpses of Barack Obama, but her turn on the national stage has seemed more Selina Meyer. After a splashy kickoff in 2019, the Harris 2020 campaign stalled, then sputtered out. Aides say she took advice from too many different advisers offering conflicting guidance. Her record as a prosecutor was unwieldy baggage for a Democratic primary shadowed by a movement for racial justice. In a contest defined by Bernie Sanders on one side and Biden on the other, she never found her lane. Her operation was plagued with mismanagement and infighting. Harris seemed tentative and insecure, terrified of putting a foot wrong. “We did a disservice to her in 2020,” admits Bakari Sellers, a state co-chair on that campaign. “We Bubble-Wrapped her.” Enthusiasm waned; the money dried up. She dropped out long before the first votes were cast in the Iowa caucuses.

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Her early months as VP were checkered too. Big interviews went poorly; Harris seemed ill-prepared and unsteady on her feet. Biden reportedly vented to a friend that she was a “work in progress.” He saddled her with a portfolio of difficult, thankless work, like addressing the root causes of the flow of undocumented immigrants from Central America’s Northern Triangle. By 2023, Harris had the lowest approval ratings for a Vice President in history. “It’s always hard for the Vice President, because the President is the one setting the policy, taking the responsibility,” says Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and close ally of Harris. “And historically, Vice Presidents have often taken on the work that the President doesn’t want to do.” Another Democrat puts it more bluntly: “They set her up to fail from day one.”

One challenge for Harris has been the people around her. Over the years, a rotating cast of senior staff has clouded her message and raised questions about her abilities as a manager. “She needs a few political consiglieres in her life. She doesn’t have a North Star guiding her,” says one Democratic strategist. “She has made novice political moves that the political elite and the pundits have glommed onto, that have pushed the narrative that she’s not ready for prime time.”

That narrative has been out of date for some time, according to allies who have worked with her and watched her closely. “To the extent anyone was paying attention, they saw this negative stuff amplified and dialed up by the right. Then there stopped being coverage of her,” says a close adviser. The caricature of Harris, the adviser says, became “frozen in time. Meanwhile, the VP continued her work leading on a bunch of important issues. But people weren’t really tracking that.” Longtime allies argue that many of her Senate priorities—on criminal-justice reform, on racial equity, on maternal health—became Administration priorities. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, another former 2020 presidential rival, says that over the past three years, Harris has mastered the art of “arm twisting” required to pass major legislation and become a “global diplomat” championing Democratic goals. “She has gone,” Booker says, “from being a Padawan to a Jedi master.”

Yet if Harris was widely underestimated, it’s also true that her circumstances have radically changed. Success in politics is situational. Harris no longer has to compete with more than 20 other Democrats for attention on the campaign trail, or contort herself to appease liberal pieties to win over the party’s base. She no longer has to be a loyal deputy to the President who calls all the shots. Now the moment is finally hers.

Republicans admit Harris will be harder to beat than a diminished Biden. But they believe the candidate riding high the past few weeks will soon, under sustained attack, come down to earth. “If she runs the same kind of campaign she ran in 2019 and 2020, her campaign will collapse and Donald Trump will waltz into the White House,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres says. “On the other hand, if she has learned as much as her allies and friends say she has in the last four years, she will give Trump a real run for his money.”

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Harris campaign officials say they remain focused on the seven key battleground states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. With Harris atop the ticket, those states “are even more in play for us, stronger for us than they might have been otherwise,” says Dan Kanninen, the campaign’s battleground director. Harris is more popular with younger, Black, and Latino voters than Biden was when he dropped out of the race, according to polling, which puts her in a stronger position to win the Sun Belt states. At the same time, she may be losing ground with older white voters, which makes her more vulnerable in the trio of “Blue Wall” states—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—that form that core of the Democrats’ Electoral College strategy. To shore up those states, Harris is leaning on her major labor endorsements and making multiple visits to the upper Midwest.

Harris inherited Biden’s campaign infrastructure, including more than 260 outposts across the battleground states. In Nevada, the Harris campaign has 13 field offices to Trump’s one; in Pennsylvania, it has 36 coordinated offices to Trump’s three, according to a campaign memo. In the first 12 days of her campaign, Harris supporters placed 2.3 million phone calls and made 172,000 house visits. While battleground organizers are knocking on swing voters’ doors, the campaign’s digital strategy is designed partly around “reaching hard-to-reach voters and convincing them to choose between our candidate and the couch,” says deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty. The avalanche of viral memes about Harris, the enthusiastic TikTok videos, and the massive Zoom calls of devoted supporters (Black Women for Harris, White Dudes for Harris, Latino Men for Harris) have made this task easier. “That’s the kind of enthusiasm that money can’t buy,” Flaherty says.

Even so, many Democrats still believe Trump’s advantages will be difficult to overcome. “I’m paranoid,” says Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan. “We still have to make sure that we are talking in the union halls and talking to veterans [in the way] that Joe Biden has done.”

But Harris’ moment also comes after eight years of transformation and triumph for American women. After Clinton’s stinging defeat in 2016, women flooded the streets in the largest protest march in U.S. history, then formed a massive grassroots electoral movement that helped Democrats overperform in most elections since. #MeToo reshaped the culture; Dobbs reshaped the electorate. Mass enthusiasm for a woman is nothing new: Harris’ run comes just a year after the blockbuster summer of Barbie, Beyoncé, and Swift. This time around, there is less hand-wringing over whether a woman is electable. “The attack lines from the Republicans are going to be on race and gender, and those are going to work to her advantage,” says Ashley Etienne, a former communications director for the Vice President. “All that was baggage is now an asset.”

Whether Harris can sustain her early success is an open question. What’s clear is that she has changed the trajectory of the election. “The whole vibe just shifted. We were looking at two candidates nobody was that excited about,” explains Leanne Weiner, 39, who wore a “Childless Cat Ladies for Harris” T-shirt as she waited in line for chicken fingers at the massive Philadelphia rally in front of another fan in a “Blasians for Harris” shirt. “Now there’s a new energy, a new force, an ability to pull in people who might be unsure.”

—With reporting by Leslie Dickstein and Julia Zorthian/New York and Brian Bennett, Philip Elliott, and Nik Popli/Washington