What the Convention Could Do for Kamala Harris. The Atlantic - Politics by Ronald Brownstein

What the Convention Could Do for Kamala Harris. The Atlantic - Politics by Ronald Brownstein 

Aug 9, 2024 at 7:48 PM//keep unread//hide

No presidential nominee in decades has approached their convention with a greater opportunity to reshape their public image than Vice President Kamala Harris.

Harris is the first nonincumbent since Hubert Humphrey in 1968 to claim either party’s presidential nomination without first enduring months of grueling primary contests. Because Harris did not experience the setbacks and triumphs that come from waging such a fight, public impressions of her are uncommonly shallow for a nominee on the convention’s eve, strategists in both parties agree.

That gives Harris a chance to benefit more than usual from the Democratic gathering in Chicago later this month if she can flesh out her story in an engaging way—but also leaves more room for Republicans to define her in negative terms. “We probably haven’t in modern times seen anybody emerge as the nominee who is less well known,” the longtime Democratic strategist Robert Shrum told me. “Her first impression with people is obviously extremely positive. But now you want to fill in the canvas.”

[Read: The Kamala Harris problem]

By choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her vice-presidential nominee on Tuesday, Harris did little to advance that process. Walz is personable, a good campaigner, and unobjectionable to any major Democratic faction. But other options might have provided star power (Arizona Senator Mark Kelly), relevance in a key swing state (Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro), or a generational contrast (Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear) that Walz does not. He looks like Hillary Clinton’s pick, Tim Kaine—a do-no-harm choice that, if the race goes sour, will be seen as a missed opportunity to make a bolder statement.

The Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which starts on August 19, now offers Harris her next opportunity to sharpen her image before Republicans do. In modern times, the candidate who has used the convention period best was Bill Clinton, who showed in 1992 how powerful a tool the convention can be in addressing loosely held, or even erroneous, perceptions among the voters.

The Arkansas governor had beaten a weak field to win the Democratic nomination, but his victory left him badly damaged by revelations that he had engaged in extramarital affairs and maneuvered to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War. After he clinched the nomination in early June, a succession of general-election polls showed him in third place, trailing not only Republican President George H. W. Bush, but also Ross Perot, the quirky independent candidate.

Over the next several weeks, Clinton and his team engineered a remarkable turnaround built on a plan that his campaign dubbed the “Manhattan Project.” Its most important revelation was that most voters mistakenly thought Clinton was a child of privilege because he had attended Georgetown and Yale, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and avoided Vietnam. Once voters learned that he had suffered through a difficult upbringing with an alcoholic stepfather in a small Arkansas town, they became much more likely to view him as genuinely committed to improving life for the middle class that he had emerged from. As Stanley Greenberg, the campaign pollster, wrote later, “The key to having Clinton’s project heard and understood was for voters to learn about his life.”

Clinton reintroduced himself through a series of media appearances that were at the time pathbreaking—including playing the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show and presenting himself for a town hall on MTV. He underlined his generational and ideological reconstruction of the Democratic Party by picking as his running mate not an older Washington veteran, but another brainy southern Baby Boomer centrist, Al Gore. At the convention, Clinton completed his comeback with a stirring nomination-acceptance speech in which he pledged to defend “our forgotten middle class,” because he was a product of it. “I still believe in a place called Hope,” he declared, poetically referencing the town where he spent part of his childhood.

On the day Clinton delivered his acceptance speech, Perot dropped out of the race. (He later reentered it and ultimately won nearly one-fifth of the popular vote.) Clinton soared into first place after his convention and never again trailed Bush in Gallup polls. Clinton’s 16-point gain in Gallup polls was by far the largest convention bump for any candidate in the past six decades, according to an analysis by the American President Project at UC Santa Barbara.

Harris’s position is in one respect easier than Clinton’s, and in another more difficult. The more difficult aspect is that in this highly polarized political era, neither side can easily achieve big bumps in support from their convention. Christopher Wlezien, a University of Texas professor of government, notes that although political scientists believe that the two party conventions mostly cancel each other out, one side has typically benefited from its convention somewhat more than the other. When the two conventions are completed, the race usually “ends up at a different place than where it was before,” Wlezien—a co-author of The Timeline of Presidential Elections, a book about the impact of campaigns on presidential-election outcomes— told me. But he also told me that the effects of the conventions have dampened over time, now that so many voters are bound to one side or the other. In the 21st century, only the Democrat Al Gore and the Republican George W. Bush in 2000 have seen substantial movement in their support around their conventions. In each of the past three contests, the conventions produced minimal shifts in support, polls found.

