Kamala Harris’ Long Path to a Last-Minute Nomination

T he first indication that Kamala Harris had knocked something loose — something that had stubbornly eluded Joe Biden, something with the power to transform the 2024 presidential race — surfaced in Wisconsin. Shortly after Biden tweeted his endorsement, RSVPs for a previously-­scheduled Harris appearance at the Italian Community Center in Milwaukee began flooding in at a startling pace. The volume of responses sent the campaign scrambling to find a venue that could accommodate more than double its initial headcount, with a little more than a day’s notice. They settled on West Allis Central High School.

For the Democratic campaign and committee staff around the country, the month following Biden’s devastating first debate against Donald Trump had been tough. The polls were dismal, questions from their friends and family demoralizing, and their visions of heroically fending off a second Trump term had, increasingly, begun to feel like a fantasy.

But from the moment the first notes of Beyoncé’s “Freedom” thundered out of the sound system that day in Milwaukee, one staffer says, it felt like the prospect of victory existed again. “It was breathtaking — it was just this immense amount of joy and enthusiasm and determination.… I was just like: ‘Oh my gosh. We are off to the races. Let’s go.’ ”

By that point, just 48 hours after Biden withdrew from the race, Harris had vaulted ahead of all other Democratic contenders, buoyed by the president’s backing, an outpouring of adoring TikTok fancams, and dozens of endorsements from party leaders, unions, and advocacy groups. By the next time she visited Milwaukee, less than a month later, Harris was packing the Fiserv Forum (capacity: 18,000) — while simultaneously beaming into the Democratic National Convention underway at Chicago’s United Center (capacity: 23,500). 

It felt fast and unexpected, but politics is a Ponzi scheme: The more people buy in, the more others will too. (And if enough people lose confidence at once, as Biden learned, the whole edifice can collapse on itself.) 

Over three and a half years, Harris’ portfolio as vice president sometimes felt like the place where the country’s most intractable political problems landed — the immigration crisis, the gun-violence epidemic, the fallout from the Dobbs decision that took away the federal right to an abortion. But when she took over this presidential campaign, what some considered political liabilities became assets. Relationships she built leading the Office of Gun Violence Prevention helped her pocket the first political endorsement March for Our Lives has ever made. Border-town mayors highlighted her work as VP while declaring they’d back her. Even the rights to use “Freedom” were secured well before Harris became the nominee — she’d been playing the song throughout her “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour as vice president. Her most high-profile stop on that tour? A visit to a facility that performs abortions in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she teamed with the state’s governor, Tim Walz, who is now Harris’ VP pick. 

And there was another factor that went largely unnoticed at the time: Starting in the summer of 2023, long before it was clear she would be the nominee, Harris was quietly boosted by a significant infusion of both money and strategic support to help cut through the noise — elevating her public image by counteracting negative messaging. At the time, some called it a waste of money, but the closer we get to Nov. 5, the more prescient — and consequential — that decision is starting to look.

ONE WEEK AFTER that improvised appearance in Wisconsin — a week in which she raised $200 million — the Harris campaign staged its first official event in Atlanta, inside a Division I basketball arena packed so full of ecstatic supporters that the fire marshal had to stop more people from flowing in. Fans who couldn’t fit into the arena lined barricades in the 91-degree heat to watch Harris’ speech — and a Megan Thee Stallion performance, and a few words from the rapper Quavo, who spoke about working with Harris to fight gun violence — projected onto a Jumbotron. It was Harris’ sixth visit to Georgia this year. The state, considered out of reach for Biden, is now seen as back in play for Democrats. 

Maggie Goldman — 26 weeks pregnant, wearing a walking cast, and wrangling her four-year-old son, Matthew — stood for hours to see Harris. Being pregnant in Georgia, where there is a six-week abortion ban, she’s had to worry more than she’d like to about later-­term pregnancy complications and the prospect that she would have to leave the state if she needed to obtain care. It’s a big part of her motivation to vote. “I thought we had a chance with Biden, I didn’t want to give up hope,” says Goldman, who previously ran for local office as a Democrat. “But I didn’t know we were missing all of the money and all of the enthusiasm that we have seen in the last week. I don’t know how we could have made it.”

A week later, in Philadelphia, around 12,000 people, sporting light-up wristbands like the kind Taylor Swift gives out on the Eras Tour, packed into Temple University’s Liacouras Center to see Harris and Walz, her brand-new running mate, take the stage together for the first time. In line for the ladies’ bathroom, Jessica Golson was positively giddy. “There was a big difference when they changed candidates for me,” she tells me. 

Like Walz, Golson was an educator, and like Harris, she’s a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. (The Divine Nine — the association of elite Black sororities and fraternities with an alumni membership network of 2.5 million — announced immediately after Harris became the nominee it would undertake an “unprecedented” effort to mobilize voters.) Golson was going to vote for Biden too, but she says, “I was reluctant. I was like: Well, it’s just what I’m doing. But all of a sudden, I’m excited to vote for her. There’s a lot of pride, a lot of excitement, validation … It’s overwhelmingly emotional.”

A year ago, it would have been hard for anyone to predict such a stunning reversal in popular opinion. At the start of July, Harris’ favorability rating was more than 17 points underwater, according to tracking by FiveThirtyEight. That’s near where Biden’s approval rating still hovers — near-historic lows for a sitting president, and lower than Trump’s at the same point in his presidency. But by September, Harris’ favorability was roughly even — meaning a lot of people changed their minds about her in a very short amount of time. At least some of the credit for that goes to an effort launched last summer. 

In June 2023, more than a year before Biden’s aspirations for a second term spontaneously combusted on a debate stage in Atlanta, EMILY’s List, the largest and most influential PAC supporting Democratic women, announced plans to spend tens of millions of dollars burnishing Harris’ public image ahead of the 2024 election. 

