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CNN
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Kamala Harris is embarking on a targeted burst of midterm campaigning — especially rooted around abortion rights — in an effort to boost her profile after a rocky start as vice president and boost turnout among key segments of the coalition Democrats desperately need for the midterm elections.
She will focus on blacks, women and younger voters while maintaining what has been a deliberate outreach to unions, both among management and rank-and-file employees, according to a dozen Harris aides and others in the White House and more from familiar with her plans.
“Positioning isn’t so much about geography,” said one aide, “it’s about demographics.”
The central and unifying theme of her downfall will be abortion, an issue that has already proven to be a driving force for Democratic voters. Harris was initially reluctant to be the face of the administration’s efforts to defend abortion rights, recoiling from the suggestion that she there was to be, simply because she is the best-known woman in Democratic politics, according to people who have spoken to her. But now she plans to focus on that as she tries to protect Democrats defending their slim majorities in Congress, even as many candidates keep their distance from her.
Harris’ first year as vice president was largely defined by stories of infighting among staff, suspensions and resulting frustration, as CNN previously reported. But even people close to Harris and in the West Wing, who insisted publicly that there were no problems with her work and public presence, now regularly talk about how much Harris has improved and express optimism that she can indeed begin to impression in the minds of voters and produce poll numbers that are worse than President Joe Biden’s.
After White House aides have privately acknowledged that Biden is not the ideal person to speak on abortion rights, they are happy to have Harris as the go-to person for both advocates and staffers. In a speech Saturday at a meeting of Democratic National Committee members outside Washington, D.C., she laid out why holding on to their slim Senate majority would matter to Democrats — and to her.
“I can’t wait,” she said, “to cast the deciding vote to break up the filibuster on voting rights and reproductive rights.”
For many Democratic operatives and officials watching, Harris’ midterm activity is part of a longer arc of preparation for the larger campaign ahead in 2024. By spring, Harris is, or is bound to be, very more famous than the normal candidate for a candidate for an already aging president to run for re-election – or if the situation changes, suddenly in a short primary campaign to be the replacement candidate herself.
“The next eight months are Rocky hitting the beef, running up the stairs,” said one senior Democrat who recently spoke with Harris.
Efforts to rescue the recalcitrant vice president began last winter after her chief of staff, communications director and press secretary were replaced. Internal and external advisers assured her that her treatment in the media was unfair. The racism and sexism the first woman and first black vice president felt were absolutely real, they told her.
But the defensive digging she was doing, they warned, would only make the situation worse. And that made her more prone to blunders outside of practice, as when she laughed off a question last summer about why she hadn’t visited the southern border, saying she hadn’t been to Europe either.
She kept saying she wanted to go out more, but she really needed to start going out more, the vice president’s advisers said, and build her confidence and comfort in society by owning her presence at work.
“All her tasks before were not so clear. If you look [migration issues related to diplomacy at the] Northern Triangle, look at voting rights, there was no clear way to measure success,” said Cedric Richmond, the former congressman and White House adviser who took on a major role as an adviser to Harris.
“I just reminded her that both she and the president are the biggest assets we have,” Richmond said, “and that people need to see her to understand everything she’s doing and really hear her.”
Among the stops already planned are additional trips to Texas and Pennsylvania and a roundtable scheduled for Friday in Chicago with state lawmakers, students, abortion providers and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who is running against a Trump-backed Republican who supports tough restrictions on abortions. Aides expect Harris to be on the road for up to three days each week in a mix of events that will include more fundraisers, but most events will be like one that CNN learned she has planned for Sept. 22 in Milwaukee at a meeting of Democratic lawyers A general association, in critical condition, where it will highlight the legal fight for abortion rights.
After Biden’s poll results dipped in the spring as even mainstream Democrats grew disaffected, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klein — who has served as chief of staff to two vice presidents — urged Harris and her aides to think directly. to profit from her appeal was strongest. Black voters are giving up on Democrats and drifting away. Before the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, voters were, too. Younger voters, who for the most part had never been deeply committed to Biden, came back underwhelmed at best.
