Kamala Harris now has her eyes fixed on one goal: running a strong enough campaign to beat former president Donald Trump in November.
The vice president has made some impressive moves thus far. In the first 24 hours as a presidential candidate, she’s raised $81 million — a fundraising record — and her campaign says that number now stands at over $100 million from 1.1 million donors. This includes substantial support from thousands of Black women, who raised over $1 million in just a few hours via Zoom. And nearly 58,000 people have signed up to volunteer for her campaign.
Then she’s received several endorsements — from politicians and organization leaders like Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Melinda French Gates, to celebrities like Katy Perry and Ariana Grande. And to top it all off, in her full day of the race, NBC News projects that Harris won endorsements from a majority of the Democratic Party’s delegates, confirming her spot as frontrunner.
“Over the next 106 days, we are going to take our case to the American people, and we are going to win,” Harris said during a recent campaign speech in Wilmington, Delaware.
While Harris has received an abundance of support, experts say many obstacles still lay ahead, from bias over her identity to voters’ criticism over the administration’s handling of immigration and foreign policy. Nadia Brown, chair of the women’s and gender studies program at Georgetown University, says another major challenge Harris faces is her ability to bring in disaffected voters — “people who don’t feel like their voice matters, and that [it] doesn’t matter who’s in the White House.”
Short on Time
As Harris hits the campaign trail, questions still loom over the Democratic party’s process of securing a nominee, and who Harris will choose as her running mate. Latest reports say the most likely contenders include Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, North Carolina Gov. Andy Cooper, and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, among others.
Lilly Goren, a professor of political science at Carroll University, calls Biden’s move to step down “unprecedented” and says that scrambling a campaign within just a few months before the election is “definitely a outlier situation.” Harris’ choice for vice president, she adds, is often considered a “key element of a candidate’s sort of decision-making capacities.”
“Who she indicates as her running mate will also be…a reflection on her as a presidential candidate, as opposed to [when] she had served as a vice-presidential candidate, or a statewide elected official as she was in California,” Goren says. And as a presidential candidate, Goren says that Harris will have to “be her own person,” by reintroducing herself and inaugurating her campaign for the presidency.
According to Augusta University political science professor Mary-Kate Lizotte, some top-of-mind issues for Harris involve securing and strengthening Democratic institutions and making “the American people understand what would happen if he [Trump] was to get re-elected,” she says.
Lizotte says Harris will face a lot of challenges due to her sex and race. Conservatives, including Trump’s running mate JD Vance, have already questioned Harris’ leadership because she does not have biological children. There is also an inaccurate belief that Black and female candidates are “much more liberal than a white candidate or a male candidate,” Lizotte says.
“She believes in capitalism and democratic institutions as they have existed traditionally in the United States, but they’re going to paint her as being a threat to traditions that Americans are used to and support,” Lizotte says.
Experts agree that Harris’ top issues will be the economy, immigration, foreign policy and reproductive rights. Independent women voters, Lizotte says, are “very, very adamant” about reproductive rights and returning Roe v. Wade to the law of the land. Harris should also make clear her evolution on certain issues “that caused some hesitancy” among base voters, Lizotte says, while bringing in young voters who have become less supportive of Biden due to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Lizotte adds.
The Power of Black Women Backing Harris
Black voters were crucial in helping Biden to secure his position at the White House. For Kamala, the power of the Black vote — especially among Black women —- will be just as crucial to winning the election, experts say. In terms of demographic groups, Goren says Black women voters “are the most loyal supporters in the Democratic party,” and that they are very active politically. Black women also coalesced around Biden in 2020 during the South Carolina primary, “who helped bring him forward as the nominee,” she says.
Harris’ sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, has a long history of being “upfront and involved in politics,” Goren adds, including advocating for the historic March on Washington in 1963. In fact, a majority of the Black women who raised over $1 million for Harris’ campaign over Zoom were members of her sorority.
“In Kamala Harris, you have a Black Asian woman running for the presidency, so I see a strong connection there to supporting her,” Goren says.
Lizotte echoes these sentiments: “Black women are going to do what they’ve been doing, which is to support her wholeheartedly and convince other members of their community that it’s worth taking the time to get out and vote for her,” she says, “just like they did for Barack Obama.”
While the Black vote is important, Brown says it’s important to keep in mind that no candidate is going to win the election on the Black vote alone, but they “can lose an election on the Black vote alone.”
In terms of Harris’ ability to secure the presidency, Brown says it’s “too close to call,” especially since there hasn’t been reliable polling.
Lizotte says Harris “has a great chance” of winning the election since she has been tested as vice president and has improved in her ability to “prosecute the case [that] what Trump would do in office would hurt a lot of Americans and hurt Democratic institutions.”
Unlike Biden, Harris, 59, has another advantage, Lizotte says. “Because of her age, she’ll be able to campaign quite vigorously.”
