Earlier this year, around the time a prosecutor called President Biden a “well-intentioned old man with a bad memory,” Vice President Kamala Harris already knew something had to change.
She told allies that it was up to her to finally rise to prominence in a job she had toiled away in for more than two years and reassure American voters that the Biden-Harris combination remained a safe bet. One adviser said she had felt alienated early in the campaign and had wanted a bigger role.
She broke out of her Washington bubble and embarked on an ambitious travel schedule, making more than 60 trips this year alone. She included talking points to speak out more forcefully on abortion rights, the war in Gaza and racial issues. She brought up her personal stories more frequently, from the influence of her mother on her life to what inspired her to become a prosecutor.
Her allies note that she has taken on a larger role for some time now, particularly since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago and during her high-profile overseas missions, but people close to her say she was looking for a stronger way to support the nominee even before questions about Biden’s age and competency surfaced.
Now, Biden’s relaunch effort is at a critical juncture, with his candidacy in jeopardy after a disastrous debate in Atlanta and Democrats seriously considering the possibility of her becoming the nominee.
Harris, 59, has offered unwavering support for Biden during the tumultuous week since the debate, but her allies argue she is the only logical choice to lead the nomination if Biden steps down.
Democratic Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, widely credited with being the architect of Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign comeback, said in an interview this week that he would support Ms. Harris if the president pulled out, and ruled out other options.
“The party should not be bypassing Harris in any way,” he said.
Harris declined to be interviewed for this article.
But many Democrats acknowledge that putting her at the top of the list comes with big risks. Her 2020 campaign quickly fell apart, casting doubt on her competency as a candidate. Even Biden called her “unfinished” early in his presidency. Democrats also at times expressed concern that she has struggled to communicate to the public that she has a grip on issues.
“Things are getting better for her,” said Robert M. Shrum, a longtime Democratic political strategist. “And there’s going to be renewed attention on her, and she’s going to have to live up to that renewed attention.”
A CNN poll found Harris leading Biden by 2 percentage points in a hypothetical matchup with Trump, but she still lost to Trump in the polls.
The Trump campaign and Republican critics have stepped up their attacks on Harris in recent days, suggesting her candidacy could lead to more of the racist and sexist attacks she fended off as vice president.
But Democratic leaders say choosing another candidate risks alienating key constituencies, including Black women who helped carry Biden to the White House in 2020. Rushing to unify behind one candidate would also avoid a deadlocked convention in Chicago next month.
Steve Phillips, a San Francisco lawyer and a major Democratic donor, said discounting Harris as a possible successor to Biden was “implicit bias, racism and sexism.”
“She’s the vice president of the United States who has been nominating her successor in this country for the last 50 years,” he said in an interview, “so now that we have a vice president who is a woman and a person of color, it’s disrespectful at best that there’s a discussion going on about the others, who are mostly white and male.”
In interviews over the past few months, more than two dozen current and former aides, administration officials, advisers, close friends and associates who have met privately with Harris said her main goal is to support Biden and prove she can take on the presidential role if necessary.
“Who is this Kamala?”
Sen. LaFonza Butler, D-Calif., a close friend of Harris’, said he’s noticed a change in her this year.
“I think she’s reached the same place as most black women, where the criticism is relentless and the expectations are ever-increasing,” Butler said, “and she said, ‘I’m not going to please everyone. I’m not going to please everyone all the time, but my purpose in being here is to be the best vice president I can be for this country, and I’m just going to focus on that.'”
At a meeting with black pastors in South Carolina in February, attendee Christopher Richardson noticed a difference: The son of a pastor who was there, he said he had seen Harris at other events and thought she seemed to be “singing someone else’s song.”
But the event, he said, showed Harris engaging with the group in a more genuine way. She “really connected with the audience,” he said, and spoke about the need to bring a divided country back together. She even hugged his niece.
“I turned to my fiancé and thought, ‘Who is Kamala?'” Richardson recalled.
At the time, Ms. Harris was trying to change her image as vice president, and aides and allies said she had been so caricatured by critics that she had become overly cautious, afraid of making a mistake that would open further criticism.
While she recognized she could reach important constituencies in ways Biden could not, one of her advisers said she felt she was being deployed only to speak about Black and women’s issues, and she wasn’t happy with that.
She turned to old friends, who told her she had power that Biden’s mostly white, male aides lacked: One friend recalled being told she was the only person in the room with Biden who wouldn’t get fired.
Friends said she began to lower her guard by talking about her personal experiences and the history of being the first woman, African-American and Asian-American to serve as vice president.
