CHICAGO — Kamala Harris relies on an oft-recommended phrase to focus her team before starting an important project: “What business are we trying to achieve here?”
Deciding what to say in the most important speech of his life Thursday, the vice president’s response has been threefold, aides said: tell his biography, frame his rivalry with former President Donald Trump as a confrontation between the future and the past, and reclaim the flag of patriotism on the Democratic ticket.
Harris has taken his convention speech so seriously that he has held rehearsals with teleprompters in three different time zones.
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Shortly after becoming a presidential candidate a month ago, he told advisers that he saw this speech and potential fall debates as key moments in a shortened race, according to three people familiar with his thinking. But in reality, he considered this speech important even longer. The earliest draft of his convention speech had first circulated when Harris was still just a vice president seeking a second term as President Joe Biden’s No. 2.
Now, the revamped speech represents Harris’ biggest turn on the national stage since his sudden rise to the top of the Democratic Party as he prepares to take on Trump in the election, which is just 75 days away.
Preparations for both his message and his delivery have been intense. Adam Frankel, a former speechwriter for former President Barack Obama and now an adviser to Harris, is the lead writer of the speech, taking feedback and suggestions from many others. But the vice president himself has workshopped the speech almost line by line, say two people familiar with the preparations.
His practices and debates have been attended by teleprompters this week in Chicago at the Park Hyatt Hotel, at Howard University in Washington and in Arizona on his first swing-state campaign trip, when some advisers traveled to his hotel in downtown Phoenix.
“He understands how important it is,” said Cedric Richmond, Harris’ adviser. “I think he probably understands how important the moment is.”
The first of the speech’s three themes, according to campaign officials familiar with it, who were not authorized to speak publicly before the speech, is to talk about their own lives. Harris is expected to describe his own middle-class upbringing and frame it in such a way that he can better understand the needs and struggles of today’s middle class. And he’s expected to tell voters about his career before the vice presidency: from his early work as a prosecutor to becoming California’s attorney general.
“This is an opportunity for him to tell the American people who he is,” Brian Nelson, a senior policy adviser to Harris who has worked with him since his time as attorney general, said Wednesday at a Bloomberg Newsmaker event.
Another goal is to frame the race as one of the future and the past, contrasting his promises to protect freedoms and offer a brighter new chapter with darker warnings about Trump’s agenda and Project 2025, which Democrats have turned into a cause for concern.
The third is an appeal to patriotism. The party handed out “USA” signs to delegates throughout the week, and Harris is expected to run for president of all Americans. “We love this country,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, said in his own speech Wednesday.
Harris’ relatively humble roots have been a recurring theme throughout the convention. Speaker after speaker has pointed to his early stint at McDonald’s to dissect Trump’s inherited wealth as a New York City developer. “We have the opportunity to elect a president who is middle class because he is middle class,” as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said in a speech on Monday.
It’s worth noting that the only major policy area where Harris has so far deployed his own agenda, separate from Biden, is the economy, which focuses on bread-and-butter issues like the cost of housing and groceries.
“He thinks about how he speaks to the American people so they know he understands what they’re going through,” Richmond said of the speech. “That he cares about what they’re going through, that he wants to provide a solution to what they’re going through, and that he’s going to work hard for it.”
In just a few weeks as a candidate, Harris has already honed a regular speech on the campaign trail that has inspired his crowds. They cheer “we’re not coming back” and wait for him to shout, linking his past as a prosecutor to Trump: “I know his type.”
But those lines are mostly delivered to the democratic masses. And while the caucus is sure to be full of those voters, television viewers offer Harris a chance to appeal to a wider base of voters, including independents and open-minded Republicans.
Harris is trying to walk a tightrope to present himself as the country’s new leader, even though he is part of the current administration. He is also trying to counter the Trump campaign’s portrayal of him as a “dangerously liberal” and has backed away from several of the more progressive positions he took during his 2020 presidency.
Harris has built a reputation as a sharp debater and cross-examiner of witnesses in the Senate more than a flamboyant orator.
But Nathan Barankin, his former chief of staff in the Senate, said that was an understatement of his skills.
“To the extent that people have the perception that giving speeches is not a strength, it’s because of the words he’s read that other people have put in his mouth,” he said. “When he’s directly engaged, he improves content and delivery.”
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