Kamala Harris and her Coconut Tree

Source: Gage Skidmore / Wiki commons.  

Opinion Piece

She has the pearl earrings, the straight silk-press hair, and the white, blonde, male VP. But can America really elect a black woman? 

After all, the American election depends almost entirely on the perfect image, as of course, all good democracy does, and the circus sideshow that is modern American politics is mostly interested in what it can sell on a poster and a stage. 

When Hillary Clinton ran for US President in 2016, America made history for all the wrong reasons. Her all-important image was scrutinised, criticised, and tarnished, and Trump’s term in office will go down in infamy.  

But pearls or not, if America can’t manage to vote-in the white wife of a former President, can they really vote for Kamala, an outspoken black woman with a career history as a state prosecutor? 

Harris and Clinton have been constantly compared, by the media, by politicians, and by America, as two women on a campaign to make history. But according to American political analysts, the differences between the two campaigns are stark, and significant. 

Harris has taken many a cue from Clinton, and the VP still relies on many former Clinton aides. Brian Fallon, now the communications director to Harris’s campaign, also served as a chief spokesperson for Clinton’s campaign run in 2016. And Lorraine Voles, her current chief of staff, first served as a communications aide to Clinton.  

But the women are very different candidates, and now is a very different time. And unlike Clinton, Harris has had the benefit of taking notes. 

Harris’s unique, popular, ‘coconut tree’ campaign has made huge waves on social media, and her campaign has drawn welcome attention from young voters. According to American voting registrars, voter registrations increased sevenfold in the first 48 hours after Joe Biden’s historic withdrawal, and nearly all of them by people under age 35. It’s a demographic split that edges Harris in front of Trump, and a development that, in a tight race, could tip the election in the Democrats’ favour.  

The demographic edge and cult campaign popularity is something that Clinton never managed to achieve, and recent polls suggest that Harris, who once trailed Trump, is now out on the front foot. With Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, named as her running mate in the race for the White House, Kamala Harris is slowly pulling ahead. 

Among recent national head-to-head polls, Morning Consult put Harris four points ahead of Trump, 48%-44%; SurveyUSA puts her three points ahead, 48%-45%; while University of Massachusetts Amherst put Harris up three, 46%-43%; and both YouGov and CBS News both made it a one-point Harris lead, 50%-49%.  

According to BBC News, David Polyansky, who served as deputy campaign manager for Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, has theorised that the polling shift could be down to the trending headlines, and Harris’s exploding visibility. For the first time, Harris has started beating Trump, master of earned media, at his own game. 

Since he first ran for president, Trump has benefited from always keeping himself in the Press. Good or bad, the next episode of the Trump saga is consistently the main political story in the country, and Trump makes the most of his “earned media”, or free press. 

Except it is VP Kamala Harris who has dominated headlines in recent weeks, and her dramatic swing from Biden’s cheerleader to Presidential candidate, has propelled her campaign out to the reach of the masses. 

But the essential question still remains; will these early indications translate into votes? 

Harris is an unconventional candidate, in just about every possible way. But unlike Clinton, who was both unconventional and unpopular, Harris has garnered enormous public support. While Clinton fixated on the history, the Harris campaign is future focused, selling the idea of moving upwards and forwards to young and disenfranchised voters, to hopeful Democrats, and disillusioned Republicans.  

“We’re not going back,” she told crowds, to a chorus of resounding cheers, a hugely popular sound bite that quickly became a de-facto campaign slogan. Harris is echoing a mantra very similar to Obama’s “Forward” slogan of 2012, and as Trump’s speeches lose direction and his campaign rhetoric becomes increasingly disjointed, she is slowly gaining essential traction. 

Unlike Clinton, who relied on the historic nature of her campaign to prop herself up, with slogans including “I’m with Her,” Harris has talked far more about the future than she has about the past.  

In autopsies of the 2016 campaign, Democratic strategists revealed that Clinton’s dependence on the past alienated her from voters, who were looking toward an uncertain future. And Harris, who is the first ever woman to serve as vice president, but also the first South Asian, African American to hold the title, hasn’t talked nearly as much about how her campaign could make history.  

Instead, she talks mostly about freedom, and with Beyoncé’s song of the same name blaring at rallies, she is very focused on the future, and America’s future legislation.  

Harris’s new messaging, and her remarkable cultural relevance, is making real headway with liberal fringe voters; and it makes voting for Harris sound less like a civic chore, and more like a positive, common-sense choice. 

“We’re not going back” has quickly become an invaluable Harris slogan, which positions Trump as an unfortunate political relic, out of touch with American life. It is a more relevant, digestible, and ‘stripped-back’ version of Biden’s successful 2020 message, that Trump is a “threat to democracy,” widely disseminated and well received.  

More than anything else, Harris is positioning herself as relatable. A citizen representing citizens. But she also has a history as a prosecutor to contend with.  

Kamala’s background as a prosecutor has been a minefield of public debate, but it has pitted her in definitive contrast to Trump, who was convicted of 34 felony counts in May.  

Those same people loudly defending ‘the thin blue line’ in 2020 are now voting for a felon, and the same people who 4 years ago demanded that America defund the police, are now voting for a criminal prosecutor. 

Harris, who’s history as a prosecutor is now being measured against Trump’s history as a felon, first became deputy district attorney in Alameda County, California, in 1990. Then in February 1998, San Francisco district attorney Terence Hallinan recruited Harris as an assistant district attorney. There, she became the chief of the Career Criminal Division, and so began her two decades of American legal experience. 

In 2002, Harris made history as the first person of colour elected as district attorney of San Francisco, when she won the election with 56 percent of the vote. And 6 years later she made history again, when she announced her candidacy for California attorney general in 2008. She was sworn in on January 3, 2011; and Harris became the first woman, the first African American, and the first South Asian American to hold the Attorney General's office in state history.  

Harris was re-elected in 2014, and beat Republican Ronald Gold out of the race. Then, on January 13, 2015,  Harris officially launched her campaign to run for Senate. In the November 2016 election, in California’s first fight for an open Senate seat in 24 years, Harris defeated Sanchez and won the election, endorsed by more than sixty percent of the vote. 

In March 2020, after Harris withdrew from the 2020 Presidential election, she endorsed current sitting President Joe Biden, and on August 11, 2020, Biden announced that he had chosen Harris as his running mate. 

Then, on November 7, 2020, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were elected to stand as the next leaders of America. Harris is the first Indian American and the first black woman to serve as Vice President of the United States, and her campaign for President is globally significant.

With personality politics at the forefront, Harris’s background as a lawyer and criminal prosecutor has acted as both black mark, and an advantage to her name, and The Prosecutor vs The Felon is an election tagline that has begun to gain real traction. 

With one streamlined message, Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has shifted the essential American conversation away from the weaknesses of Joe Biden, and shone a direct and unflattering spotlight on opponent Donald Trump. 

The Harris campaign has gained real ground in popularity, but will Harris and Waltz turn momentum into votes? Come November 2024, the world will be watching.