Americans just don\u2019t know the Democratic nominee\u2019s story.<\/b>
\nNo 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2014but also leaves more room for Republicans to define her in negative terms. \u201cWe probably haven\u2019t in modern times seen anybody emerge as the nominee who is less well known,\u201d the longtime Democratic strategist Robert Shrum told me. \u201cHer first impression with people is obviously extremely positive. But now you want to fill in the canvas.\u201d
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 Andy Beshear) that Walz does not. He looks like Hillary Clinton\u2019s pick, Tim Kaine\u2014a 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 \u201cManhattan Project.\u201d 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, \u201cThe key to having Clinton\u2019s project heard and understood was for voters to learn about his life.\u201d
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\u2019s 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.
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\u2019s on this front that Harris\u2019s task is easier than Clinton\u2019s was. Voters\u2019 impressions of her are less negative than amorphous.
\u201cShe is really undefined, and that is not different than past vice presidents,\u201d says Melissa Williams, who directs the independent-expenditure program at EMILY\u2019s List, which works to elect Democratic women who support legal abortion. \u201cPeople don\u2019t know what the vice president\u2019s job is. She has universal name identification, they know who she is, but they don\u2019t know what\u2019s in her portfolio and they don\u2019t know what her accomplishments are.\u201d Williams added, \u201cWhen 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\u2019t know about her.\u201d
Matthew Dowd, who served as a senior strategist for both of George W. Bush\u2019s campaigns, noted that, before Biden stepped aside, Harris\u2019s favorable and unfavorable ratings closely tracked the president\u2019s\u2014which 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\u2019s view of Harris since she emerged as the Democratic alternative.
\u201cThe perceptions of her were simultaneously soft and being held back by the perceptions of Biden,\u201d Dowd told me. \u201cOnce the baggage of Biden was removed, then I think she naturally started to move her numbers.\u201d 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\u2019s greatest need is less to detail a specific policy agenda than to execute a version of Bill Clinton\u2019s blueprint by talking about her personal history\u2014and explaining how it motivates and equips her to lead a diversifying, multiracial, multicultural America.
\u201cThe convention ought to be designed to tell all about her and tell her story,\u201d said Shrum. Matt McDermott, a pollster for Democratic campaigns and progressive causes, argues that 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. \u201cThe one singular data point that in hindsight will prove to drive this entire election is that 70 percent of voters wanted a different option,\u201d McDermott predicted. \u201cThere was a huge contingent of voters, myself included, sitting there saying, \u2018Man, wouldn\u2019t it be nice to have another option on the table?\u2019 And the Democratic Party gave them that option.\u201d As a result, \u201cwith a strong convention,\u201d McDermott continued, \u201cI think there is an untapped part of the electorate that will say, \u2018Let\u2019s jump on board because we can\u2019t go back to this other thing we\u2019ve had.\u2019\u201d
Democrats gained a tactical advantage when Biden didn\u2019t abandon his reelection bid until immediately after the Republican convention last month. That meant the GOP targeted most of its criticism at him\u2014which became largely irrelevant\u2014instead 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 \u201cthinks she\u2019s better than you.\u201d This portrayal of her as a coastal ideologue who\u2019s 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\u2019 greatest needs at their convention.
Trump\u2019s 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\u2014despite the added factor of sympathy for the former president after the attempt on his life\u2014and 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 \u201canti-MAGA majority\u201d 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.<\/p>\n