With just a week left until Election Day, Kamala Harris is set to deliver a speech at 7:30 p.m. Eastern time that her campaign is calling a closing argument. She will speak at the Ellipse, the park in the shadow of the White House where Donald Trump rallied the crowd that eventually stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The setting is a not-so-subtle hint at the message she is trying to send. Harris will talk about her life story and her plans to lower costs, an adviser said, but the spine of her argument will be warning undecided voters about what the future might look like if Trump is elected. She is expected to cast the former president as an aspiring dictator, a message her campaign believes is breaking through.
That argument has become the core of Harris’s pitch to voters, my colleague Erica Green, who has been reporting on the vice president for months, told me. “The Harris campaign is not one that’s driven by policy or even by enthusiasm,” Erica said. “It has made it a mission to define this election by the stakes at hand.”
In the last two elections, both of Trump’s Democratic opponents used the final weeks of the campaign to paint him as too extreme. But Harris’s style is distinct: She is still seen by many as a prosecutor at heart who prizes preparation over ideology. From the start, her energetic campaign “highlighted how much of an underwhelming fog Democrats were in under President Biden,” Erica told me. And unlike Hillary Clinton, Harris rarely mentions the fact that she would be the first woman to be president.
Erica found when talking to voters on the campaign trail that Harris’s biggest strength has been her ability to explain to voters the specific ways in which government policies can affect them. Harris is weaker when asked to lay out her broad vision for the country. “People want to get a sense that their lives will change overnight,” Erica said. “That’s just not her style and never has been.”
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