Sarah: Hello, this is Sarah from Sydney, Australia, preparing for my wedding and listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
Deepa Sivaram, host:
oh my god.
Reporter Tamara Keith: What is it?
Sivaram: (Laughs).
Sarah: This podcast was recorded in…
Shivaram: Monday, September 23, 2024 at 1:06 pm.
Sarah: Things may have changed since you heard this, but I am going to be a married woman. This is the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
Keith: Awesome.
Sivaram: Oh my goodness. Congratulations.
Keith: Congratulations.
Reporter Domenico Montanaro: If she had reached out, we could have helped her with the vows.
Keith: I hope our podcast provides some calm.
Sivaram: Yeah. I’m trying to understand what she said. It’s very inspiring for her. Hello. This is the NPR politics podcast. I’m Deepa Sivaram, covering the White House.
Keith: I’m Tamara Keith, and I also cover the White House.
MONTANARO: I’m Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
Shivaram: Today on the show, we’re talking about how identity is woven into the strategies of political candidates and what it says about the voters they’re trying to reach. We’ve talked about this before on the podcast: how Vice President Harris, who was raised by a single mother with immigrant parents, talks about her mixed race identity. Tam, I wanted to start with you since you’ve been traveling a lot lately. And finally…
Keith: Well, I went to Wisconsin and Georgia on Friday.
Sivaram: Right. So how does her history and her background and her story factor into the message that she takes to voters on the campaign trail?
Keith: I mean, there was one line in her speech in Wisconsin that really stuck with me. I think this is a common part of her street talks, but for some reason it really resonated with me on Friday night. She said, “I come from a middle-class background. I never forget that I come from a middle-class background.” And she also talks about being a single mother and having immigrant parents, as you say. I think she’s situating herself in the American story in a way that is unique to her and at the same time, as intentional as possible about who she’s appealing to.
Sivaram: Absolutely. And that really shows up in all the ways that she talks about policy, Domenico? I mean, when she announced her plan to make housing more affordable and homeownership more attainable, she cited her own experience with that. And that shows up in a variety of ways.
MONTANARO: Yeah. I think she’s obviously putting a lot of emphasis on her immigrant background and her middle-class upbringing, and there’s a good reason for that, right? The Trump campaign has an advantage on the economy, and Harris has spent this campaign talking about the economy a little bit differently than Joe Biden has, chipping away at the advantage that Trump had as the person most trusted to run the economy. So I think there’s a clear strategy there.
Leaning into identity, as most political strategists would say, is not an advantage for someone who feels that it’s something to be overcome. Harris doesn’t necessarily want to run on that. She’s not running on that. It’s not exactly what Hillary Clinton did and it’s more in line with what Barack Obama did.
Sivaram: But it’s very interesting, because there’s an element of her that we’re talking about, that she’s not talking about being black. I think that’s what we’re trying to say. She doesn’t go on stage and say, “I’m black and Asian.” But she does talk about being the child of immigrants. That’s the most resonant point you made, Tam, that you made earlier, an identity that pertains across so many racial boundaries, so many generational boundaries, in a country that was built by immigrants. As she often said in 2019, unless this is your home or your people were brought here on slave ships, you’re an immigrant. So you’re someone with an immigrant background.
So for her to talk about what it’s like to have a mother with an accent and then to come here and have that journey, I think it encompasses the journey that she’s been on in getting her message out there, trying to connect with Latino voters, trying to connect with Asian voters of all kinds. She’s been traveling quite a bit over the last few weeks, and, obviously, there are about 40 days left until the polls close.
But one of the things I noticed after the debate is that she started to send a different kind of message, which is that my wealth wasn’t handed to me on a silver platter, some of us didn’t inherit so much, etc. I think that’s a big contrast to someone like Donald Trump, where she’s really trying to drive the message that her financial history, her upbringing as a child, is totally different than her opponent.
Keith: This is no coincidence. I’ve spoken to a senior member of her campaign and I’ve seen Harris gaining support in the polls. In the polls that Domenico mentions, “Who do you trust to manage the economy?” Republicans always have an advantage on this question. But recent polls, though not all, have Harris gaining more support than Trump or on par with him. That’s unprecedented for a Democratic candidate. Harris also does very well on the question, “Who do you think cares about you?” The campaign people I spoke to there said she could highlight the contrast with Trump and say, “She’s middle class. Remember she worked at McDonald’s in college?”
Shivaram: Yes, I have heard that a lot.
Keith: They’ve really emphasized that part of her identity. On the one hand, they haven’t said that she’s going to be the first female president…
Sivaram: That’s correct.