[Read: Having a chance has changed the Democrats]

In the modern era, a more achievable goal at the convention than dramatically shifting the ballot has been fortifying underlying impressions of the candidate that can lead to ballot gains later. It’s on this front that Harris’s task is easier than Clinton’s was. Voters’ impressions of her are less negative than amorphous.

Until Biden stepped aside, Harris had spent very little time in the national spotlight. Her 2020 presidential campaign began only a few years after she was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016 and flamed out before a single vote was cast. Even after Biden selected her as his running mate and won the presidency, his administration did not provide her a high-profile role until she emerged as its principal critic of the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade as well as various civil-rights rollbacks proliferating in Republican-controlled states. Studies of the public’s views about Harris conducted by Democratic-leaning groups such as Way to Win and EMILY’s List before Biden withdrew all found that, beyond some awareness of her advocacy for abortion rights, voters know very little about her.

“She is really undefined, and that is not different than past vice presidents,” says Melissa Williams, who directs the independent-expenditure program at EMILY’s List, which works to elect Democratic women who support legal abortion. “People don’t know what the vice president’s job is. She has universal name identification, they know who she is, but they don’t know what’s in her portfolio and they don’t know what her accomplishments are.” Williams added, “When you have a conversation about her accomplishments, the numbers move dramatically because you are filling in an information gap. The ceiling is quite high to move voters because they don’t know about her.”

Matthew Dowd, who served as a senior strategist for both of George W. Bush’s campaigns, noted that, before Biden stepped aside, Harris’s favorable and unfavorable ratings closely tracked the president’s—which suggested that she was caught in the undertow as voters soured on his physical and mental capacity to do the job. That conclusion, Dowd told me, is reinforced by the rapid improvement in the public’s view of Harris since she emerged as the Democratic alternative.

“The perceptions of her were simultaneously soft and being held back by the perceptions of Biden,” Dowd told me. “Once the baggage of Biden was removed, then I think she naturally started to move her numbers.” Because views of Harris are so fluid, she might be able to reach the upper end of the convention bump still available in this polarized time. But even that is a relative measure: Dowd says that for Harris, a post-convention gain of one to three points would be significant.

Several of the strategists I spoke with predicted that the lack of knowledge about Harris would draw television viewers, potentially providing her with a bigger audience than the roughly 25 million that Donald Trump attracted. The strategists broadly agreed that Harris’s greatest need is less to detail a specific policy agenda than to execute a version of Bill Clinton’s blueprint by talking about her personal history—and explaining how it motivates and equips her to lead a diversifying, multiracial, multicultural America.

[George Packer: What Democrats can learn from the trauma of 1968]

“The convention ought to be designed to tell all about her and tell her story,” said Shrum. Matt McDermott, a pollster for Democratic campaigns and progressive causes, argues that the convention could help Harris most by underscoring both her credentials for assuming the presidency and the generational transition she represents. She is about 20 years younger than either Biden or Trump. “The one singular data point that in hindsight will prove to drive this entire election is that 70 percent of voters wanted a different option,” McDermott predicted. “There was a huge contingent of voters, myself included, sitting there saying, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be nice to have another option on the table?’ And the Democratic Party gave them that option.” As a result, “with a strong convention,” McDermott continued, “I think there is an untapped part of the electorate that will say, ‘Let’s jump on board because we can’t go back to this other thing we’ve had.’”

Democrats gained a tactical advantage when Biden didn’t abandon his reelection bid until immediately after the Republican convention last month. That meant the GOP targeted most of its criticism at him—which became largely irrelevant—instead of focusing on defining Harris. She had already benefited, Dowd notes, because Republicans could not spend months trying to seed negative impressions of her during a contested primary, as they had successfully done with most other recent Democratic nominees.

Now the GOP is trying to make up for lost time. Trump has besieged Harris as a radical liberal who will be ineffective on crime and immigration; J. D. Vance, his vice-presidential nominee, this week disparaged her as an elitist who “thinks she’s better than you.” This portrayal of her as a coastal ideologue who’s too weak to keep Americans safe is an updated version of the attack that George H. W. Bush and his fierce campaign manager, Lee Atwater, wielded to devastating effect against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential race. Insulating her against that argument may be among the Democrats’ greatest needs at their convention.

Trump’s own gathering last month in Milwaukee did not help him much. The share of voters viewing Trump favorably never reached 50 percent in the aftermath of the GOP convention—despite the added factor of sympathy for the former president after the attempt on his life—and has now slipped back below 45 percent in most surveys. The indications that Trump has stalled while Harris is rising has rekindled hope among Democrats that what they call the “anti-MAGA majority” that came out to vote in 2018, 2020, and 2022 could prevail again in 2024. Harris has to prove that she can unify and mobilize those voters. But now Democrats see at least a chance to revive their coalition at a convention that only a few weeks ago many of them feared might pass for a wake.