Five takeaways as Kamala Harris take on Trump from Ellipse
Vice President Harris kicked off the final stretch of the election campaign on Tuesday evening with a speech delivered at the Ellipse, within sight of the White House.
The Ellipse is also where former President Trump spoke on Jan. 6, 2021, right before the Capitol riot.
Harris invoked the memory of that day in the service of making a larger case against Trump. But she sought to make a broader argument too.
Her speech came with the two candidates essentially deadlocked in opinion polls — and with more than 50 million votes already cast.
Here are the main takeaways from Harris’s remarks
A strong performance
Overall, it was a good performance from Harris at a big moment.
She spoke forcefully but with flashes of humor, seeking to weave together a lot of strands — an attack on Trump, a summary of her own platform, a biographical narrative for those voters who are still not comfortable with her, and a defense on her more vulnerable issues.
There were no obvious stumbles, gaffes or other moments when things went awry — although President Biden added his own complication during a separate video call.
Harris is also enjoying a good few days, after a stretch of the campaign when she had fallen from her earlier polling highs and Trump seemed to edge just slightly ahead in the race for the White House.
But the Trump campaign has spent two days enmeshed in a controversy of its own making, after a comedian at his big rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday made a racist crack about Puerto Rico.
That was a confounding error given the sizable Puerto Rican population in some of the key swing states — including more than 400,000 people in Pennsylvania.
Harris’s performance at the Ellipse ups her chances of turning the momentum back in her favor in the campaign’s final week.
Jan. 6 looms large
The setting of Harris’s speech ensured that the events of Jan. 6, 2021 would loom large.
But she drove that point home, calling out “the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election.”
Harris also cited reports of Trump’s apparent lack of concern for Vice President Pence on that day.
“America, that’s who Donald Trump is,” she insisted.
There are differences of opinion within Team Harris about the efficacy of attacking Trump as a “fascist,” which Harris said she believed him to be during a recent CNN town hall event.
But at this crucial stretch, the nominee herself plainly believes that some reluctant voters can be moved from their couches to the ballot box by arguing that Trump’s past conduct and present rhetoric renders him unfit for office.
Harris makes appeal to voters tired of Trump
The vice president also made a more modulated case by trying to appeal to voters who simply find the former president — and his penchant for constant controversy — exhausting.
“For too long we have been consumed with too much division, chaos and mutual distrust,” she said at one point. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
Much later in the speech, she reiterated, “We know what Donald Trump has in mind: more chaos, more division and policies that help those at the very top and hurt everyone else. I offer a different path and I ask for your vote.”
This was basically the same argument as is crystalized in the “We’re not going back” chant that often erupts at Harris’s rallies.
But it was given added force in a location that both evokes Jan. 6 and provided a backdrop of a White House.
Harris turned around at one point to look at the building, noting that either she or Trump will be Oval Office-bound after next Tuesday.
A nominee still not fully known
Harris sought to incorporate some significant biographical detail into the speech — an apparent acknowledgement that some voters don’t yet feel they fully know her, despite her years as vice president.
In the speech’s closing phase, she referred to herself as having “lived the promise of America” both as “a child of the civil rights movement” and in her later life.
Repeating her pledge to make Medicare pay for at-home care, she told the story of taking care of her mother during Shyamala Harris’s struggle with cancer — and of trying to find food that her mother could eat and “finding clothes that would not irritate her skin.”
She also sought more explicitly to show empathy saying, “I’m not perfect, I make mistakes. But here’s what I promise you — I will always listen to you. Even if you don’t vote for me, I will always tell you the truth.”
Whether such remarks one week out from an election are enough to make unconvinced voters feel comfortable seems questionable. But at least she sought to tie her personal and political narratives together.
A new Biden furor complicates Harris’s big night
In the speech itself, Harris tried once again to gain some level of separation from President Biden without being disloyal toward him.
Contrasting the 2020 struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic with current concerns, Harris insisted “my presidency will be different because the challenges we face are different.”
But that artful dodge soon got complicated as a new controversy erupted over comments from Biden.
Speaking on a video call with Voto Latino and referring to the Madison Square Garden furor, Biden first said that Puerto Ricans are “good, decent, honorable people.”
He then added: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” paused slightly and said “His, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
It appeared to many people that Biden was referring to Trump supporters as “garbage" before going on to blast Trump himself.
But a White House spokesperson tweeted a transcript of the remarks suggesting the phrasing had been misinterpreted, and that Biden meant “his supporter’s demonization of Latinos is unconscionable.”
The spokesperson, Andrew Bates, said that Biden had “referred to the hateful rhetoric at the Madison Square Garden rally as ‘garbage.’”
The debate itself is sure to cause a media storm that will, at a minimum, distract from an otherwise successful night for Harris.