THE HONEYMOON PERIOD continues for Kamala Harris, the Vice President of the United States, who will soon be the officially confirmed as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.

She has fired up the progressive grassroots, who were dejected by the prospect of working to secure a second term for Joe Biden after his horrendous debate performance in late June. The Californian has raised in excess of $200 million and signed up approximately 170,000 new volunteers across America.

There is evidence of movement in the aggregated polling data on RealClearPolitics.com.
Most notably, Harris has surged slightly past her foe, Donald Trump, in the key state of Michigan. She is behind and has a distance to go to erase the deficit in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and elsewhere. But she and the Democrats are in infinitely better shape than they were prior to Biden’s withdrawal from the race.

Trump, meanwhile, seems to be flailing. His abbreviated interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, during which his rage was manifest, was a car crash. Alleging that Kamala Harris, the daughter of immigrants to the US from Jamaica and India, only just decided that she was Black probably made his ardent followers chuckle,
notwithstanding her being a graduate of historically Black Howard University and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus when she served in the US Senate.

The truth is that Harris is Black and Indian. Lots of Americans have mixed ethnic and racial origins and celebrate them all. It’s one of the best things about the country of my birth. Politically, this sort of attack won’t help Trump with the relatively small cohort of floating voters, such as suburban white women, who will determine the result of the election in November.

It could stall his momentum with people of colour with whom he had been making inroads, too. Democratic strategists were losing sleep over this troubling trend. They may now be allowing themselves occasional sighs of relief.

My own suspicion is that, at this juncture, Trump is incandescent that he’s not competing against President Biden anymore and that he committed an unforced error in selecting JD Vance to be his number two. On the latter, rumours are circulating that he might
drop Vance and replace him with a woman – perhaps New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik or even the ex-South Carolina Governor and US Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, who he despises. Since it would prompt talk of an internal campaign crisis and constitute a tacit admission that he got it wrong, I don’t think he will.

Trump actually should not be panicking. His political advisers must be tearing their hair out that he is behaving so erratically and appallingly. They need to convince him that his base isn’t large or strong enough to return him to the White House. Harris is certainly riding high and is benefitting from coverage in the mainstream media that is incredibly positive, veering close to fawning in some instances.

But objectively speaking, her approval ratings had been terrible. She is easily linked to the Biden administration’s perceived failings on what may be the two dispositive issues in the election: inflation and immigration, She is a powerful pro-choice advocate for the solid majority, though not all, of American women who lament the reversal of Roe v Wade. Yet she has expressed opinions well to the left of, again, those few hundred thousand citizens in the battlegrounds who have her fate in their hands on an array of contentious subjects: from Black Lives Matter, to the Green New Deal, to voting rights for convicted murderers, to fracking, and plenty more besides.

Trump has no shortage of material to use to create political hay out of. Whether the man who Hillary Clinton once said “lacks the temperament to be president” can temporarily
shelve his unredeemable penchant for nastiness and cease making vile, counterproductive comments that reek of misogyny and/or racism, however, remains to be seen.

It has been hypothesised that Trump sarcastically questioning if Harris is Black or Indian is an initial step in his attempt to frame her in the public mind as unlike the average American. He may not be that conniving when he is in full flow, but he and his allies will surely seek to portray the former prosecutor in an unfavourable light.

Trump at the National Association of Black Journalists Annual Convention earlier this week, Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Harris’s choice of running mate, expected to be announced imminently, and the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where she must both salute Joe
Biden for his lifetime in politics and draw clear blue water between her and her boss, are
hugely important in this regard. Partly because she was kept in the background by Biden’s people, who recognised that she could outshine their man, very many American still don’t know who Kamala Harris really is.

The difficult task for her in the weeks and months ahead, as she is scrutinised witheringly and denounced disdainfully, will be to define herself and to be equally appealing and authentic in so doing. Harris has struggled on this front previously. Of course, assailing
Donald Trump’s weak moral character and detailing the threat he poses to the nation and the world will motivate the substantial swathe of the electorate who loathe the 45th POTUS.

That gambit alone won’t win the contest. She also needs to persuade a diverse cross-section of Americans who aren’t especially ideologically driven and tuned in politically or who abhor elements of her liberal agenda to vote for her – either as the superior of the two candidates on offer or as a person they come to respect. This aim has to be to the fore in picking a partner at the top of the ticket and in messaging at the DNC.

At the convention, Democrats will hammer home the rallying cries that animate their core constituencies and boost the duo they ratify to take on Trump/Vance. Simultaneously, those who address the delegates in the arena and a massive audience watching the proceedings in their living rooms should extend an olive branch to women and men who aren’t “right on” or “woke” in the words of the cynics.

It is imperative that they make their fellow Americans, who are practising Christians, who own guns, who love gas guzzling vehicles, who drink beer not wine and who generally lead very different lives to their activists and donors, feel welcome in what they should describe as a big tent.

The Electoral College maths dictate that concerted, genuine outreach to the vast,
amorphous entity known as Middle America from the stage in Chicago and every day until 5 November is not optional for Democrats. With a proud Black and Indian American woman from California, Kamala Harris, as their nominee, they have to double down on these efforts for a range of complex and not altogether pleasant reasons.

Larry Donnelly is a Boston attorney, a Law Lecturer at the University of Galway and a political columnist with The Journal.