Strategists, analysts see excitement and pathways for Kamala Harris in Virginia

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris attends a moderated conversation with former Trump administration national security official Olivia Troye and former Republican voter Amanda Stratton on July 17, 2024 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. (Photo by Chris duMond/Getty Images)

Jade Harris feels like some of the “Obama magic” she saw as a child during the 2008 presidential election is happening again with Vice President Kamala Harris’ transformation into the likely Democratic nominee for president this year.

Harris (who has no relation to the vice president) said the days since President Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of his reelection campaign have ushered in renewed excitement for Democrats where she lives in Glasgow. 

Living near the bottom of the Shenandoah Valley, Harris is among a sprinkling of Democrats throughout that Republican-leaning part of Virginia. The in-person and online chatter this week about the incoming Democratic presidential nominee, she said, has been exciting and a “seismic shift” from last year.

When Harris was knocking on doors for her own state senate campaign to challenge Sen. Chris Head, R-Botetourt, voters would mention Biden and express concerns about his age ahead of a potential second term. 

“[Kamala Harris is] that injection of energy that those voters I was talking to were searching for,” she said. “I’m even hearing things at the grocery store.”

While Southwest and Southside Virginia may not be considered blue bastions the vice president can count on this year in her bid for the White House, Harris said she’s still going to be organizing to stir up excitement in its democratic bases. 

Besides potential supporters in Virginia’s rural regions, there’s also opportunity for Kamala Harris with younger voters that Biden had been losing, said Sam Shirazi, a lawyer who monitors political trends. On Friday, a coalition of 17 national youth voter empowerment groups endorsed Harris, saying in a statement that electing her “ is crucial to the success of our organizational missions and to the prosperity of young Americans.” 

“With Harris in, she’s giving Democrats the chance to reach back out to some of the voters that Biden may not have been able to really reach anymore,” Shirazi said. 

The new developments in the presidential race also seemed to boost prospective Virginia voters’ interest this week.

According to the Virginia Department of Elections, nearly 5,000 people registered to vote between Monday and Tuesday this week just after Biden dropped out — up from around 3,500 new registrations at the same time last week when Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance was announced as President Donald Trump’s running mate. 

A spokesperson for the department said individual registrars will still need to review the applications to make them official, and Virginia doesn’t register voters by party affiliation — but the numbers reflect people that might have otherwise sat out this election. 

‘Bring it home’: Harris’ prospects with Black Virginia voters

Perhaps one of the vice president’s strongest bases of support in Virginia and nationwide is Black women, who both see themselves in her and view Harris as someone who will fight for them. 

Democratic strategist Atima Omara participated on a virtual call Sunday led by an organization called Win With Black Women; roughly 44,000 people participated in the call. It was a good sign, Omara said, and added that she thinks Black-led organizations will help galvanize voters over the next few months.

Black women in particular, she said, are “gonna bring it home.”

And like Jade Harris, Omara is seeing excitement in Democrats that reminds her of Obama’s 2008 campaign. Omara relayed how lots of people during that time opened their homes as bases of operations during canvassing efforts. 

“I would not be surprised if we were able to do that again,” she said. 

Prior to Biden’s withdrawal announcement, Omara recalled interacting with Democratic donors and volunteers who felt less than enthusiastic about how much their time and efforts could matter. But now, she’s seeing the “wildest energy” that she “hasn’t seen in a very long time in Democratic politics.”

In Virginia specifically, Omara already sees pathways for Harris, whom she suspects will capture swaths of voters in Richmond, portions of Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia — all very diverse places that lean Democratic and contain some of the state’s largest Black voter bases. 

Plus suburban women — an often white and sometimes swingy voting demographic – could also boost Harris’ prospects in Virginia. 

To accomplish that, Omara said, “white women are going to need to organize other white women.” 

Harris’ reproductive health care stance is a selling point

Political analyst Bob Holsworth noted how reproductive rights will continue to be a strong pillar for Harris overall. With women the most affected by access to reproductive care, the matter has been able to transcend partisanship. 

It’s been a winning issue for Democrats around the country since the overturn of federal abortion protections and even some Republican-leaning states have supported continued abortion access. As Democrats have worked to restore or protect access to abortions, they’ve also promised to defend related issues like in vitro fertilization and birth control access.

Harris’ first campaign advertisement features the Beyoncé song “Freedom,” referencing her position on reproductive health care, in juxtaposition to Trump’s campaign. During his first presidential term, Trump stacked “the federal judiciary with staunch abortion opponents, including three Supreme Court justices who voted in 2022 to overturn” federal abortion protections, according to the June 24 American Civil Liberties Union report. 

While Republicans tend to advocate for personal freedom in their platforms, Holsworth said it’s smart for Harris to “reclaim” the word from that party in the context of reproductive rights. 

 Still, Holsworth noted, Virginia may potentially remain in play for Harris’ opposition. 

“A question is how much the Republicans will target Virginia and try to make it a winnable state,” he said, adding that other states like Arizona and Wisconsin have been more distinctly labeled as swing states. “[Virginia’s] not the first-tier battleground, but it could certainly become one.”

