How Kamala Harris’ warp-speed campaign launch has changed the 2024 race

By Eric Bradner, CNN

(CNN) — The five days since Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign launched at warp speed have remade the 2024 race – and given Democrats new hope of preventing a second Donald Trump presidency.

Bright green, pro-Harris memes have erupted across social media. Fundraising exploded, with Harris’ campaign saying she raised $126 million between Sunday afternoon and Tuesday evening. And Democrats were more eager to devote their own time to working to elect Harris: More than 100,000 people signed up to volunteer for her bid, and more than 2,000 applied for campaign jobs, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a Wednesday memo. New polls show a race in which Trump had been ahead now having no clear leader.

It’s all made clear how desperate much of the Democratic Party was for a change at the top of the ticket – and how eager its donors and loyalists are to back a candidate who can take on Trump in a more consistent and aggressive way.

Michigan AFL-CIO President Ron Bieber described the energy in his state – one of November’s most important battlegrounds – as “electric.”

“I’ve never seen energy like this, this time in an election cycle,” he said.

The Democratic message is largely the same. Though Harris has put her own spin on it, much of what she’s focused on in recent days – defending women’s reproductive freedom; rejecting “trickle-down economic policies”; standing up for democratic norms and values – mirrors what President Joe Biden had campaigned on.

But it’s coming through more clearly with a new messenger,  whose energetic performances on the campaign trail in recent days have laid bare the limitations of the 81-year-old Biden.

The strength of Harris’ launch has at times surprised even the former Biden campaign staffers who on Sunday suddenly found themselves working for what was converted into the Harris campaign.

It’s far too soon to draw many conclusions about how Harris’ ascension changes a race that had long looked to be a rematch between Biden and Trump. Harris hasn’t yet chosen a running mate or launched her campaign’s first television advertisement. The Democratic National Convention is just weeks away.

And Harris and Trump could debate – the sort of showdown that would attract tens of millions of viewers and potentially change the trajectory of the race.

Though Trump said earlier this week that he has not committed to debating Harris, the vice president said Thursday that she would participate in the September 10 debate that ABC had originally scheduled between Trump and Biden.

“I think that the voters deserve to see the split screen that exists in this race on a debate stage and so, I’m ready. Let’s go,” she told reporters after landing at Joint Base Andrews following a campaign trip to Houston.

It adds up to an unsettled race – even though there are signs of Harris improving on key Biden weaknesses among younger, non-White and female voters.

Trump, after surviving an assassination attempt and making his party’s case at the Republican National Convention last week, was in a margin-of-error race with Harris – 49% to her 46% – in a CNN/SSRS poll of registered nationwide voters released Wednesday.

Half of those who backed Harris in the new poll (50%) said their vote was more in support of her than against Trump. That’s a dramatic shift compared with the Trump-focused dynamic of the Biden-Trump race. Among Biden’s supporters in CNN’s June poll, just 37% said their vote was mainly to express support for the president. About three-quarters of Trump supporters (74%) said in the latest survey that their vote was to express support for him rather than opposition to Harris.

The shift toward affirmative support for Harris was notably strong among young voters, voters of color and women – groups that typically back Democrats but had been seen as trouble spots for the Biden campaign.

A New York Times/Siena College poll released Thursday offered similar findings, with Trump at 48% and Harris at 46% among registered voters nationwide – and Harris gaining strength compared with Biden among young and non-White voters.

Harris is only beginning what will be the most grueling 102-day sprint of her political career. The mistakes of her 2020 Democratic primary bid and the verbal missteps and staff upheavals that marred the early period of her vice presidency could resurface as Harris tries to prove she has grown since those stumbles. And she will face the same challenges Biden did in uniting factions of the party who are split over the war in Gaza.

Still, O’Malley Dillon argued in her memo that Harris’ presence at the top of the ticket would expand the map for Democrats. Biden’s campaign believed his path to 270 Electoral College votes ran through the “blue wall” states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But Harris, with potentially stronger appeal among young Black and Latino voters, could prove more competitive than Biden in Sun Belt battleground states – Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.

“We intend to play offense in each of these states, and have the resources and campaign infrastructure to do so,” O’Malley Dillon said in the memo.

36 hours to secure the nomination

It began just after 1:46 p.m. Sunday in her official residence at the Naval Observatory, where Harris – wearing a Howard University hoodie and workout sweats and waiting for Biden’s social media post announcing his exit from the race – began a 10-hour marathon of phone calls.

She called 100 Democrats, including former presidents, governors, congressional leaders and heads of key congressional caucuses. Harris had Biden’s endorsement but told those she called she intended to earn the nomination.

By Sunday evening, many of those initially seen as potential rivals had backed her. Monday morning, many others followed suit. By the afternoon, she had former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s endorsement and had effectively ended the race to take over from Biden before it began.

On Monday afternoon, Harris visited campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, that had become a bunker of sorts, with staffers dispirited by the weeks of controversy over whether Biden could survive as the Democratic nominee in the wake of his disastrous debate performance weeks earlier.

Biden signs were being swapped out for Harris signs. After all, only the Federal Election Commission paperwork had changed; Harris was taking over an infrastructure built for Biden, and at least initially, keeping the same leadership on board.

As she spoke to campaign staff in a speech that was carried nationally on cable news networks, Harris left Democrats elated as she previewed the message she’d drive against Trump – invoking the former president’s scandals and legal troubles and contrasting those with her own history.