On March 3, Harris traveled to Selma, Alabama, to deliver a speech to civil rights demonstrators marking the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, but she also wanted to express to the world the feelings that were weighing on her mind.
That weekend, she was shaken by reports of Gaza families eating leaves and animal feed, and of families shot dead by Israeli soldiers who had charged a food convoy they deemed “looters.” On the flight, she edited her statements, flipping through page after page with her blue pen.
Two years ago, Harris spoke at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, a sacred site of the civil rights movement, inspiring the audience with the message that the Biden administration was committed to upholding civil and human rights.
Aides said she thought making that case would be harder this year: Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza had angered the left, especially the Selma crowd sympathetic to the Palestinians.
While her speech that day did not go beyond White House policy, it was confrontational and explicitly acknowledged the human suffering caused by the war. Her speech drew attention for its focus on the Palestinians and its implicit criticism of Israel.
“Our hearts break for the victims of this terrible tragedy and for all the innocent people of Gaza who are suffering from what is clearly a humanitarian catastrophe,” she said to thunderous applause. “The people of Gaza are hungry. The conditions are inhumane. And our common humanity compels us to act.”
She also called for an “immediate ceasefire,” drawing cheers from the crowd. She aimed her remarks at Hamas, not the Israeli leadership, and reiterated that she and the president “remain unwavering in our commitment to Israel’s security.”
“When she showed up in Selma, she was Kamala when she was district attorney for the Bay Area,” said Maya Wiley, chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who was in Selma. “We saw Kamala when she was attorney general, we saw Kamala when she was a senator questioning people.”
“She was completely human,” Wiley said.
The vice president has also become a leading voice in the White House on abortion rights, an issue Biden has never liked to talk about publicly.
At an event in April, Harris spoke about the state’s anti-abortion laws that include exceptions for rape and incest, and revealed that when she was in high school, a friend confided in her that she had been sexually abused by her stepfather.
That friend, Wanda Kagan, recalled in an interview that the 16-year-old Harris said, “Oh, no, you’re going to come live with us,” before asking her mother.
“I often wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t stepped in at such a critical time in my life,” Kagan said.
In May, the vice president went into more detail about how she’s overcome a lifetime of often being the only woman of color in a room.
“When you walk into a room as the only person who looks like you, who comes from the same background as you, you walk into the room with your chin up and your shoulders back,” Harris told a gathering of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander groups.
“We need to know that sometimes people will open the door and leave it there, but sometimes they won’t, and then you have to kick that door down,” she added, using an expletive to back up her point.
The Road to November
Shortly after Harris appeared on CNN last Thursday to defend her performance in the presidential debate, saying, “I’ve watched the last three and a half years of performance and I’m not going to spend the whole night talking to you guys about the last 90 minutes,” the cable network’s chief national correspondent, John King, weighed in.
In one sign of how the political debate about Ms. Harris has changed, he called it “political malfeasance” that the White House did not use her more effectively in past years.
She is not the first vice president to face questions about her readiness to serve in the White House, but none of her predecessors have served under an older president than Biden or faced the kind of intense scrutiny she has recently faced amid Biden’s missteps.
Harris made her support for the president clear after a campaign fundraiser in California on Tuesday, when asked about calls for the president to withdraw. “Joe Biden is our nominee. We beat Trump once, and we’re going to win again, period,” she said.
Asked if she would be willing to serve as a stand-in if necessary, Harris said she was “proud to be Joe Biden’s running mate.”
Still, many in the Democratic Party have deep reservations about her competence as a candidate, and Republicans are already moving quickly to discredit her.
“Kamala Harris is incompetent,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt said. “She has proven to be the weakest and worst vice president in history. She has supported 100% of every disastrous policy Joe Biden has implemented over the last four years.”
Harris has also faced harsh criticism on immigration, a top concern for voters.
Biden has tasked her with addressing the root causes of migration (not “border security” specifically), but she has become an easy target for one of the administration’s biggest liabilities.
“Vice President Kamala Harris’ primary responsibility was border security,” Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton wrote on social media last month. “What a disaster. Harris is arguably the most incompetent, ignorant and inept vice president in history.”
The White House made a point of expressing its confidence in Harris.
“The president’s confidence in her, his reliance on the vice president, his respect for her judgment has only grown and grown,” Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, said in an interview this year. “I think he’s really counting on her ability to get to the root of problems,” he added. “And she’s often right.”
Biden, meanwhile, has suggested she is no longer a “work in progress.”
“My name is Joe Biden, and I work for Kamala Harris,” Biden told the group in the Rose Garden in May. “I asked her to be my vice president because I knew I needed someone smarter than me.”
