How Kamala Harris Got This Far Against Donald Trump

On March 12, the presidential contest was locked into place. On that day, Donald Trump clinched his third presidential nomination and Joe Biden clinched the Democratic nomination. Biden’s accomplishment had been in somewhat greater doubt than Trump’s owing to his party’s deep concerns about his advanced age and unpopularity. Despite that, he had put aside some of his own and his party’s anxiety about his running for reelection in part because of fears that if Vice-President Kamala Harris were the nominee, she would be  incapable of beating Trump. Indeed, there had earlier been talk of Biden dumping Harris from the ticket to find a more appealing vice-president.

Suffice it to say that almost no one at the beginning of 2024 had Harris as the Democratic nominee on their bingo cards. Yet she seamlessly took over the party when Biden withdrew from the race following a catastrophic debate performance against Trump on June 27. She subsequently united Democrats, made big gains in the polls against Trump, and is now in an incredibly close race that could make her the first woman president.

This sudden leap to the threshold of the White House represents a distinct contrast with the slow and steady progress Harris made earlier in her career. While Trump’s first successful run for office in 2016 was something of a lateral transfer from the heights of popular culture he had long commanded as a reality-TV star and a fixture of New York high society, Harris was then only just entering Washington. She had spent the previous quarter-century as a state and local prosecutor, rising through the ranks of California law enforcement and politics. Within three years, this junior senator was running for president, and the next year she was elected vice-president. During her years as a prosecutor, she was known as much for her interpersonal as for her professional accomplishments, becoming a staple of California’s more rarefied circles despite her own modest background as a child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants. Harris’s views and interests fit her comfortably into the pragmatic-progressive wing of her state’s Democratic Party. But she showed some real toughness in winning her first statewide race in the tea-party year of 2010, narrowly defeating the popular Los Angeles district attorney to become California attorney general. By then, she was known as an ally of President Barack Obama, whom she had backed early in his 2008 candidacy when he was an underdog running against Hillary Clinton. Her 2020 presidential campaign was very much modeled on Obama’s historic effort, after a period of senatorial tempering when she was a notably effective member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But seeking a “lane” to the presidential nomination in a crowded field led Harris to take some notably left-bent positions that would later help Trump label her as an extremist, including support for single-payer health care, total commitment to LGBTQ rights, and criminal-justice reforms that extended to decriminalization of illegal border crossings. When her candidacy failed (after a brief moment of ascendence in 2019 when she scored major points against early front-runner Joe Biden over his one-time opposition to busing) amid signs of disorganization and strategic mistakes, her reputation as a rising political superstar took a hit. But her many assets were enough to make her a logical choice as Biden’s running-mate in 2020, and she did a fine job as a vice-presidential candidate, never upstaging her boss but not submerging her identity in his either.

While she will be eternally grateful to Biden for lifting her to the vice-presidency when other options were entirely available, the 46th president did her few favors once they were in office. Even as it became apparent that the new administration’s handling of migrants and asylum petitions was controversial and quickly unpopular, he placed Harris in the highly visible position of representing the new administration in Latin America, where she was sent on a hopeless journey to persuade refugees from poverty and violence to stay home. No, she was not “border czar,” but her association with the issue was indelible. She was also charged with being the public face of another administration initiative that wasn’t unpopular but was doomed: a drive to enact a national voting-rights measure over a Republican filibuster in the Senate. She finally got the chance to do something distinctive and in her wheelhouse when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Biden’s reluctance to talk about abortion in the frank language the wave of state bans and restrictions demanded soon led Harris to become the administration’s — and to a considerable extent, the Democratic Party’s — chief advocate for the restoration of reproductive rights.

But even as her public profile improved (along with her job-approval ratings), Harris had to negotiate without a hint of disloyalty the seas of Democratic unhappiness about Biden’s age, unpopularity, and signs of unfitness for another four years as president. When the crisis of his candidacy erupted after his disastrous performance in the June debate with Trump, Harris was ready. As steady pressure from Capitol Hill and around the country confronted Biden with his eroding support, she was even steadier in her support for her boss. And when Biden finally came to grips with the necessity of his self-sequestration as Democratic nominee, the moment came and went when the president and party might have seriously entertained the idea of choosing someone other than Harris as a successor via a “blitz primary” or some other gimmick for starting the nomination process all over again just before or even at the Democratic Convention in August. Biden, determined to control the nomination even as he abandoned it, never wavered in harnessing his withdrawal to a firm endorsement of his vice-president as his replacement, and after just a few days of uncertainty, the party, including every potential alternative to Harris, fell into line.

