Kamala Harris shifts focus to policy over race in bid to win over Black voters

While President Joe Biden was hosting a celebration of Black excellence at the White House with lawmakers, advocates and celebrities this past week, Kamala Harris was instead headed off to Pennsylvania.

The nation’s first Black vice president talked with Pennsylvania voters about supporting small businesses, building more housing and expanding the child tax credit. She said the country “needs a president of the United States who works for all the American people.”

What she did not do was spend time talking about her race or gender or the prospect that she would be the nation’s first Black and South Asian woman to be president if she defeated Republican Donald Trump.

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As Harris courts voters, she embodies her identity as a woman of colour rather than making it an overt part of her pitch, choosing instead to emphasise her policies and resume.

She will be making her case to minority voters in a number of key settings in the coming days. She is scheduled to speak on Saturday night at a Washington awards dinner sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, conduct an interview with members of the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia on Tuesday, and attend an online rally Thursday headlined by Oprah and involving groups such as “Win with Black Women,” “White Women: Answer the Call,” and ”South Asians for Harris.”

Harris, throughout her career, has been ”many different firsts, and has never really led with that as a descriptor,” said Brian Brokaw, who managed Harris’ winning campaign for California attorney general in 2010.

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“Her life story and her identity and her background and her job experience have all been critical parts of her campaigns,” he said. But he added that ”becoming the first — that has never actually been part of her core rationale for why she should be elected a office. It just happens to be a important result of her elections.”

Harris’ identity, too, is evident in how she chooses to engage with voters. A member of a historically Black sorority while attending Howard University, Harris spoke this summer in Houston at the annual assembly of another sorority, where she told the women “it is so good to be with you this evening, and I say that as a proud member of the Divine Nine. And when I look out at everyone here, I see family.”

It’s a different approach from Hillary Clinton’s in her 2016 Democratic campaign for president, when she put front and center her potential to break the glass ceiling. Harris’ aides and allies say with no time to lose in a compressed campaign this year, it is perhaps more valuable to focus on voters rather than herself.

North Carolina’s Crystal McLaughlin, who attended a Harris rally in Greensboro this past week, acknowledged Harris’ candidacy as an important “historical moment” but added that what is more important is to look at “who wants to do what’s right.” Still, she said Harris’ identity matters even if it is not the focus on her campaign.

“It’s important, not only for Black young girls, but for girls period,” said McLaughlin, 53, who is Black. “If you can see it, you can actually be it.”

So far, it’s been Trump who has brought up race in the campaign, falsely claiming that Harris belatedly “turned Black.” During the presidential debate this past week, he again said he had read she was “not Black” and then she was.

Harris did not mention herself once in her response, saying instead: “I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently over the course of his career attempted to use race to divide the American people.”

After Biden dropped out of the race in July, polling indicated that Black Americans were more excited about Harris as the Democratic nominee. In late July, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll showed that about 7 in 10 Black adults said would be satisfied with Harris as the Democratic nominee. That was a marked increase from earlier in July, when about half of Black adults and 15% of Hispanic adults felt that way about Biden.

Another AP-NORC poll conducted in August found that about half of Black adults said that “excited” would describe their feelings “extremely” or “very” well if Harris was elected president. Only about 3 in 10 had said the same about Biden in March.

Although Black Americans overwhelmingly identify as Democrats and about 9 in 10 Black voters supported Biden in the 2020 election, according to AP VoteCast, there are some signs that older Black voters may be more supportive of Harris than younger Black voters are. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that about 9 in 10 Black voters over age 50 were supporting Harris, compared with three-quarters of Black voters 18 to 49.

Civil rights organizations focused on mobilizing Black voters say they have seen an uptick in enthusiasm and engagement since Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket.

The NAACP has been circulating messaging with allied groups that its researchers believe will especially resonate with Black voters, including protecting the rights of Black Americans and appealing to their responsibility to vote.

On economic questions, the civil rights group is urging organizers and campaigns to listen to Black voters’ concerns.

“Black voters want policy solutions,” said Phaedra Jackson, vice president of unit advocacy and effectiveness at the NAACP. But she added: “Representation matters. Folks are excited to see a Black women vying for the highest office in the land” and they care more about institutions when they are represented within those institutions.

The NAACP has focused much of its voter turnout efforts in battleground states where they believe issues like voter suppression will be a potential issue come November.

“Black voters are reachable and we are not a monolith. This is an extremely exciting time to be in voter engagement,” said Tyler Sterling, the NAACP’s national campaign director.

John Spencer, a 58-year-old geographer from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, said he wants Harris to stay focused on her plans for the future rather than her race and gender. Identity, unlike policies, is something you can tell just by looking at her, he said.

“Ideally in this country, a politician should be judged about their positions and not about anything other than who they are and their character and their positions,” said Spencer, who is white.

He said Harris’ positions matter more to him because he said they will ultimately impact his 11-year-old daughter Leah, who attended the Greensboro rally with him.

When Harris takes a stage, said 66-year-old Sheila Carter, the Democratic presidential candidate’s identity is “self-explanatory.” Discussion about her race and gender are secondary to what she offers as a candidate, said Carter, a Black retiree from Durham, North Carolina, who attended the rally.

“You see who she is,” Carter said. “And as she says, ‘Why bother to even address whether or not I’m Black or Indian or whatever? I am who I am. You see it, I see it, the world sees it.‘”