Harris scrambles to introduce herself to voters before Trump succeeds in villainizing her

WASHINGTON — A mad scramble is underway to introduce Vice President Kamala Harris to Americans who know little about her, with both campaigns vying to leave a vivid impression that sinks in before voters start casting ballots this fall.

In the 11-week sprint to the election, Harris’ campaign is pouring tens of millions of dollars into an ad blitz meant to humanize a candidate whom the electorate may know only as the understudy to Joe Biden.

The ads have stressed the parts of her biography they believe match up well against Donald Trump, framing her as a prosecutor who has cracked down on fraudsters and stood up for victims of sexual abuse.

But Harris’ best chance to pique the interest of a mass audience comes this week. Political conventions have long been a forum for nominees to reassure voters who may have doubts about their candidacy, and the need may be more acute for Harris, who rose to the top of the ticket without winning a single primary.

As Democrats assemble in Chicago, Harris’ challenge is to persuade voters that the story she’s telling about her life and vision rings true, and that Trump’s caricature of her falls flat.

Coming off the abrupt Harris-for-Biden swap, Trump is working to villainize her — resorting to his familiar tactic of name-calling. He’s trotted out various attack lines, questioning her intelligence and racial makeup.

“I’ve cautioned all of my Republican friends not to underestimate her,” said Jim Brulte, a Trump supporter and former chairman of the California Republican Party. “In my experience, she has unbelievably good people skills and the ability to connect not only one-on-one, but one-on-20,000.”

Trump labeled Harris a “radical left socialist” during a news conference at his Bedminster, New Jersey, home on Thursday — recycling the same phrase he used to disparage Biden four years ago in a speech to conservative activists.

“People don’t know who she is,” Trump added.

Who is she, then?

Whatever happens in November, Harris’ identity will be forever tied to Trump. Had it not been for his political ascent, Harris’ might have been short-lived.

‘Rapid fire and confrontational’

Kamala Devi Harris’ first foray into national politics came in 2016, the year of Trump’s stunning victory over Hillary Clinton in the presidential race. Then the attorney general of California, Harris easily won the statewide election that year to replace retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer.

Her victory celebration had a morose feel to it, though, with Democrats across the country shaken by Trump’s upset.

After hearing about Trump’s impending win during an election-night dinner at a Los Angeles restaurant, Harris scrapped her prepared speech and reworked it for an audience that was stunned by the news, said Debbie Mesloh, a friend and former Harris adviser.

“Do not despair,” Harris told the crowd, with her husband, Doug Emhoff, standing at her side. “Do not be overwhelmed. Do not throw up our hands when it is time to roll up our sleeves and fight for who we are. And that’s what we are about to do.”

As the junior senator, Harris hewed to California’s liberal orientation. In a 2020 report on the Senate’s ideological leanings, the government transparency website GovTrack.us ranked her as the second-most liberal senator, next to Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

But legislation isn’t the arena where she distinguished herself.

A lawyer by training, Harris began her career as a prosecutor in the Oakland, California, area, and in 2003 she won an election to become San Francisco’s district attorney.

Skills she learned cross-examining witnesses proved valuable when Trump’s officials and nominees for high office testified before her committees.

Harris appeared to unnerve Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh when asking him during his confirmation hearing in 2018 whether he could think of any laws in which the government made decisions about the “male body.”

The implication was clear: Politicians are more apt to intrude on women’s bodily rights than men’s.

“Um,” Kavanaugh said. “I’m happy to answer a more specific question.”

At a Judiciary Committee hearing the following year, she asked Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, if Trump had ever suggested that he open an investigation into anyone. Yes or no? she asked.

“I’m trying to grapple with the word ‘suggest,’” Barr said. “There have been discussions of matters out there that … they have not asked me to open an investigation.”

Asked about Harris’ methods at the hearing, Barr told NBC News: “In her questioning, she adopted — as she always does — a style that is a caricature of a tough prosecutor — rapid fire and confrontational.”

The Senate served as a springboard for Harris’ next big leap. Capitalizing on the attention she’d gotten in the hearings, she jumped into the 2020 presidential race after just two years in the Senate.

She announced her candidacy before a crowd of 20,000 people in Oakland, the city where she was born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, both immigrants.

“I wasn’t surprised when she ran, but in my interactions with her it didn’t feel like, as with some people, that she reeked of that kind of ambition from the moment you meet them,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said in an interview. “You didn’t get that kind of creepy, transitory feeling I’ve had with some of my colleagues.”

Harris’ campaign quickly flatlined. She labored to explain her health care policy and failed to run a disciplined operation. One of her campaign aides in 2019, Kelly Mehlenbacher, wrote a resignation letter obtained by The New York Times that said, “I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly.”

Harris’ exchange with Biden during the first Democratic debate, though, seemed to garner at least his grudging respect. She questioned his opposition to busing as a means of integrating schools in the 1960s and ’70s.

Describing how a little girl was bused from one school to another in Berkeley, California, to ease segregation, she said, “That little girl was me.”

At the next debate, Biden greeted her with a warm smile: “Go easy on me, kid,” he said.

Running short of money, Harris dropped out before the first contest in Iowa. From the wreckage of the 2020 campaign came a coveted opportunity. Biden won — and made Harris his running mate.

“Her 2020 campaign was a disaster and failed, but it did succeed in getting her to the vice presidency. And that succeeded in getting her to where she is now,” said Gil Duran, a former aide to Harris in the California Attorney General’s Office. “In a strange way in Kamala’s career, even the failures have been steps toward the current moment.”

