Harris pitches self as a unifier with a ‘to-do list’ – is it enough for knife-edge race?

On the second to last Sunday in July, Kamala Harris had just finished making pancakes and bacon for her grandnieces at the vice-president’s residence in Washington, and was sitting down with them to work on a jigsaw puzzle when Joe Biden called.

“I got up to take the call, and then life changed,” Harris recounted later. Biden, isolating with Covid at his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and facing calls from all corners of his party to step aside, had reached the history-altering decision to end his bid for re-election.

“Are you sure?” Harris said she asked the US president. “Because what a big decision.”

With Biden’s endorsement, Harris, still wearing her workout clothes and hooded sweatshirt from her alma mater, Howard University, leapt into action. Time was of the essence. Over the next 10 hours, with pizza boxes littered around her, she placed 100 calls to Democrats whose support she would need to secure the nomination.

By the time Harris walked into her inherited campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, to the strains of Beyoncé’s hard-charging anthem Freedom, her ascension seemed suddenly – and unexpectedly – inevitable.

In the roughly 100 days since, Harris has enthralled her party, which had been all but resigned to defeat with Biden as its nominee. She selected a running mate, the affable Minnesota governor, Tim Walz; accepted the nomination at a joy-filled convention; supercharged volunteer sign-ups and on-the-ground organizing; raised a staggering billion dollars; dominated the contest’s only presidential debate against her opponent, Donald Trump. She secured endorsements from a host of his former advisers and aides, as well as several of the planet’s biggest stars. She appeared on popular podcasts, daytime TV and news networks and delivered a closing argument that blended the economic and the existential anxieties driving Americans’ choice in November.

But has it all been enough? The race has built to a deadlocked finale, with each of the seven battleground states – and the nation – virtually tied just days before the final votes of the 2024 election are cast. Along the way, some of that early shine has worn off. Trump has crept back in the polls. Critics have carped at the Harris campaign’s traditionalism, and a perception among some that she has focused too much on Trump’s threat and not offered enough of a vision of her own for Americans to be inspired by.

On Tuesday, she delivered her last major speech of the campaign from the Ellipse in Washington, a direct appeal to the vanishingly small slice of Americans who have yet to make up their minds.

The significance of the site, an oval-shaped park south of the White House, was twofold. It was intended as a stark reminder of the violent forces Trump inflamed from that very spot nearly four years ago, when he implored supporters to “fight like hell” before a mob of them stormed the US Capitol.

And it was meant to underline the possibility of a Harris presidency.

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With the White House illuminated behind her, Harris declared: “For too long, we have been consumed with too much division, chaos and mutual distrust. And it can be easy to forget a simple truth: it doesn’t have to be this way.”

She cast the election as a contest between herself, a unifier with a “to-do list” and Trump, a “petty tyrant” seeking a return to “unchecked power”. In 90 days, one of them would take the oath of office. “Kamala! Kamala!” chanted the crowd, her largest to date with an estimated 75,000 people who spilled beyond the park, toward the Washington Monument.

Harris is running the shortest presidential campaign in modern US history. If she wins, she will have persuaded Americans to do something unprecedented in the country’s 248-year history: elect a woman and woman of color to the presidency.

At 18, could she have ever imagined this would be her life, Pro Football Hall of Famer Shannon Sharpe asked the 60-year-old during a recent appearance on his podcast. “Never,” Harris said, shaking her head. “Never.”

Delegates hold ‘Kamala’ signs as the US vice-president speaks during the Democratic convention in Chicago in August. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

The daughter of an endocrinologist from India and an economist from Jamaica, Harris said an “instinct to protect” propelled her career as a prosecutor, and was central to her opening pitch against Trump. From the courtroom, Harris took on “predators”, “fraudsters” and “scammers”, she would begin, building to the line: “So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

In an election defined by a striking gender gap – with women powering Harris and men turning toward Trump – the central question may be who Americans trust to protect them – and what they believe they need protecting from.

Harris has vowed to protect Americans’ “fundamental freedoms” – abortion rights, clean air, decades-old alliances, and democracy itself. Trump has cast himself, by contrast, as the protector of a nation under “invasion”, overrun by illegal immigration and crime. At a recent rally, he crassly suggested he would protect women, whether they “like it or not”.

Harris’s critics – even those who will begrudgingly vote for her – knock her as a maddeningly scripted politician who lacks an ideological core and who has struggled to articulate a serious policy agenda.

At a CNN town hall, she hewed closely to a set of talking points, offering circular responses to pointed questions. And yet, during the 80-minute segment, she delivered her most forceful warning about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. Yes, she agreed, her opponent was a fascist.

Harris has waved off any criticism, calling herself disciplined.

At a rally with Harris, Michelle Obama defended her further by suggesting critics were holding the nation’s first female and first Black vice-president to a “higher standard” than Trump, who often rambles incoherently, had threatened to jail his political opponents, and would be the first convicted felon elected to the White House if he wins.

“I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn,” Obama said in Kalamazoo, Michigan. “Preach!” a woman shouted from the audience.

Over the course of her abbreviated campaign, Harris has laid out a broad strokes economic agenda with proposals for first-time homebuyers, caregivers, new parents, and the “sandwich” generation of adults caring for their children and their parents. She has, meanwhile, backed away from her past support for progressives policies on immigration and fracking, which helped fuel the San Francisco liberal caricature, though it never quite suited the former “top cop” of California. Drawing on support from anti-Trump Republicans, she has vowed to put a Republican in her cabinet, and insisted she would be a president for “all Americans”, including Trump’s supporters.

