US polls 2024: The leap taken by Kamala Harris is already historic

A week, as the cliché goes, is a long time in politics. Even so, it has been decades since we last saw a week quite like the one leading up to US Vice-President Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for America’s presidential election. 

One would have to go back to the tragic assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 for such a dramatic turn in an election. Harris’s, though, is possibly a more transformative marker in US politics. 

She was the underachiever of the 2020 Democratic primaries for the party’s candidate, coming across as over-scripted. Now, if she succeeds—and opinion polls show her in a dead heat with behind Donald Trump—she might even help the Republican Party wrest itself free of Trump.

Also read: Manu Joseph: Kamala Harris inspires us but don’t ask us to explain

This time, Harris seems more relaxed and has improbably become a TikTok sensation known for her distinctive laugh and comic aphorisms. Yet, this transformation is one of substance far more than style. She claimed the spotlight and her party’s gratitude with steadfast loyalty to President Joe Biden after his alarmingly incoherent debate with Trump on 27 June. 

Immediately after, she was asked on CNN about the debate. The former attorney general of California aimed her prosecutorial skills at Trump’s record of lying and refusal to accept the 2020 election result as well as his role in curtailing women’s abortion rights, both through administrative actions and by packing the Supreme Court with judges who would undo the protections of Roe vs Wade.

In that reply to CNN’s Anderson Cooper are the seeds of Harris’s success and weakness. Last October, Elaina Plott Calabro wrote an article for The Atlantic headlined ‘The Kamala Harris Problem: Few people seem to think she’s ready to be president. Why?’ Plott Calabro says Harris is most effective when her prosecutorial skills come to the fore. 

Happily for the Democrats, Trump’s candidacy, coupled with his record of falsehoods and convictions, makes Harris a perfect counterfoil as a trained lawyer and former public prosecutor. In the past, says Plott Calabro, when asked general questions, such as her dreams for the US or about her own life, she came across as inauthentic.

In the heady days since Harris became her party’s presumptive nominee, however, even that inability to open up in interviews appears well behind her. Now, pop singers are calling her cool and internet memes about her use of the phrase “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” have been widely shared.

As the son of an irrepressibly witty Tamil mother, even though I don’t speak the language, I heard enough comic Tamil phrases as a child to relate to what Harris’ indomitable mother Shyamala said to her.

Also read: Kamala Harris has shown exactly why Donald Trump seems so afraid of her

In Nikkei Asia, Vishaka Desai, president emerita of the US-based Asia Society, argues that “the discussion of the coconut meme without any reference to its Indian context is not unlike the visible absence of much discussion of the strong influence Shyamala had on her daughter.” 

This is true enough, although Harris warmly recalls that on holidays to then Madras, she would overhear her maternal grandfather, a retired civil servant, speaking animatedly with his friends about our first generation of post-independence leaders. Harris has said that it’s likely that her interest in public service took root back then.

In many ways, even more remarkably than exposing Kamala and her sister to south Indian culture, Shyamala, who went to the US in the 1950s to study at Berkeley, ensured that her daughters imbibed plenty of idealism about the civil rights struggle of African-Americans, long after she and her husband Donald Harris, who moved to the US from Jamaica, divorced. 

This makes Harris cosmopolitan in a way that many Indian Americans are not. It is no coincidence that, as Desai notes, “Kamala solidified that connection by attending Howard University, a preeminent member of the historically black colleges and universities.”

This means that Harris will likely energize young African-American voters and Latinos. First-time contributors are making donations to her campaign in record numbers. Yet, all these seeming positives are already being repackaged for the Republican base by their spin doctors as proof that Harris is a dangerous left-leaning radical who got this far because of her racial identity and gender.

However, it says something about the Democrats’ rejuvenated campaign that even vicious personal attacks are being turned into own-goals for the Republicans. 

Vice presidential Republican nominee J.D. Vance’s view that people without children do not have a stake in America’s future and his 2021 comment that the country was run by “childless cat ladies” are now centre stage. This was largely a swipe at Harris, who has stepchildren. Harris’s stepchildren and her husband’s first wife have spoken movingly about her.

“Childless cat ladies” has become a much discussed comment, one that also draws unflattering attention to the Trump-Vance campaign’s misogynistic position on abortion. Both are likely to alienate women, generally, and crucially also suburban American women. There is speculation that Trump, no stranger to saying offensive things about women, might take Vance off the ticket.

Also read: Kamala Harris claims ‘underdog’ status, Donald Trump reacts, ‘even worse than Joe Biden’

In this action-filled, accelerated sprint for the White House, anything could happen. The US presidential race will give me knots in my stomach till its result is declared in November. May the best woman win.