This week, Anne Trompeter, a marketing professional in Chicago’s northern suburbs in her early sixties, did something she hadn’t dared to do since the start of the U.S. election campaign.
“I donated to Kamala Harris’ campaign,” she said. “My sister did the same thing. We are so excited to see her take over for Joe Biden and so relieved that he is stepping down.”
The spectacular entrance this week of the vice president at the head of the Democratic ticket, who will face Donald Trump next November, has not only changed the tone of the current electoral contest. It also seems to have reinvigorated a specific vote in the corners traditionally sought by both political camps to ensure a victory in November: that of white women living in the suburbs.
“This is about me,” says Barbara Schechtman, an AIDS prevention and control consultant from Evanston, just north of downtown in the third-largest city in the United States, with a smile. “Up until now, I wasn’t very excited about this campaign. But now it gives me new hope. Suburban women, but also African-American women, are going to be attracted to this candidacy. And not just them, because Kamala Harris is young, she’s eloquent, she’s strong and, above all, she’s a radical departure from Donald Trump, who is old and crazy.”
In just 48 hours, the vice president, who had previously been discreet on the media scene, was propelled into the spotlight by “securing” the support of more than 3,000 delegates on Tuesday to succeed Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate. The change of guard will be made official at the latest at the Democratic National Convention, which begins on August 19 in Chicago. She needed 1,976 delegates.
During a visit Monday night to the Democratic campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, and a first political rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, Kamala Harris set the tone for her campaign by presenting herself as one of two options now available to Americans: freedom versus chaos, she said.
Speaking of her past as California attorney general, the likely Democratic nominee said she “took on defendants of all kinds.” “Predators who assaulted women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own personal gain. So listen to me,” she said, “I know people like Donald Trump. And in this campaign, I will be proud to compare my record to his.”
From North Carolina on Wednesday, the populist responded by presenting his new opponent as a “new victim to beat”, while renaming her “Kamala Harris the liar”. She is “the most incompetent and most far-left vice president in the history of the United States”, said the politician, himself elected worst president of the United States in 2024 by the American Political Science Association. Since 2020, the man has also peddled a series of lies about the last presidential election, about electoral fraud that his entourage and the country’s justice system have never managed to demonstrate, and he shamelessly promotes “alternative” realities on immigration, crime, unemployment, inflation… to stir up hatred and anger among his troops, even if this almost always places him in contradiction with the facts, the New York Times.
A new contrast
“We’ve entered a completely different campaign dynamic,” summarizes Virginia Sapiro, professor emeritus of political science at Boston University, in an interview. “Now, Trump is the oldest and most tired person in this race. The Democrats are counting on the support of a majority of college-educated women anyway, but it becomes very stimulating for other segments of the electorate, for African-Americans, for young people… who might not have participated in the race if Joe Biden had been the candidate.”
She adds: “People generally vote based on their political beliefs, less based on their gender or their color, but the arrival of Kamala Harris certainly guarantees that the Democratic base will mobilize for her and will come out to vote.”
The effect already seems palpable, according to a poll by Emerson College conducted earlier this week, which reveals an instantaneous increase of 16 points in the voting intentions of young people in favor of Harris in Arizona, compared to the previous month, of 8 points in Georgia, of 5 points in Michigan and of 11 points in Pennsylvania, key states to recover those of the White House.
In a mostly Republican suburb west of Chicago, Dale Juffernbruch, whose face betrays his Japanese heritage from Hawaii, was nonetheless surprised this week by the enthusiasm for Kamala Harris, the vice president having said very little about herself and her program. “I’m waiting to see and hear from her,” she said. “But she seems a little too liberal for me.”
Still, just days after taking the reins of the Democratic campaign, Kamala Harris is already making people dream, elsewhere in the Chicago suburbs, of a first African-American woman president with Asian roots who would occupy the Oval Office. “She will probably divide voters, because she is a woman,” says Anne Trompeter. “And I say that with sadness, because I believe that we have reached a point, as a society, where the question of gender and color should no longer be important in an election. Especially when we are dealing with a candidacy of the very high caliber of hers.”
“There’s been enough water under the bridge since Hillary Clinton lost, and I think Harris’ team is going to learn from the mistakes that were made then,” Schechtman said. “Kamala Harris became the first vice president and she did very well. Why should things be any different in the White House?”
In 2016, the white vote went to Donald Trump, 47%, compared to 45% for the Democrat. Hopeful of winning the election, Hillary Clinton had also led a distant campaign in several key states, such as Wisconsin, which ended up opening the door to the White House for Donald Trump.
A bad fate that Kamala Harris’ campaign team is trying to ward off by ensuring the unity of the party around her candidacy, which was done less than 48 hours after the announcement of Biden’s withdrawal, by seeking the support of several bigwigs of the political party, including Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, on Friday, and by announcing an intensification of the holding of political rallies and meetings in the seven states that could decide the future of the two candidates next November. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia are among them.
“The next 100 days are going to be tough for her,” says Lauren Alexander, a Democrat living in Chicago’s First Belt, while assuring that she will vote for her, in order to prevent “Donald Trump from returning to the White House.” “The rest of things will depend a lot on the choice of her running mate,” which should be revealed in less than two weeks. “All I hope is that if, unfortunately, she doesn’t win the election, we won’t put this failure on the back of a black woman who would have then led the country to its downfall,” she concludes.
This report was financed with the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund-The duty.