Kamala Harris created a huge wave of energy... how long can Democrats ride it?

ATLANTA – Everything is different now for Democrats.

Their crowds are dancing. Beyonce has conquered the soundtrack. The celebrities – from Southern rappers to Hollywood actors – are showing up.

And by the time Vice-President Kamala Harris took the stage on July 31 in Atlanta for what her aides billed as the kick-off for her new-and-improved campaign, it was clear that President Joe Biden had been left a distant memory – a name not even mentioned in her remarks.

“The momentum in this race is shifting,” she declared from behind a lectern embossed with the vice-presidential seal. “There are signs that Donald Trump is feeling it.”

Ms Harris’ ascent to the top of the ticket has transformed the presidential race into a fundamentally different contest, delivering an electric shock to a listless Democratic Party that for more than a year struggled to mobilise its base behind Mr Biden.

But the real test awaits: whether Ms Harris can convert the wave of pent-up liberal energy into sustained momentum. While polling shows that the party’s core voters have rallied behind Ms Harris, the race remains in a dead heat, reflecting the politics of a fiercely divided nation. After months of

Democratic attrition over a weakened candidate,

Ms Harris must now rebuild the coalition that powered Democrats – and the Biden-Harris ticket – to victory in 2020.

In some ways, her campaign remains a work in progress. Though Ms Harris inherited the 1,300 people working for President Biden’s reelection operation and its US$96 million (S$128 million) in the bank, her plans to reshape it remain unsettled. She has yet to fully reveal her own vision for the party and the country, beyond what she inherited, or to hold a news media interview.

And she still needs to pick a running mate, though an announcement is expected early next week. Cautioning that no vice-presidential decisions have been made, her campaign announced on July 31 that the new ticket would begin a swing through the seven battleground states next week – starting in Philadelphia.

She will be operating in one of the most unpredictable political environments in recent memory. Not since the era of black-and-white television have two candidates competed in a race measured in weeks, rather than the nearly year-long traditional battle to the White House.

The condensed timeline could extend her support enough to last through the election – or send it crashing down.

“How long does the honeymoon last? Who knows,” said Mr Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster. “When you have an unprecedented event like this, people take time to digest it.”

So far, Democrats are thrilled with what they see. With thousands of people, her rally in Atlanta was far larger than any event hosted by the Biden campaign. But it was also a hard tonal shift away from the president.

The Biden campaign, as in 2020, had been about restoring the “soul of the nation,” a paean to a lost pre-Trump comity he hoped to bring back. Ms Harris is pushing a message squarely about what’s next.

“This campaign is about two very different visions for our nation: one focused on the future, the other focused on the past,” she said on July 30. “We are not going back because ours is a fight for the future and for freedom.”

Like the president, Ms Harris promised to lower housing costs and tackle prescription drug prices. She vowed to protect “hard-fought freedoms” including voting rights, pledged to expand access to abortion and, as she did last week in Wisconsin, told supporters, “The baton is on our hands”.

Campaign aides say they now face the challenge of converting the burst of enthusiasm into more durable support.

There are early signs that Democratic voters may be giving her a second look, after they largely rejected her during her ill-fated 2020 primary campaign.

In a little more than a week, she has broken fund-raising records, dominated social media and created the kind of energy that some Democrats say they have not seen since Mr Barack Obama first ran for the White House nearly two decades ago. A series of recent polls show a significant increase in the number of voters who view her more favourably than even just a month ago.

Ms Harris aides say this new sense of energy has already opened up fresh opportunities for their campaign. By the time Mr Biden exited the race, Democrats had quietly acknowledged that his path to victory had narrowed to the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Ms Harris’ campaign now says the plan is to compete across a wider range of more racially diverse Sun Belt and Southern states, including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.

For now, the Harris team intends to skip some of the traditional markers of a presidential bid. While Ms Harris released a host of policy papers during her 2020 campaign – some of which she has since disavowed – this time she plans to cast herself as a policy extension of Biden’s administration. She may release some economic plans that largely mirror what the president has proposed, but is unlikely to offer any policy surprises.

Republicans have struggled to adapt to the changed environment, cycling through a series of attacks against Ms Harris over the past week before settling on the playbook that they have been pursuing against Mr Biden for more than a year.

“When Kamala tells us she is weak, failed and dangerously liberal, we should believe her,” the Trump campaign said in a statement about Ms Harris on July 31.

That language almost exactly echoed the attacks used against Mr Biden throughout the campaign: “Joe Biden is weak, failed, dishonest and not fit for the White House,” Mr Chris LaCivita and Ms Susie Wiles, Trump’s top campaign aides, said in a July 3 statement.

Trump campaign officials attribute the shift in the race to what Mr Tony Fabrizio, a campaign pollster, has called the “Harris honeymoon”. They plan to focus on the same set of issues that have driven Trump’s campaign for months: economic discontent, concerns about the border, high housing costs and worries about crime.

Trump’s aides believe those issues may override concerns among moderate Republican voters about the former president’s polarising style and criminal record. NYTIMES