‘She takes care of her friends’

Harris’ transition to the vice presidency was a tough one. Since her election as San Francisco district attorney in 2003, she had been her own boss.

Now she was subordinate to Biden. Her job was to make him look good and propel his agenda. He tasked her with addressing the root causes of illegal migration, a largely diplomatic assignment that Trump has hung around her neck, mocking her as a failed “border czar.”

Biden’s approval ratings slumped, as did hers.

Senior Harris aides came and left, raising concerns about her managerial style.

Duran, who served as her communications director in 2013 when she was attorney general, said: “I left after five months, so I’ll let that speak to that. The narrative of staff dysfunction is something she’ll have to work on.”

Some former aides insist that she’s held to a different standard than male bosses. Jeffrey Tsai, a former senior official in the Harris-led attorney general’s office, said in an interview, “I found the three years of working for the attorney general critical to my development as a lawyer.”

Swipes at her executive temperament, he added, have “a ring of sexist overtones.”

Duran disagreed. “Dianne Feinstein,” the late California senator, “was the best manager I ever worked for and she’s a woman, so I don’t consider my critique sexist,” he said.

A former White House aide suggested that because she’s serving in top roles, Harris faces pressures on her time that require a no-nonsense approach.

“At each higher level, she has had less time,” this person said. “I’ve worked with men, too, who are driven by time efficiency. I’ve seen it. When I was working with President Biden, I’ve heard him say during briefings, ‘Don’t pull a fast one on me.’”

A view among Harris loyalists is that she had little chance to shine in an office that, by tradition, requires unwavering deference to the president. Now that she’s standing on her own, she’s drawing large crowds and forging a direct connection with Americans that wasn’t possible when she was Biden’s No. 2, in this view.

“I don’t know if that’s true, but it has the ring of truth to it,” Warner said.

In private, she often displayed the ease and amiability that Americans are now seeing on the campaign trail, her supporters said. Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, said Harris would invite female senators from both parties to the vice presidential residence for dinner. Harris made cheese puffs for the group once, then handed out her recipe.

Hirono mentioned another instance when the vice president appeared in the Senate to break a tie vote. Harris noticed that Hirono’s scarf was undone and, at the dais, fixed it herself.

“How many people presiding [over the Senate] would do that?” Hirono said. “She takes care of her friends.”

'She belongs in this role'

Brian Brokaw, a former Harris campaign aide, came to the White House last year to see his old boss and pass her notes that his two young children had written her.

In a picture taken of the meeting, Harris is holding the letters in her hand, leaning forward on a sofa. She’s in her West Wing office, down the hall from the Oval, nearly 3,000 miles from that school bus she boarded in the hope that Black children would get the same opportunities as white kids.

“Can you believe this?” Brokaw said to her. “Here you are in your West Wing office! That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?”

Harris gave him a look, he recalled, as if to say, “Of course I’m here!”

“She 100% believes she belongs in this role,” Brokaw said in an interview.

Harris came to politics with none of the inherent advantages most presidents enjoy — family money or political pedigrees. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a cancer researcher and her father, Donald Harris, an economist. The couple filed for divorce in 1972.

In the mid-1990s she dated Willie Brown, the powerful former California state Assembly speaker and ex-mayor of San Francisco.

A Los Angeles Times article in November 1994 reported that then-Speaker Brown had named her to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a post that paid $72,000 a year. At that time, sources had described her as Brown’s girlfriend, the article shows.

In interviews she gave to SF Weekly in 2003 while running for San Francisco DA, she sought to rebut any suggestion that she was beholden to Brown.

“His career is over; I will be alive and kicking for the next 40 years. I do not owe him a thing,” she told the news outlet.

Her mother, who died in 2009 from the same disease she had studied, stands as the formative influence in her life. She encouraged her daughter as she embarked on a political career of her own.

Mesloh recalls Shyamala showing up every day at the campaign office during the DA’s race, attending strategy meetings and stuffing envelopes — whatever was needed.

“She was a worker,” Mesloh said. “Shyamala was always very present.”

As San Francisco DA and later attorney general, Harris took many of the positions that are now fodder for both campaigns.

She opposed capital punishment, hewing to her stance even when a San Francisco police officer was shot to death on her watch as DA. Harris refused to seek the death penalty for the 21-year-old gang member charged with murdering officer Isaac Espinoza, putting her at odds with then-Sen. Feinstein, who argued that the crime justified the death penalty.

Harris’ position would seem to render her vulnerable to the charge that she’s soft on crime.

Yet when she later became attorney general, she defended the death penalty in court. Harris appealed a federal judge’s ruling in 2014 that California’s death penalty ran afoul of the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. An appeals court reversed the judge’s ruling a year later, preserving the death penalty.

Her campaign is seizing on other parts of her record as attorney general to show she is the antithesis of Trump. She filed suit against the for-profit Corinthian Colleges in 2013, alleging the company provided worthless degrees to unsuspecting students while leaving them in debt.

The case culminated three years later in a $1.1 billion judgment against Corinthian Colleges, which was then defunct. As vice president in 2022, Harris had the satisfaction of announcing that the Biden administration was canceling the debt borne by former Corinthian students.

She is already invoking the Corinthian Colleges saga as proof of her bona fides.

In 2018, a federal court approved a $25 million settlement with students of Trump University who’d alleged they were lured into paying high fees in hopes of learning “the secrets of success” in the real estate industry.

“I know Donald Trump’s type,” she likes to say.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com