It's Harris' night at DNC. To some voters, she's still 'a blank slate'

Kamala Harris waves from a stage before red and blue backdrop

Staff Writer

Aug. 22, 2024 3 AM PT

CHICAGO — Vice President Kamala Harris will make history Thursday night as the first woman of color to accept a major party presidential nomination. But did you know she worked at McDonald’s in college and confronted a bully when she was 4?

As Harris’ campaign tries to reintroduce her to the country at this week’s Democratic National Convention, they are seeking to balance the excitement of a trailblazing candidate with the need to paint her in three dimensions. That means playing up her background as a middle-class child of a single mother as much as her status as the first female and mixed-race vice president.

“Her story is your story,” former First Lady Michelle Obama said Tuesday. “It’s my story. It’s the story of the vast majority of Americans trying to build a better life.”

Polling and focus groups suggest many Americans know who Harris is but not much about her. The compressed nature of the campaign puts more pressure on the party convention to define her in positive terms before former President Trump, who held his convention before President Biden stepped aside last month, can cast her in a negative light.

Americans have largely fixed opinions of Trump, who has served a term as president and been in the public eye since the 1980s, including the reality television show “The Apprentice,” which framed his image as a successful business tycoon. He is viewed favorably by about 43% of them, according to the FiveThirtyEight.com polling average, a number that has been fairly stable for much of his time in politics, aside from a 4- to 5-point dip after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Harris, by contrast, stayed in the background as vice president after a brief and unsuccessful run for president in the 2020 Democratic primary. Her approval rose from under 38% to more than 44% in the month since Biden dropped out of the election and endorsed her, a large swing for a national politician in the heat of a presidential contest.

“The thing about vice presidents: The downside is nobody knows who you are. The upside is nobody knows who you are,” David Axelrod, former President Obama’s lead strategist, said at a University of Chicago Institute of Politics event Wednesday.

“You get a chance to define yourself,” Axelrod added. “She is a turn-the-page candidate right now, and the fight right now is whether the Trump folks can push her back into the box of being an incumbent and hold her accountable for the things that Biden has done.”

Harris has more room for growth than Trump, because she is viewed unfavorably by 47% of voters, compared with 52% of voters who say they disapprove of Trump.

“She’s a blank slate,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who conducts regular focus groups.

To fill in those blanks, Democrats have been bombarding the home audience with videos and testimonials about Harris’ biography, including vintage pictures of her late mother, Shyamala, who for a time raised Harris as a single parent above a children’s nursery, as well as Harris’ time as prosecutor and California attorney general, going after predators, gangs and big banks.

During her run in the 2020 race, Harris shied away from her role as a tough prosecutor amid backlash from the party’s base. This week, she is being lauded for putting rapists, child molesters and murderers behind bars while creating a diversion program for nonviolent offenders.

The glimpses into her personal life also mark an evolution for a politician who has been selective in revealing it.

Harris’ relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown in 1994 and 1995, chronicled in local gossip columns, has made her more reserved throughout much of her career. In her 2019 memoir, she did not mention Brown but wrote about the pressure she felt as a single professional woman in her 40s in the public eye when she began dating Doug Emhoff, whom she married in 2014.

On Tuesday, the second gentleman recounted awkward moments from their courtship, including a voicemail he left her before their first date, and the callback that came while he was eating lunch at his desk.

“We talked for an hour and we laughed. Well, you know that laugh? I love that laugh,” Emhoff said, noting they would celebrate their 10th anniversary Thursday.

On Monday, her childhood best friend, Stacey Johnson Batiste, spoke from the podium about Harris getting a scar over her eye when she took on a “bully” who broke Batiste’s pottery project on the playground.

She is in a race to define her image with Trump, who has used hyperbolic language to paint her as an unqualified “communist.”

“People don’t know who she is,” Trump said last week at a news conference at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. “She’s a radical-left socialist. But beyond that, I mean, she’s way beyond socialism, who’s going to destroy our country. And when they find out, I think you’re going to see something.”

Yet he has also struggled to focus on a singular line of attack. “I’m much better looking than her,” Trump said at a Pennsylvania rally over the weekend.

“Kamala wants World War III,” his campaign wrote in a fundraising email Tuesday.

Sarah Longwell, who runs an anti-Trump Republican political group that holds regular focus groups, said at the Institute of Politics event that many voters who shared negative impressions of Harris months ago revealed in their comments that “they didn’t see her, they didn’t know her, they didn’t know what she did,” which left an opening. But she has to overcome the preconceptions.

“‘San Francisco liberal’ is a buzzword that [to] conservatives strikes right at their hearts, or even people who are center right,” she said. “They have no idea what it means but know what it feels like. And it’s bad.... And so that is the thing she’s got to push off.”

Democrats have driven their own attacks on Trump all week as they seek to lift Harris up, sometimes in the same speech.

“One candidate worked at McDonald’s while she was in college” at Howard University, said Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas. “The other was born with a silver spoon in his mouth — and helped his daddy in the family business: housing discrimination.

“She became a career prosecutor, while he became a career criminal, with 34 felonies, two impeachments and one porn star to prove it,” she continued.

Crockett also told a personal story about Harris counseling her through doubts about public life a few years ago when they met for the first time at the vice president’s residence. It was one of many speeches that treated Harris’ status as a woman of color as the background — a basis for relating to someone else who was doubted because of how others view them.

That is a departure from Harris’ 2020 run and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run, when their statuses as pioneering women were front and center in their appeals to voters. Gender remains on the ballot this year. But it’s taken a different form: as a call to arms against the loss of abortion rights in the Supreme Court and a sense of angry defiance against gender-based attacks from Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, who has criticized “childless cat ladies.”

Clinton, who spoke Monday night, traced Harris’ historic line from Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to seek a major party presidential nomination in 1972, and Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman on a major party’s presidential ticket in 1984 when she ran unsuccessfully for vice president, to her own failed run in 2016.

Most of Clinton’s speech was devoted to breaking through the final glass ceiling. But she also included a warning to Democrats about letting Trump define Harris.

“It is no surprise, is it, that he is lying about Kamala’s record? He’s mocking her name and her laugh,” she said. “Sounds familiar?”