ROYAL OAK, Mich. (AP) — Inside a small community theater in suburban Detroit, Vice President Kamala Harris was asked at a recent forum to talk about her life…
Inside a small community theater in suburban Detroit, Vice President Kamala Harris was asked at a recent forum to talk about her life for the benefit of voters who are still getting to know her.
It was the type of question typically asked of a new candidate. But here was Harris getting it less than two weeks before the Nov. 5 election and after millions of people already had voted. Her response underscored perhaps the defining challenge of her campaign for the White House.
“How much time do we have?” Harris quipped.
The fact is, not much.
Any candidate’s most valuable resource is time, and from the start, Harris has been historically constrained. The Democratic nominee has been running for only three months after Democratic President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, and Harris still is confronting voters who say they want to learn more about who she is or how she will govern.
Her public events have tended toward large rallies where crowds ride high on vibes and Harris delivers variations on her standard stump speech. In the past week or so, though, she has added events in more intimate settings, lower-key church services and black box theater sit-downs where the conversations can be more revealing.
“I have lived a full life,” Harris told the Michigan audience. “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 on the national political stage.
Much of her career, as she often reminds voters, was outside of Washington, in California as a prosecutor and state attorney general. That was followed by a four-year stint in the Senate and a flame-out in the 2020 race for the White House. Her time as vice president boosted her profile, but nothing like what a traditional candidate would have at this stage in the race.
“Harris, comparably, is still such a relatively unknown quantity as a candidate,” said Kevin Madden, a political strategist who worked on three presidential campaigns. “It takes years to build up the kind of national profile that can withstand the brutality of a presidential campaign.