It was this all but miraculous switchover, which angry and confused Republicans called a “coup,” that in turn produced the sense of relief and excitement that made the DNC a lovefest and gave Harris the kind of almost-immediate lead over Trump (in fundraising, enthusiasm, and the polls) that Biden could never achieve.

Harris’s struggle against Trump has been a tempestuous contest that has steadily tightened as the former president has hammered away at her on one level as a progressive (or as he calls her, a “Marxist”) extremist and at a much lower, personal level as a “low-IQ” diversity queen as unfit as Biden to serve and sharing the responsibility for his alleged policy failures. Her own campaign has combined old-school Democratic base mobilization with a clear focus on converting anti-Trump Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, even as she continues her demands for the restoration of abortion rights and slowly lays down an economic and immigration platform differing just enough from Biden’s to make her credible as a “change” candidate. As the race entered its final phase, Harris stepped up media appearances and began to stress her own version of the threat to democracy posed by Trump, focusing on his dangerous unpredictability and hinting at an age-based unfitness reminiscent of what Republicans said of Biden. While anything could happen on November 5, Harris is almost certainly doing better than any Democrat could have anticipated in the doldrums of June.

If Harris loses, a number of the key strategic decisions she’s made during her brief candidacy will be called into question. The first will be her choice of Tim Walz as a running-mate. He made sense as a congenial partner with no real enemies in the Democratic Party and some personal characteristics such as his long-time military service and rural roots. His selection resembled the calculation Biden seems to have made in choosing her four years earlier. But a lot of Democrats favored Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro due to his specific popularity in his pivotal state and more generally his alleged superiority as a signal that Democrats were eschewing the outspoken progressivism that Republicans labeled extremism (or even “Marxism” or “Communism”).

Other harsh second-guessing may occur over Harris not doing enough to repudiate some of the policy positions she took in 2020 and/or not doing enough to lay out a tangible and popular agenda for the White House that supersedes the bad old stuff. She may be criticized for not doing enough media interviews until late in the campaign, missing an opportunity to define herself before Trump’s scurrilous ads demagoguing about transgender folk could define her as a bit to the left of tofu. And most of all, if she loses, unhappy Democrats will wonder if Harris should have done more to distance herself from Biden, whose job-approval rating never really recovered from the trough his debate performance created, despite improved economic conditions and significantly reduced border crossings. It’s unclear what sort of future a defeated Harris would have.

If she wins, however, she will have the gratitude of Democrats and Never Trump Republicans for a long time. Yes, Biden defeated Trump in 2020, but he significantly underperformed his polls, and his true miracle accomplishment was winning the nomination after terrible showings in Iowa and New Hampshire. Harris would have won a crucial general election against the terrifying 45th president that the 46th president was almost certainly in the process of losing. All the rising Democratic stars who at the beginning of this cycle who were waiting for Old Uncle Joe to hang it up would be deeply in the shadow of Harris (who just turned 60, a relatively youthful age for a presidential candidate these days, while looking much younger than her own 60-year-old running-mate).

To be sure, a President Harris would have her own problems. Even if she wins decisively, an extremely unfortunate Senate landscape for Democrats means the GOP will very likely flip control of that chamber, denying her automatic confirmation of executive and judicial appointments, along with the trifecta that would grease the legislative process for her. At best she’s going to be presiding over a divided government. And if she has to go into overtime to consummate her victory by putting down another attempt by Trump to overturn it, she’ll take office over the vindictive cries of an opposition party that’s more embittered than any in living memory. Any joy her followers experience will probably fade soon after her inauguration.

But without question, President Harris would have come a very long way by an improbable path that she took with great skill and composure. Her formidable self-assurance will be well earned if indeed “we win when we fight.”