Kamala Harris: can underestimated trailblazer beat Trump?

The call that upended everything for Kamala Harris came on a Sunday morning in July as the US vice president did a jigsaw puzzle at home with her grand-nieces.

“The phone rings, and it’s Joe,” Harris told radio host Howard Stern recently. “I got up to take the call — and then life changed.”

President Joe Biden’s revelation that he was going to drop out of the 2024 White House race and endorse Harris as the Democratic nominee triggered one of the most remarkable transformations in American politics.

Harris was previously saddled with record low approval ratings for a “veep.”

Within a few short weeks she created an election campaign out of nothing. She held rapturous rallies, raised more than $1 billion in funds and brought what she called a burst of joy to a party that had given up hope.

But with the now polls showing the 60-year-old in a dead heat with Republican former president Donald Trump, Harris is in the fight of her life to win on November 5 and become the first female president in US history.

“It’s not easy. Usually people run for president for two years, and she’s just been running since late July,” David Karol, who teaches government and politics at the University of Maryland, told AFP.

Difficult debut

Harris was a trailblazer from the moment she entered the White House as America’s first female, Black and South Asian vice president.

Yet the trail proved difficult at first. Harris faced withering criticism that she was not up to the job of being a heartbeat from the presidency.

Already criticized for vagueness on policy during a failed presidential run against Biden in 2019, she increasingly became notorious — like Biden himself — for “word salads.”

Tasked by Biden with getting to the roots of the country’s illegal migration problem, Harris fumbled and granted Republicans an attack line about being a failed “border czar” that they use to this day.

But things began to change in 2022. Harris found her voice when the US Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion.

She rallied around the country on the issue and took on an increasingly prominent role in Biden’s second presidential campaign — with officials privately admitting she was gearing up for her own presidential run in 2028.

Biden also increasingly tasked her with diplomatic missions on Ukraine and the Middle East.

But few dreamed that the moment for her to take a tilt at the White House would come so soon.

Partly that was because Harris had long been underestimated, by some Democrats and by Republicans alike.

Trump would soon find that the woman he called “crazy” and subjected to sexist and racist taunts was a force to be reckoned with. In their only debate she gained the upper hand by taunting the former president.

‘Momala’

Harris, however has deliberately steered away from overtly leaning into her race or her gender during the campaign.

When she does talk about her personal background it has largely been about her Indian-born mother who raised her and her sister alone — while her Jamaican-born father rarely gets a mention.

Or there’s her very public affection for “Second Gentleman” Doug Emhoff.

Famously his children Cole and Emma, who are now her stepchildren, dubbed her “Momala.”

She has also used their relationship to call out Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance for previously describing top Democrats as “childless cat ladies.”

But it is more common to hear her focus on her professional history as a prosecutor and then as California attorney general — and contrasting herself with Trump, who’s bidding to become the first convicted felon in the Oval Office.

Harris has also repeatedly brought up the fact that’s she’s a gun owner, as she reaches out to Republican voters.

Yet there have also been familiar weaknesses. She remains uncomfortable with the media, and her failure to sit for any interviews for several weeks mid-campaign drew Republican fire.

The question now is whether she can put the puzzle together and shatter America’s highest glass ceiling.

“I think she has run a good campaign. And if she loses, some people will say ‘oh, that’s because she didn’t run a good campaign’ — and I think that’s wrong,” said Karol.