Keith: …of the United States. They are not as committed to the United States as they are to the United States, in contrast to Trump. Does Trump understand you? How could he? He’s a billionaire.
MONTANARO: It’s not surprising that she’s emulating Obama’s strategy a little bit, because Obama won. And, you know, trying to take Hillary Clinton’s strategy of focusing so heavily on gender is obviously something that her team is going to look at and say, she didn’t win. And she’s surrounded by more Obama supporters now than she was in 2019. And there’s a clear path that she can win this way. And frankly, she’s standing on the shoulders of Obama and Clinton, both of whom were able to break down some of these barriers that they had to deal with themselves in both campaigns.
Sivaram: Okay, I’ll take a short break and come back to you shortly.
Welcome back. Tam, you recently reported on Kamala Harris’ political strategy as she talks about her identity. What did the strategists that you spoke to say?
Keith: Well, I spoke to two strategists, both Democratic strategists who worked on Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and they both said that in 2016, Hillary Clinton certainly leaned into gender, leaned into the idea of being the first woman president. They said that VP Harris didn’t need to do the same. They said that, at least in part, the reason the Clinton campaign decided to lean into gender was because they needed to galvanize the Democratic base. They needed to make the Democratic base want to go out and vote.
In Harris’ case, first of all, Democratic voters are already pretty energized, much more so than they were in 2016. Also, Trump is better known now. At the time, they say, Hillary Clinton was running against Donald Trump’s presidency. As a result, they felt they needed to take Trump’s sexist attacks and respond to them, whereas Harris didn’t feel the need to do the same. To give a less abstract example, Hillary Clinton used this line almost throughout her 2016 campaign.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
Hillary Clinton: Mr. Trump recently accused me of “playing the woman card.”
(Booing)
CLINTON: If fighting for women’s health insurance, paid family leave, equal pay means playing the woman card, then count me in.
Keith: In the end, it just wasn’t enough. It certainly excited some voters, but I think it also intrigued others.
Montanaro: One thing that’s interesting to note here is that you said that Trump in 2016 was a fictional character. He was a theoretical character. I think that made it harder for Hillary Clinton to make the case that women’s rights were being threatened, as Kamala Harris can make now because of the Dobbs decision. I think that gave Harris a pretty strong message to make on the campaign trail. She did that as vice president, and she wasn’t on the campaign trail, but she had plenty of time to talk about it. So I think emphasizing the need for defenders of women’s rights, particularly women’s reproductive rights, is much less theoretical now and much more real.
Sivaram: Tam, and part of what you talked about in your article was how Kamala Harris is talking, or not talking, about her identity on the campaign trail.
Keith: The fact is, Deepa, you’ve been reporting on this for a long time before me, but she hates being asked questions like, “What’s it like to be a leading figure?”, “What’s your identity?”, “What’s it like to be a woman?” She’s uncomfortable with those questions, and doesn’t seem interested in them. As someone explained to me, “To be interested in those questions means you’re speaking on someone else’s terms. She only wants to speak about this on her own terms.”
Montanaro: You know, we’ve talked a lot about how Harris talks about her identity. We know that she’s trying to avoid that and talk about important issues. This is probably a strong, safe strategy and makes a lot of sense. But there’s a flip side to this. I felt from the beginning that if Harris were elected, Trump and the Republican Party would have a very hard time talking about black women. And we’ve seen that play out over and over again and become a trap for them. You know, Trump certainly had a hard time in the debates, not even looking at Harris. He…
Keith: He didn’t say her name.
MONTANARO: He didn’t say her name. You know, he’s made tweets and posts on Truth Social that are derogatory and belittling to black women. And I think that in some ways that presents a bigger challenge for Trump and the Republican Party than it does for Harris.
Shivaram: I think that’s part of Harris’ character. She really refuses to be asked or challenged to explain herself. It’s not just in her political DNA, it’s not in her character. She was raised by a mother who often taught her, “Don’t let anyone tell you who you are. Tell them who you are.” So she doesn’t feel the need to explain herself to anyone, let alone the media, the mostly white reporters, the people who feel the need to question her on this again and again. It’s worth pointing out that Donald Trump has not faced these questions, and neither have the white male candidates faced these questions.
Well, that’s all for today. I’m Deepa Sivaram, covering the White House.
Keith: I’m Tamara Keith, and I also cover the White House.
MONTANARO: I’m Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
Sivaram: Thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
Copyright © 2024 NPR. All Rights Reserved. For more information, see our website’s Terms of Use and Permissions page at www.npr.org.
NPR transcripts are produced under rush deadlines by NPR contractors. This text may not be final and may be updated or revised over time. Accuracy and availability may vary. The official record of an NPR program is the audio recording.