AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The presidential election we started with this year between former President Trump and President Biden was one between two men pretty much everyone knew and had strong opinions about. But that is less true for Vice President Kamala Harris. Views of the new Democratic nominee are not fully formed yet, so the race is on for both campaigns to try to define her, especially in the eyes of swing voters in the most closely watched states. Here's NPR senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro with a look at how they are attempting to do that.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: All of the top ads running right now are about one thing - Kamala Harris. More than a hundred million dollars has been spent by Democrats and Republicans in the past month trying to frame how voters should think about her.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD, "HARRIS-WALZ 2024")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: She grew up in a middle-class home. She was the daughter of a working mom, and she worked at McDonald's while she got her degree.
MONTANARO: A soft-focus, gauzy ad from the Harris campaign that's heavy on her biography and lighter on policy. That ad has aired more than 45,000 times in the crucial swing states, more than any ad in the past month - for Republicans, a very different emphasis.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD, "TRUMP CAMPAIGN 2024")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Kamala Harris was the liberal San Francisco prosecutor, the most progressive in all of California. She let an MS-13 gang member go, who then murdered a father and his two sons.
MONTANARO: There's more money behind that ad from a super PAC supporting Trump than any other that's currently on the air - $25 million. It's everywhere, though the facts are spurious.
TYCHE HENDRICKS, BYLINE: It's misleading because these things are always more complicated.
MONTANARO: Tyche Hendricks is senior immigration editor at KQED, the public radio station in San Francisco.
HENDRICKS: There was an earlier arrest of that man when he was an adult, and she did not prosecute him because she didn't feel like she had enough evidence to bring the case.
MONTANARO: But in politics, it's not always nuance and facts that wind up mattering most.
KEVIN MADDEN: It's a very potent ad.
MONTANARO: Kevin Madden is a Republican campaign consultant and was a senior adviser to Mitt Romney's presidential campaigns.
MADDEN: One of the challenges that Harris faces and one of the opportunities that Trump has with an ad like this is that for many voters, Harris is still an unknown quantity.
MONTANARO: He says especially when a candidate is new, it's perception that matters most.
MADDEN: That's the charge. It's to fill in the blank on Kamala Harris with swing voters before she gets to do it herself.
JAMAL SIMMONS: Donald Trump has one way of attacking opponents, which is very personal, very negative, very viscerally.
MONTANARO: Jamal Simmons served as communications director to Harris for a year in the White House. He says Harris has to answer the attacks by reframing her time as a prosecutor. That's something she's done on the campaign trail and at the Democratic National Convention in talking about transnational gangs, for example. And the Harris campaign is out today with a new ad pointing to her work as a prosecutor to address home affordability.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD, "HARRIS-WALZ 2024")
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: During the foreclosure crisis, I took on the big banks who exploited people in the housing market.
MONTANARO: But Simmons isn't sure a focus on any particular time in her life or policy details will matter as much as the overarching narrative of the campaign.
SIMMONS: What might be true is that this is really an election about change versus more of the same. And if it's a change election, Harris is the candidate of change, and it's going to be hard to get people to move off of that.
MONTANARO: And in politics, there are few greater forces than change. Domenico Montanaro, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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