ROYAL OAK, Mich. – Inside a small community theater in suburban Detroit, Vice President Kamala Harris was asked at a recent forum to talk about her life for the benefit of voters who are still getting to know her.
It was the type of question typically asked of a new candidate. But here was Harris getting it less than two weeks before the Nov. 5 election and after millions of people already had voted. Her response underscored perhaps the defining challenge of her campaign for the White House.
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“How much time do we have?" Harris quipped.
The fact is, not much.
Any candidate’s most valuable resource is time, and from the start, Harris has been historically constrained. The Democratic nominee has been running for only three months after Democratic President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, and Harris still is confronting voters who say they want to learn more about who she is or how she will govern.
Her public events have tended toward large rallies where crowds ride high on vibes and Harris delivers variations on her standard stump speech. In the past week or so, though, she has added events in more intimate settings, lower-key church services and black box theater sit-downs where the conversations can be more revealing.
“I have lived a full life,” Harris told the Michigan audience. “I am a wife, I am a mother, I am a sister, I am a godmother. I love to cook.”
Harris, 60, is a relative newcomer on the national political stage.
Much of her career, as she often reminds voters, was outside of Washington, in California as a prosecutor and state attorney general. That was followed by a four-year stint in the Senate and a flame-out in the 2020 race for the White House. Her time as vice president boosted her profile, but nothing like what a traditional candidate would have at this stage in the race.
“Harris, comparably, is still such a relatively unknown quantity as a candidate," said Kevin Madden, a political strategist who worked on three presidential campaigns. "It takes years to build up the kind of national profile that can withstand the brutality of a presidential campaign."
Biden ran several times before he won the nomination and had three decades of public service on his resume, including eight years as vice president. Democrat Barack Obama started to build his profile during John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004 and the midterm elections in 2006 before his two-year quest for what would be his first term in the White House. On the Republican side, the Bush family brand was built through multiple presidential campaigns over two decades.
“It was always going to be a major, major challenge to build and execute a presidential campaign unique to Harris in the space of 108 days,” Madden said.
Republican Donald Trump, meanwhile, is a known quantity. He had near-universal name recognition even before his 2016 campaign, owing to his time in reality television. He has been campaigning essentially ever since he lost the 2020 election to Biden — a fact he refuses to acknowledge to this day.
To Harris and her aides, the shortened campaign has offered advantages and challenges. But with no way to change the reality of that political timeline, they can only try to make the most of it.
That makes for an endless series of tough choices: where to go, what to talk about, with whom to speak. Those challenges come into focus in the final weeks of any campaign, but for Harris they have been a central feature in her sprint.
Aides have framed the campaign in different phases.
In the opening days, Harris prioritized locking down the nomination and staving off any would-be challengers. Then she shifted to trying to introduce herself on her own terms to the public. That meant talking about her biography, but also her governing philosophy, particularly on economic issues, as potential voters complained they did not know what she was about.
Along the way, she has returned to Washington for duties associated with her office, trying to play up the government's competence in response to natural disasters and to show her national security credentials in approaching wars overseas.
“The hill was a little steeper for her to climb because of the truncated nature of the race, but that’s why she’s doing everything she possibly can,” said Eric Schultz, who served as deputy White House press secretary under Obama.
In recent weeks, Harris has spoken more frankly about the summer Sunday when Biden dropped out of the race and handed her the keys to the campaign. She offered voters a new glimpse into her faith, looking to harness a profound political moment into an opportunity to connect with voters.
“It was an extraordinary day that Sunday when the president called me, and I instinctively understood the gravity of the moment, the seriousness of the moment,” she said during a CNN town hall.
So she called her pastor, she said. “I needed that spiritual kind of connection, I needed that advice, I needed a prayer." She added she prays every day.
The event in suburban Detroit was one of three in crucial Midwestern states this past week in which Harris, joined by Liz Cheney, a prominent Republican critic of Trump who has endorsed the Democrat, answered questions from a moderator and audiences of undecided voters. It was a different version of the vice president from the one seen in her rallies, more relaxed and talkative.
Rita Peterson, 48, said she came away impressed by Harris' ability to connect.
“I think when you come from a place of joy and you come from a place of wanting to work together to move forward, I think there are a lot of people who want to be a part of that and want to move forward together,” she said.
The conversations with Cheney were meant to attract Republican voters, those concerned about a second Trump presidency, particularly in the wake of Trump's failed effort to overturn the 2020 vote and after the violent riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters beat and blooded law enforcement in an effort to stop the certification of Biden's win.
In the closing days of her campaign, Harris is zeroing in on drawing a contrast with Trump. She will return to the site near the White House where Trump helped incite the mob on Jan. 6, hoping it will crystalize for voters the fight between defending democracy and sowing political chaos.
She will give a speech at the Ellipse on Tuesday — one week before Election Day — to urge the nation to “turn the page.”