Along the way, many stars have aligned for her. Oprah sang her praise – “Kamaaaaala” – in a DNC speech. Taylor Swift endorsed Harris after her debate performance against Trump. Beyoncé embraced Harris at an abortion-rights focused event in Texas. Bad Bunny urged support for her after a shock jock disparaged Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage” at a Trump rally. She has also won support from the billionaire Mark Cuban, whose traveled the country making the case that Harris would be better for business than the man who made his name as a Manhattan builder.

Tory Gavito, the president of Way to Win, a hub for liberal donors and organizers, likened Harris’s dizzying “everything, everywhere, all at once” campaign to the Wizard of Oz. The vice-president was thrust to the forefront of American politics and quickly assembled an unlikely coalition that includes gen Z meme-makers and the former Republican vice-president Dick Cheney.

“Now here we are. This is the end of the road,” she said. “I just can’t imagine it having been done any other way.”

Although Harris has served as the vice-president for nearly four years, she nevertheless arrived at the top of the Democratic ticket relatively unknown. But in stark reversal of fortunes, she defied skeptics of her political skill, and her popularity soared.

“She has not put a foot wrong,” said Paul Begala, a veteran Democratic strategist and former adviser to Bill Clinton. If he had to identify a misstep, it would be during an appearance on ABC’s The View, where, when asked how she would distinguish herself from Biden, Harris responded: “Not a thing that comes to mind.” The Trump campaign seized on the line, tying Harris to the unpopular president.

Begala marveled at the way Harris has “squared the circle” between Democrats who believed her closing message should be centered around Trump’s threats to democracy – as the party did in the 2022 midterms when they blunted the anticipated red wave – and those who argued she should conclude with an economic-focused message, highlighting Americans’ top voting issue. Trump would arrive in office “obsessed with revenge” against an ever-growing enemies list, Harris says, while she would focused on her “to-do” list: lowering costs and fighting to protect what’s left of abortion access in America.

Since the supreme court overturned Roe in 2022, Harris has been a powerful messenger on abortion rights, framing it as a matter of bodily autonomy. On the campaign trail, she has been joined by women whose lives have been put a risk by their state’s abortion bans, as well as by the family of Amber Thurman, the 28-year-old mother from Georgia who died of sepsis in 2022 after being denied timely medical care to treat a medication abortion.

“We need to make sure that we know who is responsible for those deaths, and that is Donald Trump, his supreme court, and all of the Maga Republicans who have voted for legislation up and down the ballot across the country,” said Silvina Alarcón, political director at Reproductive Freedom for All.

Harris has also had to navigate, as she has her entire career, a torrent of racist and sexist abuse, including from her opponent, who has insulted her intelligence, calling her “dumb as a rock” and an “extremely low IQ person”. During a live interview with members of the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump attacked her racial identity and asked when she “happened to turn Black”. The remark drew gasps in the room.

Christina Reynolds, a senior vice-president of communications for Emily’s List, the influential political group that backs female candidates who support abortion rights, said Harris has faced all of the obstacles that have long burdened women, and especially women of color, who seek high political office. But she has also helped blaze her own trail, demonstrating leadership as the vice-president.

“She’s had to stack up to the division and hate and lies, while building the plane,” Reynolds said. “I think that when she wins, it will be historic and epic and truly a testament to her and the people around her and the work that they’ve done.”

Support for Harris has slightly fallen as the Trump campaign sharpened its attacks. Looming over a race that appears to be teetering on a razor’s edge is whether Harris can stitch together her own diverse coalition, similar to the one that elevated Biden in 2020, while polls show Trump making inroads with voters of color and young people, especially men.

Democrats are closely watching places such as Dearborn, Michigan, where Democratic emissaries from Barack Obama and the independent senator Bernie Sanders are working to stave off a mass defection of Arab and Muslim American voters furious at the administration over the deadly war in Gaza. At nearly every stop, Harris is heckled by pro-Palestinian protesters, many of whom have said they plan to vote for a third party candidate or not at all.

John Zogby, an author and pollster who studies the Arab American electorate, said the scale of the devastation in Gaza and now Lebanon, and the depth of these voters’ discontent, have reached a “point of almost no return”.

“It really is different this time,” he said.

In the final days, Harris will circle between all seven battleground states, searching for any last wells of support that might tip the balance. Until the end, she is attempting to make the affirmative case for herself, while arguing that Trump’s vilification of his most prominent critics, using increasingly violence rhetoric, “must be disqualifying”.

Election eve will be spent in Pennsylvania, whose 19 electoral college votes are seen as a must-win for Harris. On Tuesday, the Harris campaign will host an election night party at Howard, the historically Black college where the vice-president won her first election: freshman class representative.

While Democrats remain fearful a second Trump presidency will usher in a dark era for American democracy, and of the former president’s pre-emptive efforts to deny an election loss, those on the ground say they see signs that Harris’s “joyful warrior” campaign will prevail. Maxwell Alejandro Frost, the gen Z congressman from Florida, told reporters on Friday: “A bellwether for me in an election is when you’re going to events and you’re seeing people who are not political, who don’t like politics but are there because – sometimes they can’t even articulate it – they’re there because they felt like they needed to be there.

“That’s the difference between a political candidate and a movement candidate. And we have a movement candidate, and this is a movement right now.”

David Smith contributed reporting