The Scramble to Define Kamala Harris Before Republicans Do It For Her

Both sides are vying to fill what's a blank canvas for many voters

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

Before Joe Biden abandoned his bid for a second term, his shrinking corps of loyalists were quietly making the case that he was in a stronger position to win than Kamala Harris. Yes, they conceded, some private polls showed the Vice President performed better against Donald Trump, but that’s only because she’s never faced the onslaught of critique that comes with leading the top of the ticket. As Biden’s own legislative hands on Capitol Hill indelicately put it to lawmakers, Harris wasn’t prepared to handle that level of incoming attacks. The numbers, put simply, didn’t tell the whole story; they would rise before they fell.

We are about to see what that whole story looks like. While initial polling and fundraising tallies suggest tremendous excitement for Harris’ rise, there remains a big unknown, and that is Harris herself. Americans still don’t have a full appreciation of the presumptive Democratic nominee and operatives from both parties suggest that her full identity remains something of a cypher. 

In the immediate wake of Biden’s very bad June 27 debate, a CNN poll found that a full 17% of Americans had no opinion of the Vice President, who served as a District Attorney, state Attorney General, and U.S. Senator before joining the Biden ticket in 2020 and becoming his understudy in 2021. Another 6% said they’d never heard of her. 

That 17% marks her highest unknown level captured in CNN polls since December of 2018, a signal that despite arriving in Washington almost eight years ago, many view this figure who remains just one heartbeat—or 270 electoral votes—away from the presidency as something of a stranger. 

This all means it’s hard to know how long the “Harris Honeymoon” lasts. She is, in effect, a blank canvas to the many Americans who never paid her much attention before last weekend. Both sides see a chance to cast Harris as they see fit.

Harris’ defenders say the opening provides a chance for them to start afresh with a career prosecutor who has thrice won statewide office in California but remains largely a mystery to most of the country. As The D.C. Brief has noted before, Harris has long been one of the most under-used players in the Biden orbit. That natural political talent has surprised many who have been watching her this week as she re-introduces herself to the country. 

To be sure, Harris starts out as a better known figure than Trump’s new running mate. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio posts as an unknown quality among 16% of those polled by CNN and another 22% say they have no opinion of the pick. It’s how a fact-check of a sketchy claim about Vance’s relationship with a couch went viral; no one really knows Vance’s biography well enough to shoot it down. His slate is even more blank.

Still, Republicans are trying to frame their own message against Harris, and Trump on Wednesday evening conducted his own real-time message test at a rally in Charlotte, N.C. Trump tried out his latest nickname of “Lying Kamala Harris,” intentionally mispronouncing her name and calling her “the most incompetent and far-left Vice President in American history.” Those barbs came on the heels of Republicans repeatedly deriding Harris in ways that focused on her gender or race; House Speaker Mike Johnson and others have told GOP colleagues to knock off calling her “a DEI hire.”

Trump’s team, meanwhile, seems to share the view of Biden’s own aides on the Hill: the “Harris Honeymoon” could be short-lived as voters start to learn more about who she is and what she’s about. It’s one thing to be a hypothetical take-over option and it’s quite another to be atop the ticket.

While Harris’ mystique may be larger than most, it carries an opportunity. Harris’ backers have shrewdly taken her perceived weaknesses—occasional turns of phrases that seem goofy when meme’d and laughter that never fails to trigger misogynists—and made them into strengths. See: brat, coconut tree, and cackle.

In that, Biden’s hands are trying to use the marginal knowledge of Harris to work for them. “The Vice President is well-known but less well-known than both Trump and President Biden, particularly among Dem-leaning constituencies,” campaign chief Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote to supporters in a press release-masquerading-as-strategy memo on Thursday morning. “In a highly polarized electoral environment, this shift in the race opens up additional persuadable voters.”

Then, there’s actual substance. Give a visit to Harris’ campaign site—a rewrap of Biden’s landing page repurposed on the fly—and you won’t find any talk of issues. But if you type in the URL for what should be a page for her issues (kamalaharris.com/issues), Biden’s positions come up just below a photograph of the incumbent rocking aviators. The page is but one reminder of how quickly Harris inherited a massive organization and, as TIME’s Brian Bennett reports, leaves her working fast to put some distance between her boss’s platform and her own.

Democrats are quickly coalescing around Harris, and party veterans are coming off the bench to pitch in however needed—including a major show of support from former President Barack Obama said to be coming soon. 

Much like they did with Obama early on, Democrats are rapidly giving themselves permission to graft whatever they want to see onto Harris. As one Democratic strategist put it, this is basically “Project Projection Harris”—everyone can see what they need for now in order to get to yes. Democrats did this most notably with Obama, who disappointed many liberals when his administration was not as anti-war as they had hoped, or with Biden, whose campaign rhetoric against guns, among other issues, often failed to match his results. Ultimately, Democrats fell in line in service of a bigger goal of stopping the alternative.

All of which is to say this: Harris is having a very good roll-out, one that is unrivaled in recent memory for any candidate’s start, but she may be riding high on borrowed time. She and her new campaign are working overdrive to define Harris’ candidacy before rivals and even well-meaning allies can. Ultimately, though, it’s up to Harris to show Americans who she is and how she would lead. While it’s still early days, it seems Harris has found her footing and an open-minded audience who still want to know more about her. She just needs to make up a lot of ground in a short window.

Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.