Nancy Quarles, the Democratic party chair for Oakland County in the suburbs of Detroit, is a veteran of many political battles in the swing state of Michigan.
But speaking at her office along the 12 Mile Road in the middle-class town of Southfield, she says there is “something completely new” in what has unfolded since Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate just four weeks ago in the election against Donald Trump.
“Our phones are ringing off the hook. The people want signs [for their gardens]. Our director of operations is inundated with people who want to come in and help,” she says. “There’s been this pent-up wanting to do something, but they just didn’t have the impetus.”
When the Democratic party rallied quickly around Harris after Joe Biden dropped his re-election bid last month, it marked a leap of faith that the vice-president could electrify the centre-left of American politics and revive its chances of stopping Trump from winning a second term.
So far, the wager on Harris has worked. She has caught up with the former president and Republican nominee and is even eclipsing him in national and some battleground polls, in a remarkable turnaround. Trump is suddenly on the defensive after being the relatively comfortable frontrunner for months.
Harris has now held large, boisterous rallies in cities ranging from Detroit to Philadelphia and Las Vegas that have evoked Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008, and raked in more than $350mn of fundraising, which is allowing her to launch advertising campaigns across the country.
The launch of her campaign has gone as well as anyone in the Democratic party could have hoped as she has satisfied the demand of many voters for a fresh face in the race. But now the second phase is about to begin and this will involve much bigger hurdles.
The Democratic National Convention, starting today in Chicago, will be capped by Harris’s speech accepting the party’s presidential nomination on Thursday night. After that she will be under pressure to keep this surge of Democratic support alive in the face of potentially sharper attacks from Republicans, greater scrutiny of her policy plans and unscripted interactions with the public.
Meanwhile, she risks having to contend with economic and geopolitical situations for which she will be held responsible as the incumbent vice-president, from the White House response to turmoil in the Middle East to a slowdown in US job growth and inflation.
Donna Brazile, a veteran Democratic strategist and former party chair, still thinks Trump has the advantage in the race against the vice-president: “She has to make a clear and convincing case that she cares about people’s concerns.”
For now though, Harris has Trump scrambling — and struggling — to craft an effective message against her, as the two campaigns fight to define her in the eyes of voters with little time to spare before the November election.
In Michigan, one of a trio of swing states along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin known as the “Blue Wall” that is likely to decide the election, Democratic lawmakers are optimistic that she can pull off a victory. But they say it will not be easy.
“Kamala Harris has a lot of energy and momentum,” says Haley Stevens, a Democratic lawmaker from Michigan representing Oakland County. “My goal is to have record turnout, and we’re going to need to dig deep for that . . . to pay attention to the still undecided voters.”
Dan Kildee, a Democratic lawmaker representing the area of Flint, north of Detroit, says Harris’s challenge will be to “get specific” on policy proposals while keeping up the positive aura surrounding her candidacy.
“In some ways, the compressed nature of this candidacy makes it easier to sustain,” he says. “This is a 400-metre sprint, not a marathon.”
In little less than a month, and despite being the second-in-command of the US government, Harris has been able to position herself as the candidate of change in an election in which voters were desperately searching for an alternative to both Biden and Trump.
At 59, she is nearly 20 years younger than Trump, who is 78, and would be the first woman to serve as US president if elected. Her campaign speeches are shorter by comparison — often lasting less than 30 minutes — and they are far more direct in attacking Trump than Biden’s were. Her delivery is also clearer and sunnier.
“[This campaign] is about two very different visions for the future of our nation: one, ours, focused on the future, and the other focused on the past,” she said to the audience of about 15,000 that assembled at Detroit’s airport on August 7, where she was flanked by her vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota. “In this fight, we are joyful warriors,” she added.
So far, a broad swath of Democrats — including the young, Black, Hispanic, and female voters who are most reliably part of the party’s base — have responded well to Harris, after being dejected about Biden for most of the year.
A poll by Monmouth University released last week showed that 85 per cent of Democrats are now enthusiastic about the election, compared with 46 per cent in June, whereas enthusiasm for the contest among Republicans has remained steady at 71 per cent over the past two months.
But there is conflicting evidence about whether Harris is starting to win parts of the independent and centrist electorate, and she has not dented Trump’s support within the Republican and conservative base. Brazile is confident that she can.
“No one wants to be on the doom and gloom parade, they want hope and change,” says Brazile. “The undecideds and ‘double haters’ — now they have someone to look up to,” she adds, referring to voters who disliked both Trump and Biden.
Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster, says the election is essentially tied, with all to play for in less than three months. “Biden was on his way to losing badly and now we are back to a jump ball election where the outcome is uncertain.”
The biggest threat to the Harris campaign would come from Republicans, including Trump, mounting more effective attacks on her than they have so far. Her rivals had been bubbling with confidence in a Trump victory against Biden after their party’s convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin little more than a month ago, which happened just after the former president survived an assassination attempt.
But they were caught on the back foot by his replacement with Harris, and have had difficulty adapting and defining the vice-president on their own negative terms.
Republicans have pounced on Harris’s early assignment at the White House to manage the root causes of immigration from Central America — mainly a diplomatic role — to blame her for the surge of undocumented migrants across the southern border.
They have also tried to associate her with the burst of inflation that undermined the US economy throughout the Biden administration.
More broadly, they have depicted Harris as a radical leftist soft on crime and extremely liberal on social issues, mainly drawing on progressive positions she adopted during her ill-fated 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, which she has now recanted.
