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If I told you a few months ago that by August, Vice President Kamala Harris would be the Democrat’s nominee for President, surging in the polls, drawing in more than $300 million in donations, garnering crowds of 10,000, 12,000 and 15,000 people in key battleground states, and taking TikTok by storm, you likely would not have believed me.
Days after President Biden announced he would bow out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsed his Vice President, Harris earned enough support to cement her position as the Democratic nominee.
Now, she is on track to make history for the fourth time in her career.
I have spent many hours with Vice President Harris. We first worked together when I was a senior advisor on the Biden campaign when she joined the ticket in 2020, then through the transition as her spokesperson, and finally at the White House as her senior advisor and chief spokesperson.
In my experience, Vice President Harris is someone who understands the gravity of the moments she has repeatedly found herself in, but she is not enamored by their spectacle. She does not relish in the ability to make history; rather, she focuses on what work needs to be done and how she should go about doing it.
She approaches politics and governing as an aspirational pragmatist. Take for example her first remarks as Vice President in 2020. Harris spoke of “American Aspiration,” saying,
“Even in dark times — We not only dream. We do.
We not only see what has been, we see what can be.
we shoot for the moon, and then we plant our flag on it.
We are bold, fearless, and ambitious.
We are undaunted in our belief that we shall overcome, that we will rise up.”
She went on to say, “A great experiment takes great determination — the will to do the work and then the wisdom to keep refining, keep tinkering, keep perfecting.” These words accurately describe the current moment in which America finds itself.
If Vice President Harris wins in November, it will be because she rallied the masses behind a positive vision for the future where the people’s issues are addressed and they went out to vote for that vision.
How can she do that in such a short time? There are two important tasks. First, she needs to reintroduce herself.
Once Harris became the presumptive nominee, her campaign moved quickly to share key parts of life story and work. She introduced herself as a former prosecutor that took on criminals, sexual predators and fraudsters. Her campaign released an ad where they talked about her being a child of immigrants and working at McDonalds to pay her way. Addressing the United Auto Workers at a recent rally, she spoke extensively about her record of walking picket lines and advocating to protect worker’s rights. She and her campaign did not wait for someone to ask who she was as the nominee, she proactively told us. That image-shaping is important because of the amount of misinformation and disinformation that exists about her record. Most people are unaware of the work that a vice president does daily. Now that the vice president is at the top of the ticket, everyone is about to find out.
Secondly, Vice President Harris will need to make good use of one of her superpowers — ensuring voters know that she sees them and that the work she does speaks directly to them.
During her first week in office, VP Harris had a number of things she wanted to accomplish to set the tone for her engagement going forward. So, her first call was to the head of the World Health Organization as we were still in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. One of her first virtual events was with small business owners she met on the campaign trail because she wanted them to know getting them the relief they discussed was a priority for the President and her. She got the vaccine on camera to let people know they had nothing to be afraid of.
When it came to policy, while I worked for her she always wanted us to cut the fluff and be straightforward. She wanted numbers that people could identify with and when we did not do that, she would find the numbers herself. One time, while preparing for a press conference in France, the specific numbers on how much the price of gas had increased in America were missing from VP Harris’ briefing materials. When we arrived at that section during her prep, she proactively told us all what they were because she’d looked them up that morning. Did the French press care about the price of gas in America? No, but the Americans reading or watching the coverage of her press conference did, and she cared about that.
The kind of policy the Harris-Walz campaign puts forward matters. Like their support for expanding the child tax credit, ending federal taxes on tipped wages or addressing the housing crisis — all policies that address the economic squeeze younger folks across the country are feeling.
People want to be inspired, but they do not want that inspiration to ignore their reality. After all, don’t we all just exist in the context anyway?
On July 19, 1984 Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman to be named Vice President for a major party. She said during her acceptance speech, “Change is in the air, just as surely as when John Kennedy beckoned America to a new frontier; when Sally Ride rocketed into space and when Rev. Jesse Jackson ran for the office of president of the United States.” Forty years later, Vice President Harris is accepting the democratic nomination for President with the wind at her back.
It again feels like change is in the air.
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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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