They’re using the pattern of Harris’ appearance at the Essence Festival in New Orleans over July 4th weekend. There is no competitive racing in the fall near Louisiana. But there was an audience of 10,000 mostly black women gathered from around the country to whom she spoke about the “outrageous” Dobbs decision, which didn’t very subtly connect the Supreme Court’s decision to “a history in this country of a government trying to claim ownership of human bodies.”
She brings her own approach to the problem. In internal White House conversations, for example, she argued that they should not assume that black voters will automatically agree with them on protecting abortion rights.
After her speech at the DNC on Saturday, Harris made a surprise stop at the same hotel to address a gathering of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the black women’s sorority she belonged to at Howard, and urged the women in the room to think of the midterm campaign as service.
“So many women, especially younger women, who we absolutely need, are connecting with her in a way that they’re not connecting with any other leader in the Democratic Party right now who is front and center,” said Cornell Belcher , a Democratic pollster who has advised Harris and her team.
This single-minded focus would also define Harris’ approach to media interviews. Although she pre-recorded a rare Sunday appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last weekend, her assistants are handling women’s magazines, black and Latino TV and radio, and a Labor Day-themed, union-focused interview with the left slanted magazine The Nation. (She declined an interview request from CNN.)
“If you’re going to put together a winning coalition at the national level, I’d say it’s more important to be on the Essence Festival stage than to be at the rural county fair,” Belcher said.
So far, Harris’ recalibration is not a complete revolution. Some of the problems that plagued her start as vice president—inconsistency, endless meetings and preparation sessions—remain. Complaints have come from inside and outside the government about hesitation and lack of follow-up. “Overthinking” is still a word that people who talk to her often use, and caution and anxiety can turn her words into contortions, such as in the “Meet the Press” interview when she slipped up when asked if would support the prosecution of former President Donald Trump.
Although the internal dynamics in the White House have improved, Harris and her aides are still wary of inadvertently overshadowing Biden as they try to build their own identities.
Her role, one of Biden’s top advisers said — acknowledging that she played the part of Harris’ original 2020 “prosecutor for president” idea — is now protecting Biden.
“For a lot of the people we’re talking to, these are the same people who should have come out for us in 2020,” said another person familiar with Harris’ thinking. “She feels a sense of responsibility to make them understand what we’ve accomplished and ask them to do it again.”
And when she makes that sale, she likes to be specific, her aides say. She’ll cross out “American Rescue Plan” or “ARP,” for example, if she sees them written into her speeches, and say things like, “Don’t tell me, ‘We’re spending money on bridges.’ Choose a bridge!”
Harris was flying to Chicago when the Dobbs case was decided in late June, but she broke the majority opinion, dissent and concurrence when Air Force 2 landed and then in a motorcade to a long-planned event that happened to be health-related to the mother, she scribbled notes in the margins.
Harris very quickly began talking about the decision as an assault not on reproductive rights, but on “liberty and liberty.” She emphasized the importance of talking about the impact on IVF and miscarriages and potential future legal action against same-sex marriage.
Speaking to clergy and other religious leaders, she urged them to view abortion rights not as a threat to their personal opposition to the procedure, but instead as a government that doesn’t make decisions for women. She also pressed her aides to make sure she wasn’t talking only to older religious leaders.
The new assistants have built a quiet but consistent structure of events for her, unlike her first year on the job. By hosting abortion rights roundtables with local lawmakers across the country in both red and blue states, Harris raised their profile in the spotlight that the vice president’s visit brings, while offering practical advice such as who to call the Justice Department task force or which legislator in another state might be worth contacting.
Harris has also chaired internal White House meetings, with aides saying her experience as attorney general has proved crucial both in gauging policy moves and urging everyone involved to use more practical and direct language.
“It helps the president to have her play a leadership role,” said senior Biden adviser Anita Dunn, who has had several one-on-one and group conversations with Harris.
And that’s clearly helped Harris, too, say many around her.
“She found her way,” said Donna Brazile, a former DNC chair and informal adviser, marveling at how the issue, which brings together Harris’ legal background and longtime focus on maternal health and equality, came just when she needed it.
“She’s really been able to help the White House get its message across about choice, freedom and equality — and that matters in a close election.”
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