Kamala Harris’ bid for the presidency is historic. Is America ready? | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on August 8, 2024) of The Excerpt podcast: It’s been just over two weeks since President Joe Biden took the extraordinary step of stepping down from the 2024 presidential race, making Vice President Kamala Harris only the second female to ever make it to the top of a presidential ticket, and the first female of color to do so. Is the country ready? What lessons can Harris’ communication team take from women who have come before her in seeking the most powerful office in America? And can they successfully manage to tame a Republican media narrative that may treat her race and gender as detractors rather than strengths? Amanda Litman, Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of Run For Something, a progressive American political organization dedicated to recruiting and supporting young candidates running for down-ballot office, joins The Excerpt to discuss. She was also email director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, August 8th, 2024, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. It's been just over two weeks since President Joe Biden took the extraordinary step of stepping down from the 2024 presidential race making Vice President Kamala Harris only the second female ever to make it to the top of a presidential ticket and the first female of color to do so. Is the country ready? What lessons can Harris' communications team take from women who've come before in seeking the most powerful office in America? Can they successfully manage to tame a Republican media narrative that may treat race and gender as detractors rather than strengths? Here to discuss, I'm now joined by Amanda Litman, co-founder and co-executive director of Run for Something, a progressive American political organization dedicated to recruiting and supporting young candidates running for down-ballot office. She was also email director for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. Thanks for being on The Excerpt, Amanda.
Amanda Litman:
Thank you for having me.
Dana Taylor:
You were a key part of Clinton's team back in 2016 during her historic campaign. With Harris now the Democratic nominee, is there something bittersweet about this moment for you?
Amanda Litman:
There really is, and I know that we would not have presidential nominee and hopefully presidential-elect Kamala Harris without presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. She had to run and in some ways she had to lose in order to get the progress that we've made for women running for office over the last eight years. Seeing this moment and knowing how close we are, it feels like getting to avenge a wrongdoing of eight years ago.
Dana Taylor:
You were quoted in an Atlantic article after Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination in 2020 as saying you were devastated when Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the running, and in fact, you wrote an op-ed in Cosmopolitan titled "Stop Lying, America: You Were Never Gonna Vote for a Woman President." Is America ready now, do you think?
Amanda Litman:
I think so, and I think we've come a long way in the last eight years. It's worth situating ourselves, as Kamala likes to say, the context of all that has come before us. In 2018, we had a record number of women running for office. Some people called it the year of the woman round two. The most recent one before that had been 1992. That broke history with AOC winning in New York. Lauren Underwood being a young black woman winning a majority white district outside Chicago. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar becoming the first Muslim women to serve in Congress. Deb Haaland becoming the first indigenous woman to serve in Congress.
All of that helps lay the groundwork. Then in 2020, we had I think six women running for president, each of which ran in a slightly different way, one of them being vice president now, Vice President Kamala Harris. That again expanded the models for what a woman could look like leading. On top of that, in 2022 and 2024 and the years in between, now, my organization alone has worked with boards than 1,800 young women running for local office across the country. We have seen state legislators in Nevada, and I believe Arizona become majority women. Colorado is really close.
We have Saint Paul, Minnesota just earlier this year, end of last year, become the first major of American city to be run entirely by women. It's an all women city council, all young women, majority women of color city council. They joked during the swearing in ceremony, it felt like Barbieland. and we've seen other women across the country run who do not model or do not look like and act like the kind of women that ran even before 2016, which means I think we have more experience voting for, working for, campaigning for, volunteering for, and also defending women who are stepping up to lead in a way that really sets us up for this moment extremely well.
Dana Taylor:
There've been a lot of personal attacks on Harris recently from Trump and other Republicans, from criticizing her racial identity to attacking her laugh, something Clinton also had to battle. I know it's early days, but do you think she and her team are fighting these effectively so far, and if not, how would you advise her going forward?
Amanda Litman:
I think they're doing a really good job of not even engaging with some of it. Part of it's because it doesn't stick to her the way that it did with Hillary Clinton. For Hillary, she had been a target of right wing oppo attacks for 25 years. They had really dedicated themselves to tearing her down and making it clear no matter what kind of woman she was, whether she was a career woman or a stay-at-home mom with her kid or whatever she decided to be, it wasn't the right kind. She was never going to be right. Now, I think what the Harris campaign is doing now is not leaning away from her gender or her race, but using that as part of her story for why she cares about the issues she does and helps inform and give her credibility when she's talking about things like reproductive health, like maternal mortality, like equal pay, like paid family leave. It's not why she's running, but it helps inform her credibility on the issues in a really meaningful way.
Dana Taylor:
What does the entry of Harris into the presidential race add to this national contest that wasn't part of the conversation before?
Amanda Litman:
We get to talk about the future. I think this is one of the problems of the Biden campaign when Biden was at the top of it, was that it became either a referendum on Trump, which was backward looking, or even a referendum on Biden, which because he wasn't able to be as effective of a messenger, people didn't really know what he had done. He had done really good things, but he couldn't sit for as many interviews. He couldn't do the kinds of pop culture engagement that maybe Kamala can do. We now get to look to what a new generation of leadership looks like. Kamala Harris gets to represent the future and gets to represent hope and gets to represent excitement. Yeah, you can run a campaign that is afraid of Trump and instilling the fear of an existential threat of democracy, that can work and we've seen that work before, but it is so much more fun and so much more energizing to run a campaign based on hope and enthusiasm from what could be as opposed to what was.
