Kamala Harris.
Credit: Reuters Photo
Chicago: The fight over whether Kamala Harris can represent change has emerged as one of the early thematic battlegrounds of the 2024 race, playing out both at this week's Democratic convention in Chicago and on the airwaves of swing states.
With chants of "we're not going back" ringing through a convention hall and her campaign's "A New Way Forward" slogan plastered outside, the vice president is making a bold bid to position the same Democratic Party that now holds the White House as bringing a fresh start to the country.
The battle over the mantle of change is especially significant at a moment when polls show a sizable majority of Americans are unhappy with the state of the nation's affairs.
Former President Donald Trump had established a clear edge as the candidate who would upend the status quo when he was still facing President Joe Biden. He was the insurgent; Biden was the incumbent.
But now Harris, a 59-year-old who would make history as the first female president, has altered the dynamics of a contest that had previously pitted two men seeking to break the record of the oldest president.
The desire for change has been a constant of modern American politics. Barack Obama promised "change you can believe in." Bill Clinton sold the nation on "change versus more of the same." And Trump pledged to break with eight years of Democratic rule and "Make America Great Again" in 2016.
For nearly a decade, Trump's bulldozing approach has been premised on the idea that the nation was staring into an abyss and only urgent upheaval could save the country. The question for Harris is whether she can frame Democrats keeping power in 2024 as a break from that dark and divisive era.
"She is absolutely the change candidate," said Cedric Richmond, a former Biden White House official who was part of Harris' vice presidential vetting team. "The alternative keeps looking at yesterday and she's talking about tomorrow. So if you're looking for change, you don't want the person that's going to bring you back -- you want the person that's going to bring you forward."
Forward has been the watchword for Democrats in Chicago, as the party embraces its most future-leaning posture since Obama's first campaign in 2008. Delegates and supporters have circulated a new poster designed by artist Shepard Fairey, who made Obama's famous "Hope" poster in 2008. The refreshed Harris one features the word "Forward" at the bottom.
Obama himself mocked the idea of Trump returning to power in his prime-time speech Tuesday night. "We have seen that movie before," Obama said, "and we all know that the sequel is usually worse."
The Trump campaign is determined to tie Harris to Biden. The president is deeply unpopular in polling, and the Trump campaign believes that linking her to him highlights a vulnerability. The goal is to saddle her with some of the least popular initiatives and issues of their administration, especially on immigration and inflation.
"You don't have to imagine what a Kamala Harris presidency would be," Trump said last week, "because you're living through that nightmare right now."
Trump is making that point in ads, too. One recent Trump ad features Harris saying the word "Bidenomics" no less than three times in 30 seconds. Another ad from a pro-Trump super political action committee talks about both inflation and the "border invasion," with a video of Biden and Harris hoisting their arms in the air together.
"They know Kamala owns this failed record," a narrator says.
Chris LaCivita, one of Trump's co-campaign managers, dismissed the idea that Harris could win over voters wanting to change course with gauzy talk about the future.
"They have no choice than to change the subject," LaCivita said. "But changing the subject does not make you the agent of change."
In a New York Times/Siena College poll this spring of battleground states, an overwhelming 69 per cent of voters said major changes were needed to the country's political and economic system -- or that the system needed to be torn down entirely.
The problem for Democrats was that only 24% of voters thought Biden would do either of those things.
But recent polls of swing states in the Sun Belt show that voters do not view Harris the same way they do Biden. While far more voters still see Trump as more likely than Harris to make major changes -- 80 per cent to 46 per cent -- they are more divided on whether he would bring the kind of change they want.
Exactly the same share of voters -- 50 per cent each -- said Harris would bring about the right kind of changes compared with Trump.
"Kamala Harris looks like change, and Donald Trump looks like more of the same," said Pete Giangreco, a Democratic strategist who worked on the Obama campaign. "The way this race was framed going in was a rerun of 2020 -- Biden and Trump -- no one wanted that race."
"The change," he explained, "has already happened."
Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump's running mate, said during a campaign stop this week in Philadelphia that Harris' talk of change was a political mirage.
"This is a person who's promising that she's going to fix the very problems that she has been creating for 1,300 days," Vance said. "And now she wants the American people to give her a promotion."
Harris has not exactly sought to distance herself from the administration she is serving in. She joined Biden for an emotional onstage embrace Monday night, and she often opens her rallies by thanking the president for his work. But she is trying to differentiate herself, both stylistically and with some new economic plans.
In her campaign speeches, Harris has repeatedly hit rewind on her biography as she reintroduces herself to the nation, beginning more than 20 years ago in a pre-Biden era.
"Before I was elected vice president and before I was elected a United States senator, I was an elected attorney general and an elected district attorney," she said at a recent rally in Atlanta. "And before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor."
Staking a claim on change is hardly the only issue Trump and Harris are battling over.
Trump's advertisements and campaign have aggressively labeled her as "dangerously liberal." As Trump put it to reporters at his golf property in New Jersey last week, "All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that's going to destroy our country."
Harris has been trying to neutralize Trump's ideological attacks, starting with a tough-on-immigration ad that featured her work as attorney general taking on "drug cartels" and "gang members."
Future Forward, the leading pro-Harris super PAC, has created 200 potential ads for Harris in the month since she emerged as the nominee, its leader, Chauncey McLean, said at an event in Chicago this week.
The group heavily tests all those ads to determine which ones will be most effective politically. It is notable, then, how much the group's ads focus on the ways Harris will "turn the page" on the past. "This campaign is a fight for the future," Harris says in the opening scene of a new ad that will begin airing Wednesday.
The single ad on which the most money has been spent so far this election, according to data from the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, is a spot from Future Forward that ends with a tagline on the screen: "Let the future begin."
McLean said Republicans might have hoped to "paint her as more of the same," but his internal surveys showed voters were open to Harris defining herself apart from Biden.
"In hindsight, it was clear that the American people, for 18 months, said, 'Please give us something else in this choice -- and we will be euphoric,'" he said.