She pointed to her time as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, saying that she “took on perpetrators of all kinds.”

“Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own game,” Harris said. “So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Within about 36 hours, no serious challenger had emerged, and enough state delegations to the Democratic National Convention had announced their unanimous support for Harris for her to clinch the party’s nomination.

Coconut trees and ‘brat’

Meanwhile, pro-Harris memes were exploding across social media.

Charli XCX, the British pop singer, declared the vice president “brat,” which is both the title of her sixth studio album with its bright green-colored cover and now a Gen Z summer soundtrack. It set off a series of TikTok memes featuring the same shade of green and video of Harris.

Then, there were the coconut memes, revisiting a May 2023 speech in which Harris spoke about “a difference between equality and equity.”

“None of us just live in a silo. Everything is in context,” she said in that speech. “My mother used to – she would give us a hard time sometimes – and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.’”

Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis posted an endorsement of Harris on social media that was communicated through three emojis: a coconut, a palm tree and an American flag.

“What we’re seeing is a really classic example of when pop culture really gets intertwined with politics, and it takes a special kind of candidate and a special kind of leader to inspire that,” Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost, a 27-year-old Democrat, said on CNN. “It has to be organic. You can’t make it happen.”

‘The future is banking on this’

On Tuesday, Harris traveled to Milwaukee, where she held her first rally as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

The usually soft-spoken Wisconsin governor, Tony Evers, told thousands of people who had packed into the Milwaukee high school gymnasium that he was “jazzed as hell” to welcome Harris to town.

“We have 105 days, and we do not have a minute to waste,” Evers said.

Harris once again hammered Trump in her Tuesday speech. And she sought to drive an economic message that was much clearer and more forward-looking than Biden’s case for his own accomplishments.

“Building up the middle class,” Harris told supporters, “will be a defining goal of my presidency.”

Harris also pointed to what she called Trump’s “extreme Project 2025 agenda.” Trump has disavowed the Heritage Foundation-backed policy plan, which was created by many of his former staffers. However, many of its most conservative and controversial proposals have become central planks in Democratic attacks on Trump.

“We are not going back,” she vowed, prompting the crowd to chant the words back at her.

Many in the crowd, which the campaign said consisted of more than 3,500 attendees, said they were thrilled that Harris was replacing Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

Felita Daniels Ashley, a high school administrator in Milwaukee, said she was “so excited” to see Harris as the party’s nominee, after backing the California Democrat to be Biden’s running mate in 2020.

“The future is banking on this,” she said.

Seventeen-year-old Olivia Jessup-Anger and her friend Natalie Jauch, who turns 18 the day before Election Day, said they agree with Charli XCX that Harris is “brat,” a sentiment the pop artist shared on social media Sunday in a post that went viral.

Jessup-Anger said she’s seen a lot of content over the past few days on TikTok featuring Harris paired with music by popular artists such as Taylor Swift and Kesha.

“I think she’s iconic,” Jessup-Anger said of Harris, saying she also agrees with the vice president on policy issues such as abortion rights and education, and “overall seeing a strong independent woman on the ballot this November is really promising.”

Appealing to Black women, teachers

Harris has spent each day methodically targeting key parts of the Democratic base – including supporters in a crucial part of a swing state Tuesday, Black women on Wednesday and teachers on Thursday.

She attempted to mobilize Black women – a key Democratic constituency that helped Biden secure the Democratic nomination in 2020 – in a speech to the Zeta Phi Beta sorority in Indianapolis.

“There’s so much at stake at this moment. There’s so much at stake, and again in this moment, our nation – as it always has – is counting on you to energize, to organize and to mobilize,” Harris said at the Black sorority’s Grand Boulé gathering. “To register folks to vote, to get them to the polls and to continue to fight for our future.”

She accused Trump of backing “a plan to return America to a dark past” and argued that some of Project 2025’s agenda, including cutting the Department of Education and Medicare, “represents an outright attack on our children, our families and our future.”

On Thursday, Harris traveled to Houston for the American Federation of Teachers’ convention, where she thanked the union for being the first to endorse her presidential campaign this week.

Again, she pointed to Project 2025, saying that the agenda would stop student loan forgiveness for teachers and other public servants.

“They even want to eliminate the Department of Education and Headstart, which, of course, would take away preschool from hundreds of thousands of our children,” she said.

‘Freedom’ launch

Harris’ campaign on Thursday also released the first video of her reelection campaign – a 75-second clip that features Beyoncé’s “Freedom.”

The messengers are different, but the core theme bears similarities to what Biden said in his April 2023 reelection campaign launch video.

In that three-minute video, Biden said: “The question we are facing is whether in the years ahead, we have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer. I know what I want the answer to be, and I think you do too. This is not a time to be complacent. That’s why I’m running for reelection.”

Harris, meanwhile, also emphasized an argument for “freedom” – though in a slight departure from Biden’s defense of democracy, she made the case more broadly, incorporating women’s reproductive rights and more.

The video begins with Harris asking, “In this election, we each face a question: What kind of country do we want to live in?” as scenes from her campaign rally in Milwaukee play.

“We choose freedom. The freedom not just to get by, but get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body,” Harris said. “We choose a future where no child lives in poverty, where we can all afford health care. Where no one is above the law. We believe in the promise of America, and we’re ready to fight for it. Because when we fight, we win.”

CNN’s Alison Main, Betsy Klein, Ebony Davis, Sam Fossum, Edward-Isaac Dovere and Lisa Respers France contributed to this report.

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