All of a sudden, I’m excited to vote for her. There’s a lot of validation.

Decision-makers reasoned that Harris was the highest-ranking female officeholder in the country, and the administration’s best messenger on abortion, but it was an enormous sum of money to spend on a single candidate who was not at the top of the ticket and who was part of a campaign virtually guaranteed to bring in many multiples of that amount anyway. And it came at a time when there was no shortage of female candidates who could benefit from even a fraction of such an outlay. Back then, the Intercept called the wisdom of the organization’s decision into question, suggesting it was a vanity project spearheaded by a personal friend of Harris’ — Laphonza Butler, who was an adviser to Harris’ first presidential campaign, in 2019, before she was installed as president of EMILY’s List. (Today, Butler is a U.S. senator, appointed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom to serve out the remainder of the late Dianne Feinstein’s term. Harris’ sister, Maya, was on the board of EMILY’s List then — she’s now taking a leave from the organization.) 

Over the past year, the money earmarked for Harris went into traditional activities, like research, polling memos, and ad campaigns targeted to voters in battleground states. But it also supported a different kind of work: a “deep social listening” effort, as one person involved put it, monitoring right-wing social media to identify the kinds of attacks that tanked Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid in 2016 and preemptively “inoculate” Harris from them. 

As a separate consultant who has worked with EMILY’s List explains, it’s easy to spend millions of dollars poll-testing a message, but it’s harder to poll-test the messenger — who is often key to its credibility. That person credited EMILY’s List with changing up the types of influencers they worked with and the “pop-culture, vibes-based content” they were producing. 

It’s impossible to untangle the early EMILY’s List push for Harris from the groundswell of support from people thrilled to have a fresh face to throw their enthusiasm behind. But the result is a conversation online that is jubilant enough to repel most of what the right is throwing at Harris. 

For example: In May 2023, an operative at the Republican National Committee clipped a sound bite of the vice president speaking at a White House event. “My mother used to give us a hard time sometimes, and she’d say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you fell out of a coconut tree?’ You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” The clip, as ripped by the RNC, was meant to ridicule Harris and paint her as an unserious person. 

But today? Harris fans use the coconut and palm-tree emojis in their social media bios. There are enthusiastic homemade music videos using that audio clip. 

Butler, for her part, says simply, “Our commitment was to equip people with the facts about who she is, and her record.… There was so much negativity that was being driven from people opposed to her leadership, we needed to equip the environment with the positive stories: Who is she, what has she done in her career? We were able to tell those stories early and often and really set the groundwork for the kind of energy that we’re seeing right now,” she tells me the day after that first rally in Milwaukee. “The fact that she got that kind of welcome in Wisconsin, in my opinion, was a direct result of the work we did at EMILY’s List in those battleground states.”

To Butler, all of the support and enthusiasm is a validation of the thesis that EMILY’s List has operated under since its founding nearly 40 years ago: Investing early pays off. “The strategy is to be prepared and to be able to capitalize when you have the opportunity,” Butler says. “The strategy was sound.”

Wherever the memes originated, the right messages seem to be getting to the right people. There’s been a substantive change in the dynamics of the presidential race, according to polling conducted by EMILY’s List in the weeks immediately following Harris’ elevation. Between July and August, enthusiasm among voters in battleground states was up across all demographics, but especially most among women ages 18 to 44 — women like Goldman and Golson — who reported a staggering 57-point increase in their motivation to vote, a magnitude of change that pollsters say they rarely see. Among the women polled, abortion rights were viewed as the most convincing reason to vote for Harris, followed by an argument that she could help bring down household costs. 

Those numbers are important because of the specific profile of this cycle’s undecided voter. Somewhere between three and five percent of the electorate is currently undecided, and according to a report by elections analyst Amy Walter, this year, those voters are “disproportionately female, younger, and identify as moderate ideologically.” They are largely pro-choice, but they are more deeply concerned about household costs than the average voter. This election will hinge on which candidate more of those voters break for in the end.

Voter registration data shows promising signs for Harris. Analyst Tom Bonier, one of the first to detect a Dobbs-motivated voter-­registration trend in 2022, has said what he is seeing since Harris became the nominee eclipses even that post-Dobbs boom. 

Across 13 states that had updated their registration data by early September, Bonier observed an 83.7 percent increase in registration among young women the week after Harris’ elevation, compared with the same period four years earlier. Among younger Hispanic women, that increase was 149 percent. And among young Black women it was a stunning 175 percent.

“It’s as if a switch was flipped and [there’s] suddenly all this energy and intensity and enthusiasm, and it’s not in a nebulous way,” Bonier says. “Some people have referred to it as a sugar high, as if it’s something that’s fleeting and could go away. Obviously, the dynamics of any race can change, but there are real, tangible gains being accrued by the Harris campaign right now through voter registration. And we know people who register to vote intentionally in the lead-up to an election tend to have very high turnout rates.”

In Chicago, the night Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for president, there was static in the air and a crush of people crowding every aisle. This time it was Chicago’s fire marshal who forbade volunteers at the United Center from allowing anyone else on the floor, more than two and half hours ahead of Harris’ speech. But only a few seemed to mind. (“People have to go to the damn bathroom!” an exasperated delegate from Missouri scolded.) Most women, many in their white suffragist pantsuits for the occasion, seemed content to wait. When Harris, in a sleek blue suit, finally walked out, you could barely hear “Freedom” over the deafening roar of the crowd, which only died down to give way to chants of “Ka-ma-la!” and “U-S-A!” 

Harris was unfazed by the frenzy. “OK,” she said. “Let’s get to business.”