WASHINGTON —
Vice President Kamala Harris enters this week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago with a small lead over former President Trump in national polling averages that few would have thought likely even a month ago.
The truncated nature of the race — initially thought by many to present an added hurdle — has played to Harris’ strengths, while minimizing her flaws.
The Nov. 5 election will take place just 75 days after the convention ends on Thursday. Voting begins even earlier in many states, including prized battleground Pennsylvania, where some counties will begin handing out ballots next month.
Before President Biden dropped out of the race in July, many Democrats saw Harris as a risky candidate, while also worrying that anyone taking his place on the ballot would face logistical challenges.
Here’s why the snap election, unprecedented in modern American politics, has been helpful to Harris so far, and how Trump could reclaim a contest that is still up for grabs:
No primary, no problem with defining core beliefs
Harris started her race for her party’s 2020 nomination with the type of excitement she is drawing from Democratic voters today. More than 20,000 people showed up for her January 2019 announcement rally in Oakland, and she raised big dollars as she established herself as a top-tier contender.
By December of that year, before ballots were cast or caucuses held, she had dropped out. Harris had trouble defining her core beliefs compared with those of others in a big field of Democratic hopefuls. As a result, voters lacked a sense of what she stood for.
Was she a lefty competing for progressive populist votes with Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts? Was she a centrist sparring with Biden and Pete Buttigieg, who is now Biden’s transportation secretary?
“She’s not necessarily easy to pigeonhole as being a progressive or centrist or moderate,” said Brian Brokaw, a former Harris advisor who ran a group supporting Harris in the primary. “She’s confounded people.”
Her attempts to straddle the party’s ideological divides — with her own universal healthcare plan and a partial embrace of the movement to reform or abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — failed to win over her party.
She doesn’t have to worry about those fights now that the race is a binary choice — with brighter lines between her and Trump on issues such as abortion, democracy and the economy.
“She’s benefiting so much from being a foil against Trump, in a particularly compelling and positive way, that everyone’s looking at her differently,” said Faiz Shakir, a senior advisor to Sanders.
“In a primary process, voters would be asking, ‘Could she be the nominee? Should she be? Is she the best?’” Shakir added. “Here, you’re either for Trump or Harris.”
Less need for an ‘Etch-A-Sketch’
Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign was famously undermined when a top advisor said the Republican could erase some of the conservative positions he espoused in the GOP primary with an “Etch-A-Sketch” to appeal to a more moderate electorate in the general election.