Some challenges ahead

In America, “Black women have been fighting oppression for over 400 years,” said Virginia Commonwealth University political science professor Jatia Wrighten. “So it’ll be interesting to see what Kamala Harris can do in about 100 days.”

Harris’ forthcoming candidacy — and the chance for her to become the nation’s first woman president and woman of color president — are  cause for excitement and celebration among voters, Wrighten said. However, “We should be humbled by the fact that most western democracies have already had women in positions of power.” 

Wrighten suspects Harris’ race and gender will be a challenge even if those aspects allure  some people. She points to the “cyclical” nature of racial history in America. 

“We had hundreds of years of enslavement, then about twelve years of Reconstruction before the 80 years of Jim Crow [laws that disenfranchised Black Americans],” Wrighten said. “It’s always a step forward and then two steps back.” 

Though Obama’s presidency signaled a big achievement for racial parity in politics, it was countered with the rise of the Tea Party movement and other far-right factions of the modern Republican party. Wrighten cautioned that white politicians’ and parental groups’ efforts to remove books from school curriculums and to dilute Black history lessons, and the current pushback against diversity, equity and inclusion policies are the backdrop of the America that Harris is running in now. 

Still, Wrighten, Omara and Jade Harris said that the vice president’s gender and track record of championing women’s issues can inspire women of all backgrounds to become or remain politically engaged. 

Harris’ prosecutorial background stands to be a strong point for her against Trump among more conservative voters. 

As many Republicans typically label most Democrats as “weak on crime,” Harris will be able to point to her experience as San Francisco’s top prosecutor in the early 2000s and her time spent as California’s attorney general. Her approach was to blend criminal justice reform policies with a tough-on-crime stance. 

But that blended record could give potential Democratic voters pause, especially Black voters, as Black people are  disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system, a stark reflection of America’s historic and systemic racism. 

Harris’ background was a bit of a hindrance during her former presidential campaign in 2020, as more localities were electing progressive district attorneys around the country (known as commonwealths’ attorneys here in Virginia). 

By the time Biden had tapped Harris as his vice president pick, the murder of Black man George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer had prompted national outcry and calls for police reform. 

Calls to “defund the police” have been less loud than they were four summers ago and majority-liberal cities are now embracing conservative anti-crime policies, but some things stay the same. 

Black Americans are still more likely to have negative or deadly encounters with law enforcement — such as Illinois’ Sonya Massey who was shot by law enforcement when they responded to her 911 call this summer, or Virginia’s Irvo Otieno, who died last year amid a mental health crisis, after being held down on a hospital floor by seven police officers and three hospital workers.  

Harris’ prosecutor record was a mark against her in her previous run for president in 2020 when she was up against a crowd of other Democrats vying for the position. She eventually dropped out of the primary.

“I think it’s going to be less of a problem than when she was trying to negotiate the two poles of the Democratic Party,” Holsworth said. 

Now that the race will feature a Democrat former prosecutor versus a Republican with 34 criminal convictions, playing up her prosecutor past can help her, he said. 

It appears Harris is already leaning into that strategy. At a rally in Wisconsin this week, she alluded to Trump’s criminal convictions and other pending legal woes while hearkening back to her California prosecutor past. 

“I took on perpetrators of all kinds, predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own game,” Harris said at a rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday. “So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”

And while his indictments and convictions are a badge of honor to him, — “I was convicted for you,” Trump told his followers at a rally in Chesapeake earlier this summer — they’re a stark contrast to Harris, who shaped her career on the other side of courtrooms. 

And Wrighten said a prosecutor’s background can be broadly appealing because of the role they play in general public safety. The desire for safer communities is not bound by demographic or voter type, she stressed, and differs “from the ways Black people have good reason to fear police officers.”

Holsworth anticipates Harris will face sharp criticism from opponents on the economy and U.S.-Mexico border security. However, those areas have always been a vulnerability for Democrats. Harris, who was made a White House point person on the border just as a record number of crossings took place, is already facing attacks from Republican political action committees over both. 

And despite Democrats’ and the Biden-Harris administration’s leadership on the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, its effects have been nuanced, as Americans still face the rising costs of gas and groceries each day. 

Holsworth said presidents overall get “too much credit and too much blame” for the economy, as they aren’t a sole entity in control of its performance. He said it’s hard to convince some voters otherwise when they’re faced with inflation’s effects daily. 

On the border issue, he said Democrats and Harris are going to need to put Republicans on the defensive about it, by highlighting actions such as a GOP committee killing a border deal earlier this year carried by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY. 

Meanwhile, in the days since Biden dropped out of the race, Democratic officials and operatives have spoken out about the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration, like efforts to lower some prescription drug costs, expanding environmental policies and helping steer America out of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But Holsworth said if the party wants to win voters, it’s time to keep the focus squarely on Harris now.

“Republicans are going to try to paint her as simply the heir to Biden,” he said. “It’s important for her not to be seen that way.”

Both Black women and Democrats, Omara and Jade Harris are especially excited to vote for the vice president in November’s presidential election. But first, they’ll be voting for her next month as delegates at the Democratic National Convention where Harris will formally become the party’s presidential nominee. 

“This is historic,” Harris said.