Intelligencer - Can Kamala Harris Win?

Early last year, I joined Kamala Harris on a mostly unremarkable day trip to Atlanta, where she talked about climate change and promoted the administration’s credits for buying electric vehicles. It was the day after Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, and Harris was struggling to earn respect. Some pundits and donors had spent months whispering that she had been a disappointment dating back to her 2020 presidential campaign, and light Washington chatter was once again circulating about whether Biden should replace her on his reelection ticket. At the same time, I’d been hearing from some Democratic strategists about how Harris’s image was far better than Biden’s among Black voters, especially Black women, and that this was being badly underappreciated in the Beltway parlor games. “Younger girls kind of see her in a way that younger African Americans saw Barack Obama: This too can happen, there too can I be,” Cornell Belcher, a pollster who’d worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, told me at the time. “It’s beyond politics, it’s beyond cultural, it’s a spiritual thing.” For Harris, Belcher said, “from a political standpoint, that shit is gold.”

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