Kamala Harris is seeking to appeal to moderate voters without alienating the left of her Democratic party as the vice-president tries to find a winning political formula to defeat Donald Trump in the November election.
In her first major decision as presidential nominee, Harris this week chose Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate, presenting the former congressman, who is also a retired Army National Guardsman and geography teacher, as a safe pick who could appeal to rural voters.
But Walz has also championed free school meals for children, and policies to support labour unions, paid family and medical leave, health insurance and driver’s licences for migrants who illegally entered the country. Many Democrat progressives approved of the choice.
The selection of Walz is part of Harris’s effort to find the political sweet spot on the centre left that will maximise her chances of beating Trump in a close election likely to be decided in just a few battleground states.
Since entering the race on July 21, Harris has already galvanised large parts of the Democratic base — including young voters, women and people of colour — that were uninspired by President Joe Biden’s re-election bid.
But she knows this cannot happen at the expense of appealing to a broader audience. “When elected, we will govern on behalf of all Americans,” she said at a rally with Walz in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
Harris and her campaign have also tried to show they have dropped some of the more staunchly leftwing positions she had embraced during her failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, when she proposed a progressive wishlist, including a single-payer healthcare programme, a “Green New Deal” and the decriminalisation of illegal entry to the US.
“[2020] was a wildly contested primary, which sadly in the Democratic party tends to lead you to more left of centre positions,” said former US trade representative Ron Kirk, who has known Harris for more than two decades.
“But I think there is nothing like being next to the seat of power and being in the White House and understanding just how brutally difficult these decisions are that the president has to make.”
Harris now calls for more police funding, expanding access to health insurance through the Affordable Care Act and boosting the number of Border Patrol agents.
The shift has been noted by supporters such as investor Bob Pohlad, a megadonor who serves on the boards of PepsiCo and the Minnesota Twins baseball team.
After a Zoom call with donors, he described Harris as “so effective, and so, frankly and honestly, different than I had seen her in the short campaign in 2020 . . . and had seen her since then”.
“She made me feel confident,” he added. “She made me feel enthusiastic.”
Unlike in 2020, Harris has also embraced her past as San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney-general to show her toughness on criminals.
This year, Trump became the first former president to be convicted of a crime after the hush money trial and separately faces massive civil fraud penalties in New York. Harris has pitched the 2024 election as a choice between a prosecutor and a felon.
California lieutenant-governor Eleni Kounalakis said Harris can “really restore a sense of order” in the country compared with “much more chaos with Donald Trump”.
“She is the person who can hold Trump accountable,” she added.
Still, Harris has not insulated herself from political attacks from Republicans, who have been quick to depict Walz as a radical leftist.
Republicans have shared a video of him saying “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighbourliness” and criticised his handling of the 2020 summer riots after a white policeman in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd.
In YouTube videos and Truth Social posts, Trump’s campaign has also blasted Harris for the rise in illegal immigration and over the “defund the police” slogan, which she has discarded.
“Tim Walz let Minnesota burn,” said Trump in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday. “Kamala Harris bailed out the ones who lit the matches.”
But Trump has struggled to make overtures to the political middle: JD Vance, the Ohio senator he picked as his running mate, is widely seen as a darling of the conservative right but is finding it difficult to appeal to swing voters.
The former president has also continued to make inflammatory public remarks and social media posts that will raise the eyebrows of moderate voters. At the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week, he questioned Harris’s racial identity.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” he said, to widespread condemnation.
Harris’s challenge will be to exploit the vacuum at the ideological centre of US politics without favouring one faction of her party over the other — a balance that so far has benefited her.
In the first 24 hours after Walz was announced as Harris’s running mate, their campaign reported raising $36mn.
“I am so excited, I’ll tell ya,” said Mark Buell, a California real estate developer, who has backed Harris in every local, state and federal race since meeting her over hamburgers at San Francisco’s Balboa Cafe about 22 years ago.
“It’s amazing to see the new energy in the Democratic party.”
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