The first vice-president who is Black, of South Asian descent, or a woman versus a white man. The oldest presidential candidate in US history versus someone almost 20 years younger than him. The property mogul who inherited a fortune from his father versus the daughter of a biologist and a university professor in economics, both of whom are immigrants.
If Kamala Harris becomes the nominee, then, as said in a 2020 Harris campaign ad shared widely after Biden resigned, Trump will be up against “the Anti-Trump”.
But can she beat Trump? In order to do so, she will not only have to upend a history of American racism and sexism – in 200 years of US democracy, voters have elected only one Black president and never a woman – but get out the vote among a population disaffected with politics, by selling her policies on key issues – including the Israel-Hamas war, inflation, abortion, immigration and more.
Gaza
Though Harris has technically toed Biden’s line on Gaza, she is viewed as being more forceful when it comes to criticising Israel, and expressing empathy for Palestinians. When she delivered a speech in March in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, her comments on Gaza were followed by sustained applause.
“People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane. And our common humanity compels us to act,” she said. “Given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate ceasefire.” She added, after stopping for the applause, “for six weeks”.
In the presidential primaries, more than 101,000 Michigan Democrats, about 13% of those who voted, cast ballots for “uncommitted”, after campaigning by anti-war organizers, winning two delegates to the Democratic national convention and awakening a modern anti-war movement that forced the president’s attention to Gaza.
Abortion
Democrats will be hoping that Harris, if she is the nominee, will have gender in her favour among Democratic voters, particularly since Roe v Wade was overturned by a supreme court with three judges appointed by Trump, who boasted this year: “We broke Roe v Wade.”
Beginning in late 2023, Harris has embarked on a national tour to highlight the threats to reproductive rights posed by a second Trump administration – an issue that Biden has been criticized for shying away from. Biden has defended Roe v Wade, but has said he is “not big on abortion”.
“As a woman on the ticket and the first woman VP and a woman of color, and then secondly, as an AG, she is strongest when her profile is fighting and prosecuting the case. People really like her in that mode,” Celinda Lake, a Democratic party strategist and a lead pollster on the 2020 Biden campaign, told the Guardian in March. “She’s so comfortable saying the word ‘abortion’. She’s so comfortable leaning in and speaking to the repercussions.”
Trump has run against and defeated a woman before – Hillary Clinton. After Roe v Wade, more people may be motivated by the possibility of a female president who is clearly in favor of abortion rights. It will probably also motivate people who are anti-abortion to vote for Trump.
Immigration
Trump will try to show swing voters that his likely new rival has her fingerprints all over two issues he is counting on for victory in November: immigration and the cost of living, Reuters reported.
The Trump campaign is already casting Harris as the “co-pilot” of administration policies it says are behind both sources of voter discontent.
In anticipation of this moment, the Trump campaign has for weeks been preparing for the prospect of a Harris candidacy should Biden drop out and she win her party’s nomination.
Trump’s campaign has signalled it will tie her as tightly as possible to Biden’s immigration policy, which Republicans say is to blame for a sharp increase in the number of people crossing the southern border with Mexico illegally.
As vice-president, Harris was charged with addressing the root causes of migration from northern triangle countries in Central America, not border policy as Republicans have long claimed. In that role, Harris announced $950m in 2023 to address the causes of immigration to North America from Latin America.
She has been targeted by Republicans who have organised for asylum seekers to be driven on buses to Harris’s home on multiple occasions, including on Christmas Eve.
In February this year, Harris said that the US migration system was “broken”, telling New York’s Spectrum News: “We know, and I think many people have known for a long time, that our immigration system is broken and needs to be fixed.”
She was speaking after a bipartisan bill that would have seen the border closed if immigration reached a threshold was killed after Trump urged Republicans not to back it, the New York Times reports. As a senator, Harris was a strong advocate in favor of expanding work and legal pathways for Dreamers, people brought to the United States unlawfully as children.
Inflation
A second major line of attack against Harris by the Trump campaign team will centre on the economy. Public opinion polls consistently show Americans are unhappy with high food and fuel costs as well as interest rates that have made buying a home less affordable.
“Harris will be even WORSE for the people of our Nation than Joe Biden,” Trump said in a statement on Sunday. “They own each other’s records, and there is no distance between the two.”
June inflation figures were better than expected, with prices falling, lifting hopes that the Federal Reserve might soon cut interest rates. As inflation fell 0.1% on a monthly basis in June, having been unchanged in May, the consumer price index’s annual increase was also the smallest in a year.
But the cost of living remains high, and people’s pockets will be front of mind in this election. The annual increase in consumer prices slowed significantly in June from a peak of 9.1% in June 2022, which was their highest level in a generation.
In an interview with NBC-affiliated WDSU, a local news channel, on 21 July, Harris addressed the cost of living.
“The president and our administration’s probably highest priority is bringing down the price of gas and cost of living,” Harris said.
“If it wasn’t clear before the pandemic it was certainly clear after, when people are sick they need to be able to stay home and not juggle that versus their ability to put food on the table,” she said. “So these are some things that we are going to continue to fight for.”
