Kamala Harris was made for this political moment
By Tory Gavito, co-founder and President of Way to Win
July 23, 2024
When President Joe Biden passed the torch Sunday to his Vice President, Kamala Harris, along with a full-throated endorsement of her, he did the right thing by the country, the American people, and perhaps most importantly at this politically fraught moment, the Democratic Party.
The future of the Democratic Party and our electoral prospects this November run through an important demographic: young voters and younger Black and brown Americans, who turned out at record rates in 2020 to help the Biden-Harris secure the White House. Their participation proved instrumental in 2020 to flipping a reliably red state like Georgia blue in a presidential contest for the first time in nearly three decades, and handed control of the upper chamber to Democrats.
These same voters are helping to fuel the explosive population growth across the southern band of the country, stretching from the Peach State all the way west to Arizona and Nevada. This younger, more diverse coalition of voters is the emergent electorate that will prove indispensable to growing and cementing a strong and vibrant Democratic coalition, starting in November. Leaving them without a home and a candidate who excites them this cycle would have been a massive missed opportunity with potentially disastrous consequences. It’s also a demographic that has been profoundly under-invested. The path to the republic’s future will be built with a broad Anti-MAGA coalition which includes both ideologically moderate and progressive voters and spans beyond the northern wall. It includes a more diverse coalition of voters who have only begun to flex their muscles in the South and Southwest of the nation.
In fact, I helped found the strategy group Way to Win in 2018 with an eye toward this very moment, when the political possibility of the future met up with the electoral politics of the here and now. For half a dozen years, Way to Win has been laying the groundwork for a strong multiracial, multi-generational voting coalition primed to support the candidacy of a dynamic woman of color of exactly the caliber of Vice President Harris.
Indeed, our recent polling underscores that Harris excites exactly the segment of younger Democratic voters who turned out for Democrats in a major way in both 2020 and 2022 and who had been feeling less than enthusiastic so far this cycle. Way to Win polling released earlier this month found that Harris overperformed in battleground states with 18–34 year olds, Black voters, Latino voters, independent voters, so-called double doubters (who don’t like Biden or Trump), and “maybe” voters (those who say there’s a 50–50 chance they’ll vote this cycle).
At the same time, ever since the fall of Roe, Harris has been honing her message as the lead on the ticket’s freedom portfolio specifically related to reproductive freedoms, voting rights, and MAGA Republicans’ retrograde intrusion on every aspect of self determination — from who to love to when to start a family to which books you can read at your local library.
Her finely tuned messaging chops were on full display last week at a campaign rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
“Their plans are extreme, and they are divisive,” Harris said of the newly minted GOP presidential ticket that now includes Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as vice president. During the Republican National Convention, Harris noted, Republicans have sought to portray themselves as “the party of unity,” which she cast as empty rhetoric.
“You cannot claim you stand for unity if you are pushing an agenda that deprives whole groups of Americans of basic freedoms, opportunity, and dignity,” she charged. “You cannot claim you stand for unity if you are intent on taking reproductive freedoms from the people of America and the women of America.”
Nor can you claim to be for unity, Harris added, “if you try to overturn a free and fair election” and threaten to “terminate the United States Constitution.”
Harris is uniquely prepared to deliver Democrats’ best argument for beating Trump and the MAGA movement — an unabashed takedown of their assault on personal freedoms and the right to self determination.
She also personifies a passing of the torch to a new generation at the exact time when an emerging coalition of Americans is hungry to see their power reflected in their standard-bearer. In short, Vice President Harris was made for a political moment that has arrived.