Pete Hoekstra, the chair of the Republican party in Michigan and former US ambassador to the Netherlands, concedes there has been “some movement” towards Harris but says “the bottom line is the facts on the ground haven’t changed”.
“People are struggling with grocery bills, struggling with insurance costs, they are going to their gas stations and they are filling up their pick-up trucks and the number is still a big number,” he says.
But some Republican strategists believe Trump has been clearly rattled by Harris’s entry into the race and so far unfocused in his attacks on the vice-president, in some cases even triggering a backlash.
At a conference of Black journalists in July, Trump questioned the vice-president’s racial identity, saying the California-born daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica had “happened to turn Black” a few years ago. This month Trump also falsely accused her in an online post of using artificial intelligence to embellish the crowd size at the Detroit airport rally.
Speaking to tech billionaire Elon Musk during a discussion on social media platform X last Monday, Trump commented on Harris’s appearance, saying she was “beautiful”, referring to a Time magazine cover image of the vice-president in which he said she resembled his wife Melania.
When Trump delivered a big speech on the economy two days later in North Carolina he partially accomplished his goal of trying to tie Harris to Biden’s economic policies. “They are a team”, Trump said.
But the former president then cast doubt on the political salience of the economy in the first place even though it often tops the lists of voter concerns. “They say it is the most important subject, I’m not sure it is,” Trump said.
“Trump has been largely off message, he needs to make the transition from a Biden race to a Harris race as soon as possible . . . or else he’s in real trouble,” says Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist based in Washington, DC.
“She’s a sitting vice-president of the United States, tied to an administration that has a record that should be held accountable,” he adds.
Trump’s response to Harris has even drawn criticism from Nikki Haley, his former Republican rival who belatedly backed him at the Republican National Convention last month.
“You don’t need to be talking about crowd sizes. You don’t need to be going on rants about her not doing an interview. You don’t need to talk about things that don’t matter,” Haley told Fox News last week.
“What [voters] like about Kamala is that she’s being hopeful. She’s talking about freedom. She’s talking about a way forward. They don’t want a former president talking about the past,” she said.
Trump has shown no sign of changing his approach, however. Speaking to reporters at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Thursday, he vowed to continue the personal attacks. “I don’t have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence, and I think she’ll be a terrible president,” he said.
Stevens, the Democratic lawmaker, says Democrats are now experienced in facing Trump and better at responding to the “vitriol and the low blows”. “It’s a combination of punching back and rising above,” she says.
Both Republican and Democratic strategists believe Harris will be more exposed to journalists’ questions and interactions with the public in the coming weeks, however.
Harris has so far only spoken at rallies and official events, mainly through a teleprompter, and had limited exchanges with the press during trips. She has not done any big interviews since entering the race.
That will soon change: Harris will be delivering the most important speech of her political career at the Democratic National Convention this week and participate in many more campaign events over the coming weeks. On September 10, she will be squaring off against Trump in their first live televised debate.
“We’re still in an anything-can-happen environment,” says Bonjean. “In one moment, if she says one thing wrong, it can redefine everything.”
Meanwhile, the vice-president has started rolling out some policy proposals, including ones to ban price-gouging on groceries and to boost the affordability of housing — although the measures have received a lukewarm response.
Harris appears to have passed one critical test in selecting Walz as the vice-presidential nominee, a counter to JD Vance, the Ohio senator tapped by Trump as his running mate.
So far, Walz’s favourability ratings have remained solid even after Republicans have attacked him for being too leftwing, for embellishing his military career and mishandling the protests in Minneapolis over the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
The hope in the Harris campaign is that the attacks will not stick and that Walz, who is 60, will help her win back the Blue Wall states, where there is a greater share of older, white voters than the rest of the country.
“This is a play for the heartland unlike anything we’ve seen on a presidential level for decades,” says Brian Reisinger, a former Wisconsin Republican party strategist. “The question is whether Tim Walz can turn the folksy image into real appeal to voters in Middle America.”
The polling improvements posted by Harris have raised hopes among Democrats that they can expand the map of competitive states to include sunbelt states like Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina, which seemed to be slipping away under Biden.
But securing Michigan is still crucial for Harris. In the city of Bloomfield Hills, Nick Cunningham, a 34-year-old who works in the property sector, is not impressed with Harris. He believes she was “pushed” into the nomination by Democrats and he is “confused” by her policy positions, including on immigration. He wants Trump to win, believing interest rates will come down if he does.
“Right now you’re either sinking in the water with finances, or just barely floating,” he says. “To me it just makes sense to go with the guy who did a pretty good job the first time”.
Others in the area disagree. Victoria Leicht, a 38-year-old physician’s assistant who considers herself an independent voter, says she is leaning towards the Democratic nominee.
“I’m probably going to vote for Kamala Harris because Donald Trump is a narcissist and more importantly for reproductive rights and better gun control,” she says. But she warns that Harris will need to talk about her plans for the southern border and deal with the conflict in Gaza, as well as financial issues.
Yolanda Herbert, a 71-year-old retired school principal, says she is encouraged so far, and expects Harris would be a “dynamic president” with a level of authenticity that is greater than Trump’s. “I think her strongest message is that she’s the prosecutor going against the felon, and she’s working for all people.”
As for Quarles in Southfield, she worries that “cultural differences” could be a problem for the vice-president as a Black woman facing sexism and racism. But she thinks Harris is “breaking through that” and is more approachable than she previously thought.
“She’s the kind of person I would imagine if I saw her in the grocery store I would stop and talk to her.”
Additional reporting by Alex Rogers