Dana Taylor:
Unlike Clinton, Harris has already held the office. It's just a heartbeat away from the presidency. Is this likely to help her overcome some of the bias out there among likely voters?
Amanda Litman:
I think having seen her lead in big moments, having seen her do international trips, all of that does play a part here. Similarly, when she served in the Senate, she has a strong track record of accomplishments. That's not to say Hillary Clinton didn't either. She absolutely did, but people weren't as used to seeing a woman in that kind of role, which I think made it seem a little scarier in some ways for her.
Dana Taylor:
As part of Hillary Clinton's campaign team, I'm guessing you spent a lot of time and energy trying to manage the shifting media narrative. If you were going to advise Harris' campaign on strategy, what might you tell them to do differently?
Amanda Litman:
Well, different from 2016 and different from Hillary is that Vice President Harris has always been a part of this media ecosystem. She doesn't have the same antagonistic relationship with the press. Hillary absolutely did, and I don't blame her for that. Again, the 25 years of people talking about her marriage and her personal life and insulting her in the media, spreading conspiracy theories around her, that made her a little hesitant to engage in a really unguarded way. I think it's telling that when people talk about, "Oh, the Hillary Clinton I know, the one that I have met is much warmer and friendlier than the one maybe that the press got to see."
Whereas Kamala has come of age as a politician, particularly in a moment where there are always cameras around her. Usually it's supporters with iPhones excited to take a picture with her as opposed to trackers trying to catch her in a bad moment. She knows how to use the internet personally, and she really can engage with the press in a way that is joyful and authentic without any fear, and that allows her to have a really different relationship with the media in a way that I think will make the difference in her campaign.
Dana Taylor:
The email issue that arose late in the campaign for Clinton was clearly damaging to her image. Assuming for the moment that Harris doesn't face any high profile incidents like that in the run up to November, how would you advise her communications team to keep the media narrative focused on the issues versus her gender or race?
Amanda Litman:
Yeah. I think they are experts and professionals. I think in particular, Brian Fallon who runs her communication team, who also worked for the Hillary campaign back in 2016 is one of the best in the business. I think for her talking about the issues that are ensworned by her gender or her race as opposed to making it about her gender or her race. Everyone can see she's a black woman. She's a woman of South Asian descent. She is who she is. Keeping a focus on how that shapes her passion for the issues, there's a reason she was the most forceful advocate for abortion access within the Biden White House. Biden couldn't speak credibly on that for any number of reasons. She really can and that's true across any number of issues.
Dana Taylor:
On the other side of the aisle this year, there was a strong female contender for the Republican presidential nomination with Nikki Haley who of course was not just female but also of South Asian heritage. She faced attacks on both counts during her campaign. What were the most impressive takeaways from the Haley campaign on how to overcome voter preconceptions and bias here?
Amanda Litman:
I do think it is telling that we are seeing Republican women on the other sides who engage with gender in a different way. They are not always the best advocates for women to put it lightly. In many circumstances, they tend to success for me, not for thee kind of framework to their policy approaches. But I do think she also helped warm up some Republican voters who maybe were a little hesitant to vote for a woman but they could get behind Nikki Haley, especially if they were not behind Donald Trump. I think a lot about how in many of those Republican primaries people kept voting for her even after she dropped out. Even when she was no longer campaigning, but her name was on the ballot, she kept winning some Republican primary voters. Those are voters who now that they've sort of broken the seal of voting for a woman for president might be able to do it this time around for Kamala.
Dana Taylor:
I want to turn to former President Barack Obama who recently endorsed Harris for President. His campaign had to confront a torrent of false and racially motivated attacks aimed at his citizenship, for example. Did we learn anything about Obama's successful communication strategy there?
Amanda Litman:
I think you got to point to it as a tactic. He was very on the level with folks. This is a thing that the Republican Party is doing to try and make it seem like I am not one of you, but my story is the American story. We saw this in the rally in Philadelphia where Vice President Harris was introducing Tim Walz and talked about their unlikely backgrounds of both growing up middle class in Oakland, California and in the Heartland, Tim Walz grew up in Nebraska and now governs Minnesota, can rise to be two of the most powerful people in the country, the very top of our federal government. That's the American story in the same way that Barack Obama was the American story. It really makes it about patriotism, not about the tactics that the GOP is using to divide us.
Dana Taylor:
Finally, Amanda, what do you most want our audience to know about Harris' historic presidential run that they might not know already?
Amanda Litman:
She can win this. I think it is maybe people do know that and maybe they're afraid to embrace that possibility. I know I've talked with so many, especially women who had their hearts set on electing Hillary Clinton in 2016 who are afraid to get excited this time around because of that crushing disappointment after election day. This is different. We are in a different moment. We have gone through a different period in history from the Women's March to the Me Too movement, to even the Barbie movie last year and the Taylor Swift and Beyonce tours that increased and embraced female joy and female power. This is a moment in history and she's the right person to lead, and if we have her back, she can absolutely win and I'm not afraid of that. I don't want folks to be afraid of hoping for a victory.
Dana Taylor:
Amanda, thank you so much for joining me on The Excerpt.
Amanda Litman:
Thanks for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producer Shannon Rae Green for her production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.