“When I am elected, I will arrive at the Oval Office with a to-do list full of priorities for what I will do for the American people,” Vice President Kamala Harris promised this week on the Ellipse, the large esplanade in front of the White House. Behind her, a whole row of American flags and, above all, the illuminated presidential residence. Before her, 75,000 people – according to her campaign – exceeded the capacity of the venue and spilled out onto the grass of the adjacent parks. The image was, as the Democratic candidate hoped, a preview of what could happen after next Tuesday’s elections: the first woman, and the second black person, president of the United States in a speech to the nation.
In the last two weeks of the campaign’s closing, the Democratic candidate has appeared at her multiple rallies surrounded by stars, each more famous. From the Tigres del Norte and Maná, to Bruce Springsteen. Going by Beyoncé. All of this to convey a message of optimism and power at the polls about the defense of democracy and rights – especially abortion – when the polls point to a stubborn tie between her and Trump.
What neither she nor her party have done has been to emphasize at any time the historical nature of her career. “She is there because she is the best possible candidate for the position, period. The fact that she is a woman is just the icing on the cake,” said former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi in August, in a talk with journalists during the Democratic convention in Chicago. Harris herself has seemed upset, at times, when asked about the matter: “next question,” she responded in August, in her first televised interview after assuming the candidacy, about her identity as a black woman that Trump had placed in doubt days before. His intention, he assures, is to demonstrate that he wants to govern for everyone, not just a part of the electorate.
In part, it is due to the consideration that there is no need to emphasize the obvious. Lessons have been learned after the 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton, who during her campaign, under the slogan “I am with her,” promised to break “the hardest glass ceiling” and failed. But it is also a matter of personality: during her first time as vice president she wanted to avoid being awarded portfolios related to gender, so as not to pigeonhole herself. And it is a matter of not giving arguments to a Republican Party that has tried to portray her as a candidate selected not for her qualities, but to meet gender and minority representation quotas.
“My experience is that it is clear that regardless of the gender (of the candidate), voters want to be sure that in the Presidency there will be someone who has a plan to reduce costs, a plan to guarantee the security of the United States in the context of our position in the world,” Harris recently declared in an interview for NBC. “Clearly I am a woman. But the thing is, most people are concerned about whether you are qualified for the position and whether you have a plan that will solve their problems.”
Behind his reluctance to exploit the historical nature of his candidacy, there is also a care not to alienate part of the male vote, where among groups such as African-American men — who have traditionally supported the Democrats by a large majority — it may be more difficult to accept the idea. to have a woman as a leader.
In the United States “there is still a small, but not insignificant, number of Americans who continue to believe that men are better political candidates than women,” Professor Diana O’Brien, from Washington University in Washington, pointed out in a talk with foreign journalists. St. Louis and expert in female political representation.
Former President Barack Obama himself, when campaigning for Harris, urged African-American men to support the vice president, amid indications in polls that the support of this electoral group for the Democratic ticket is lower than in previous elections, while the sympathy for Trump.
“Part of me fears that they simply don’t like the idea of having a woman as president, and they allege other alternatives and reasons to justify it,” appealed the first black head of state in the United States, in a speech in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania). ).
Trump himself has tried to suggest that Harris would be a weak leader on the global stage simply because she is a woman. “There are voters who will not support Harris because of a gender issue. Trump has attempted to make gender an issue, expressing the view that world leaders would not take her seriously as president. Harris has responded by avoiding talking about how her victory would be a historic event,” says Katherine Tate, professor of political science at Brown University.
But, although she avoids influencing her gender, she does, and profusely, on the priorities for female voters, especially the right to abortion: for the youngest, the great electoral factor. Harris makes constant references to the issue in her campaign events and has called entire rallies dedicated to the issue, such as the one she held in Houston 10 days ago accompanied by Beyoncé. In interviews, where she can sometimes respond with what some journalist has called “word salad,” this is by far the area in which she feels safest.
Women have rallied to her: all surveys indicate that the female vote, which has historically leaned towards the Democrats, is more tilted than ever in these elections in favor of Harris. If in 2022 55% of women supported it, now the difference with respect to men is between 14 and 30 points. The gender gap is especially drastic among those under 30 years of age: statistician John Zogby calculates that among this group the difference between women and men who support Harris is 60 percentage points.
“She is appreciated by women, especially young women,” notes this expert. “In fact, from many points of view, having a multiracial and multiethnic background represents a good part of the millennial and Z generation, which have the highest proportion of multiethnic backgrounds of all voting groups in the United States.”
Today, the polls point to a stubborn tie between Harris and Trump, which will clearly be decided by a few handfuls of votes in the seven pivotal states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.
It is something that would have seemed almost unthinkable hours before Sunday, July 23, when despair was spreading among Democratic supporters. President Joe Biden clung to the candidacy despite pressure from his party and after having left a terrible impression in his catastrophic debate against Republican Donald Trump. Polls predicted a catastrophe in the November elections. Donations were drying up.
The vice president, an avid cook, had just had breakfast with her family at her official residence, at the Naval Observatory in Washington, and was preparing to complete a puzzle with her nieces. The phone rang. It was Biden. The president wanted to tell her that he was preparing to announce his resignation from re-election and was going to support her as his replacement. It was an unprecedented step in the history of the United States. The Democratic candidacy remained in the hands of Harris, just three months before the polls.
His first reaction, he later said, was to think of Biden himself, and ask him if he was sure of what he was doing. And then call his spiritual advisor, Baptist pastor Amos Brown, in San Francisco. “Instinctively, I understood the gravity of that moment, the seriousness of the moment. “I didn’t foresee or know exactly how that day would go,” this 60-year-old former Californian attorney general, daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, explained last month on CNN.
The replacement was a major shock for a Democratic campaign that, until then, had had problems mobilizing even its own faithful, plagued by skepticism about the physical and mental suitability of its candidate and, in the case of progressive groups, about the Government’s position on the war in Gaza. Suddenly, they went from taking an electoral mess for granted to seeing that he had left.
The vice president who had gone almost unnoticed in her position for three years was transformed, almost overnight, into a formidable political force that attracted crowds to her rallies, raised hundreds of millions of dollars, rose in the polls and reached get ahead of Trump. At the Democratic Party convention in Chicago in August he accepted the nomination before a fervent audience. His best moment came with the only debate against his rival, when he got him to enter the fray by mocking the size of the crowds that attend the former president’s electoral events and their willingness to leave before they conclude.
But after the enthusiasm raised in the first six weeks of his campaign, the race has entered a impassein which no comment, no electoral act, seems to move the tie. Any outcome seems possible.
Both Harris and Trump plan to complete an intense tour of the seven states. The vice president will conclude hers in Philadelphia this Monday, when she seeks to take a new mass bath as the final message of her campaign.
