Kamala Harris is trying new ways to engage with voters

COLLEEN LONG and ZEKE MILLER

ROYAL OAK, Mich. (AP) — Inside small community theater in the suburbs of Detroit, Vice President Kamala Harris At a recent forum, she was asked to talk about her life for voters who are still getting to know her.

This question was usually asked to a new candidate. But here Harris got it less than two weeks before the Nov. 5 election and after millions of people had already voted. Her response underscored perhaps the defining issue of her White House campaign.

“How much time do we have?” Harris joked.

Actually, not so much.

Any candidate’s most valuable resource is time, and Harris has historically been limited from the start. The Democratic candidate has been running for just three months after Democratic President Joe Biden dropped out of the raceand Harris still faces voters who say they want to know more about who she is and how she will govern.

Her public events tended to involve large rallies where the crowd is buzzing with excitement and Harris delivers variations of his standard stump speech. But in the last week or so, she’s added more intimate events, low-key church services and black box theater gatherings where conversations can be more candid.

“I have lived a full life,” Harris told the audience in Michigan. “I am a wife, I am a mother, I am a sister, I am a godmother. I love to cook.”

Harris, 60, is a relative newcomer to the national political scene.

Much of her career, as she often reminds voters, was spent outside Washington, in California as a prosecutor and state attorney general. This was followed by a four-year stint in the Senate and a collapse in the 2020 White House race. Her time as vice president has raised her profile, but it’s nothing like what a traditional candidate would have at this point in the race.

“Harris, by contrast, is still a relatively unknown figure as a candidate,” said Kevin Madden, a political strategist who has worked on three presidential campaigns. “It takes years to build a national image that can withstand the brutality of a presidential campaign.”

Biden ran several times before winning the nomination and had three decades of public service on his resume, including eight years as vice president. Democrat Barack Obama began to build his profile during John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and the 2006 midterm elections before embarking on a two-year quest for his first term in the White House. On the Republican side, the Bush family brand was built through numerous presidential campaigns over two decades.

“Designing and executing Harris’s unique 108-day presidential campaign was always going to be a major, major challenge,” Madden said.

Republican Donald Trumpmeanwhile, is a known quantity. He was a near-universal name recognition even before his 2016 campaign thanks to his stint on reality television. In fact, he has been campaigning ever since he lost the 2020 election to Biden, a fact he refuses to acknowledge to this day.

For Harris and her aides, the shortened campaign has created both benefits and challenges. But without being able to change the reality of this political graph, they can only try to make the best of it.

This leads to an endless series of difficult choices: where to go, what to talk about, who to talk to. These issues come into focus in the final weeks of any campaign, but for Harris they were a central feature of her sprint.

Aides broke the campaign into various stages.

In the early days, Harris prioritized blocking down the nomination and preventing any potential rivals. She then moved on to trying to introduce herself to the public on her own terms. That meant talking about her background as well as her governing philosophy, especially on economic issues, since potential voters complained they didn’t know what she did.

Along the way, she returned to Washington to carry out duties associated with her office, trying to highlight the government’s competence in responding to natural disasters and demonstrate its national security credentials in fighting wars abroad.

“The hill has been a little steeper for her to climb because of the shortened nature of the race, but that’s why she’s doing everything she can,” said Eric Schultz, who served as deputy White House press secretary under Obama.

In recent weeks, Harris has spoken more openly about summer Sunday. when Biden dropped out of the race and handed her the keys to the campaign. She invited voters to take a fresh look at their faith, seeking to use a profound political moment as an opportunity to connect with voters.

“It was an unusual day that Sunday when the president called me, and I instinctively understood the gravity of the moment, the gravity of the moment,” she said during a CNN town hall.

So she called her pastor, she said. “I needed that spiritual connection, I needed that advice, I needed that prayer.” She added that she prays every day.

The event in suburban Detroit was one of three in key Midwestern states last week that Harris joined. Liz Cheneya prominent Republican Trump critic who endorsed the Democrat answered questions from the moderator and an audience of undecided voters. This was a different version of the vice president than the one at her rallies, calmer and more talkative.