HARRIS ON FRONT LINE OF DEMS’ BATTLE TO BEAT TRUMP
VP emerges from shadows to take starring role in campaign.
As a marching band played and the crowd chanted “four more years,” US Vice President Kamala Harris looked like she was enjoying being out of Joe Biden’s shadow. From condemning abortion bans to wooing black voters, the 59-year-old Ms Harris is taking a starring role in Joe Biden’s campaign to win a second term by again defeating Donald Trump.
But can Ms Harris really be its secret weapon, and defy polls that show US voters still aren’t convinced she’s the right person to be a heartbeat away from the Oval Office?
Ms Harris made US history when she became the first female, black and South Asian vice president in 2021 — but then spent much of Mr Biden’s first term getting often low-profile tasks from her boss.
Yet things have changed drastically since the 2024 campaign kicked into high gear. Ms Harris has become the face of the White House’s efforts to target what she has called “Trump abortion bans” in more than 21 US states, an issue Democrats see as a vote winner.
“This is a fight for freedom,” Ms Harris said Wednesday to cheers in Jacksonville, Florida, as she slammed the state’s new ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
“Across our nation, we witness a full-on assault, state by state, on reproductive freedom. And understand who’s to blame: former president Donald Trump did this,” Ms Harris said.
Florida’s harsh new ban took effect Wednesday, outlawing all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy in a state that had been one of the last in the southern United States with a relatively high gestational limit.
Mr Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has bragged about how justices he nominated allowed the conservative-leaning US Supreme Court to revoke the national right to abortion in 2022, in turn paving the way for 21 states to bring in total or partial bans.
The Florida ban took effect as Arizona’s senate — controlled by Republicans — voted to repeal an 1864 law banning abortion, a month after the state’s top court said the Civil War-era rule was still valid.
US President Joe Biden had earlier slammed the “extreme” Florida ban, and like Ms Harris pinned the blame on the man he likely faces in a bitter rematch in November.
“There is one person responsible for this nightmare: Donald Trump,” he said.
But it is Ms Harris who has led the charge on a divisive subject that Democrats hope will be a vote winner.
Supporters in Jacksonville booed and cried “shame” on several occasions that she mentioned Mr Trump’s name.
Aides said Ms Harris had been taking the lead on the issue since the first reports two years ago that the US Supreme Court would overturn the half-century-old nationwide right to abortion.
Mr Biden’s campaign is using Ms Harris to target the coalition of voters that delivered victory in 2020 but now seems to be fracturing — particularly black voters.
She reached out to black male voters in Atlanta last week, launching a tour of battleground states to promote economic policies the administration says will help them.
Then there’s Gaza, an ever tougher issue for Mr Biden as protests against his support for Israel’s military operation roil US campuses.
Ms Harris, who hails from a family with a background of rights activism, has often seemed a step ahead of her boss when it comes to rhetoric on Gaza.
It was the vice president who — in a March speech at an Alabama site that was significant in the US civil rights struggle — first called for an immediate ceasefire and delivered the administration’s toughest language to date on the plight of Palestinian civilians.
As screens on Air Force Two played images of pro-Palestinian campus protests being broken up by police as she headed back from Florida, aides insisted she and the president were on the same page.
Despite Ms Harris’s newly prominent role, she and her staff remain wary. She suffered years of bad press and criticism from Republicans over everything from alleged gaffes to the way she laughs. And while she often comes to the back of her plane to talk to journalists off the record — unlike Mr Biden — she still rarely gives interviews.
Polls meanwhile seem to back up the fact that voters have a problem with Ms Harris and Mr Biden alike. She has an approval rating of just 38.5 percent, just shy of her boss’s already low 38.9 percent, according to polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight.
Thomas Whalen, an associate professor of social sciences at Boston University, said Ms Harris was doing a good job on the campaign trail. “Particularly on the abortion issue, she’s been strategically deployed,” Mr Whalen told AFP.
“Given polls are showing that African American voters are sceptical about supporting Biden for another go round, she’s going to be even more important,” he said. “Right now, she seems to be doing an effective job.”
There is one person responsible for this nightmare: Donald Trump. US PRESIDENT, JOE BIDEN