Kamala Harris still needs to define herself – but she is the ultimate anti-Trump candidate

BY Arwa Mahdawi – “The Guardian”:

Fate has swung wildly in her favour, with everything from the Democrat establishment to memes on her side. Will we finally see a Madam President?

Aweek has always been a long time in politics, but this might have been the longest week in Kamala Harris’s life. While Joe Biden is still technically the US president, he already feels irrelevant. All eyes are on Harris now. The speed with which she has gone from being one of the most unpopular vice-presidents in modern history to sitting at the top of the Democratic ticket, with an army of enthusiastic fans behind her, is astounding. Biden’s trajectory has been widely compared to a Shakespearean tragedy; Harris’s sudden reversal of fortune, meanwhile, is like something out of a fairytale.

A quick recap: Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris on Sunday. The Democratic establishment then threw its weight behind her on Monday. So did hundreds of thousands of donors; Harris’s campaign raked in a record-breaking $81m in just 24 hours. By Tuesday, she had earned enough support from delegates to win the Democratic nomination for president next month. On Wednesday, Democrats approved rules meaning that any Democrat who wants to compete against Harris for the nomination only has days to do so. Then, on Friday, Barack Obama endorsed the vice-president. Her coronation is almost complete.

Importantly, Harris doesn’t just have the consolidated support of party elites. She’s also got large swathes of social media cheering her on. The woman has undeniably mementum. “kamala IS brat,” the British pop star Charli xcx posted on X on Sunday. It may not be on the level of an Obama endorsement but Charli’s approval thrust Harris into the middle of the pop-cultural zeitgeist. Charli xcx’s new album, Brat, has undoubtedly been the meme of the summer – the album’s lime-green aesthetic plastered everywhere.

In fact, soon after Charli’s approving tweet, @kamalahq changed its backdrop to brat green. Cue a lot of campaign staff trying to explain to high-ranking Democrats like Nancy Pelosi what on earth is going on. (“Well ma’am, Ms xcx, has defined a ‘brat’ as ‘just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it’. Yeah, I know that sounds confusing. But trust me when I say it’ll help us get out the youth vote.”)

Harris’s campaign hasn’t just embraced the brats, it’s leaning hard into all the Kamala memes that have been flooding the internet over the past few weeks, including a lot of coconut-related content. That is not a racial slur, I should make clear to British readers, but rather a reference to a speech the vice-president gave in 2023.

“My mother … would give us a hard time sometimes,” Harris said at a White House event about educational opportunity. “… and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’” She then paused for profundity before continuing with the philosophical bit. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

The coconut quote – which circulated online long before last week – is quintessential Harris: a bewildering series of words that sound like someone typed “come up with a profound sentence” into an early version of ChatGPT. Lines like this have been a liability in the past, used by her detractors to suggest she’s unserious. The internet, however, is now turning Harris’s unique rhetorical style into an asset. The TikTok mashups and coconut memes have helped inject some much-needed joy and levity into what until now has been an extremely depressing election cycle.

At the moment, Harris seems unstoppable. A new Axios/Generation Lab poll shows she’s got a big edge with young voters and another poll has found she’s narrowed Donald Trump’s lead significantly. Nevertheless, it can’t be emphasised enough that we are still very much in the Harris honeymoon phase. People were desperate not to have another Trump-Biden matchup and eager to embrace change of any kind. The question is: can the momentum around Harris be sustained?

There is certainly precedent in US elections when it comes to a woman being rapidly built up, only to be swiftly knocked down. And Republicans are already doing their best to knock Harris down with racist and misogynistic attacks. They’ve also attacked her record as vice-president, calling her the “border tsar” and blaming her for the migration crisis.

Then there’s the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The internet may have positioned Harris as a lovable goofball now but that image will be hard to sustain among young people if she becomes the face of Biden’s horrific Gaza policy – which has been deeply unpopular with young people and lost the Democrats a lot of support in the important swing state of Michigan, where there is a large Arab American population.

So far, Harris has been walking a careful tightrope when it comes to Gaza; trying not to alienate progressives while also making sure she isn’t branded “anti-Israel”. On Wednesday, the vice-president skipped Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress and met him privately instead. On Thursday, she said it was time for a ceasefire deal to be done, but also pledged “unwavering” support for Israel. There’s only so long she can play both sides, however. She will either continue Biden’s policy of letting Israel kill as many Palestinians as it wants, with only meek protestations, or she won’t.

Harris will also have to define herself as a candidate more broadly. This has never been one of her strengths and a lack of substance was the undoing of her 2019 attempt to be the Democratic nominee. “She has proved to be an uneven campaigner who changes her message and tactics to little effect and has a staff torn into factions,” the New York Times decreed in a November 2019 piece about how her campaign unravelled.

That said, running against her fellow Democrats is very different from running against Trump. While Harris didn’t fully shine as the primary candidate or the vice-president, she has the potential to come into her own now. She is the ultimate anti-Trump. She’s the prosecutor, he’s the felon. He’s the old guy, she’s the relatively young woman. He represents the US’s past, she represents its future. Just a few weeks ago, I was resigned to a Trump win. Now I think the US has a fighting chance of seeing a Madam President.

Then again, a week is a long time in politics. And there are still 14 to go before the election.