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2019 Kamala and 2024 Kamala walk into a bar…

Vice President Kamala Harris’s first appearance as the presumptive Democratic nominee seemed designed to send a message. Campaigning in Wisconsin, a state Hillary Clinton did not visit once during the 2016 general election, she delivered a rebuke of Donald Trump more focused and to a crowd larger than any Joe Biden had provided all cycle. Harris ended the event by walking off to Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” which was also the soundtrack in an immediately viral introductory video.

It’s a fitting theme song for a candidate telegraphing her plans to hit the issues of abortion rights and Project 2025 far more aggressively than her boss. It was also a selection that would have never been made during Harris’s first presidential campaign five years ago, which came long before Democrats began to embrace the “freedom” mantle. Small as it was, it called to mind a question that will prove key as the vice president begins an effort that is one part campaign, one rescue mission: How much will the shadow of 2019 matter?

Four weeks to the day since Biden and Trump’s fateful debate, the political landscape has been transformed. Even before the president’s official passing of the torch on Wednesday night, Democrats’ campaign HQ had been papered with “Kamala” signs, a large new California flag signaling the changing of the guard. Mere days after pledging undying fealty to the president, Biden’s online superfans have rebranded to boosting Harris. And for the first time in years, Democrats’ private and public sentiments were in alignment: hope.

For the beleaguered party, the effect was measurable: The Harris campaign raised an astonishing $81 million in the 24 hours after Biden’s withdrawal from the race, reportedly the biggest single-day fundraising total in history. By Wednesday, the campaign also reported 60,000 new volunteer sign ups.

This immediate euphoria obscured a larger story: the Democratic Party has now torn up its Trump-era playbook.

After the trauma of 2016, Democrats spent years running a tried-and-true approach in tossup races: nominating uncontroversial candidates with centrist bona fides and no liberal paper trail. Following the backlash to the first Black president and the loss of the first female major-party nominee, demographics were always part of that calculation — deep anxieties about race and gender ultimately helped power Biden’s victory in the 2020 primary contest — but it was never just about identity.

In 2018, Black candidates like Lauren Underwood, Lucy McBath, and Antonio Delgado flipped seats won by Trump in 2016. In 2022, Latino candidates like Gabe Vasquez and Yadira Caraveo defied expectations to nab swing districts. Women like Gretchen Whitmer, Catherine Cortez Masto, and Katie Hobbs have prevailed statewide in the states that will decide this year’s race. Two of the three reddest House seats in the Democratic caucus are held by women of color.

Regardless of their identity, what these successful candidates have shared is a dogged avoidance of issue stances that could lend themselves to easy vilification. It’s here that Harris’s past may come back to bite her. Irrespective of any racial or gender bias, the vice president made an active choice during her first campaign to position herself as the kind of strident liberal the party has largely avoided running in high-stakes races.

In 2019, Harris ran a campaign that, yes, existed in the context of what proved to be a high-water moment for a certain style of liberal politics: heavily online, catering to progressive activist groups, and laden with language popular with those who staff Democratic campaigns. That approach was ultimately rebuked by Democratic voters, including voters of color, who narrowed the field to the two candidates least concerned with the comfort of party activists, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.

The success of Biden’s old school, class-centered campaign in 2020 cast the identity-driven, “Love Trumps Hate” appeals of Clinton’s 2016 approach in an even harsher light. Trump's significant inroads among some working class people of color in 2020 further contributed to a broader cultural snapback. Today, even the most progressive Democrats have a distinctly different approach to language, identity, and coalition-building than they did at the time of Harris’s first run.

Harris’s identity is already resulting in attacks related to race and gender — several Republicans this week took to labelling her a “DEI vice president.” But her 2020 campaign also made a decision to repeatedly stake out the most ambitiously liberal positions on issues. Few in the party think she’d make the same choices today. “I’m certain she regrets saying and doing some of those things,” a prominent Democrat insider, who hails from the party’s moderate wing, told me. But, they added, “I do think that she gets a reset.”

Republicans intend to make sure she doesn’t. One ad this week revealed the attacks waiting for her: a parade of on-camera positions that no Democratic consultant would let a candidate in a toss up-race take now. Some may have real resonance for swing voters, like her previous support for eliminating private insurance, banning fracking (a particular vulnerability in Pennsylvania), and providing public benefits to immigrants who came to the country illegally. Others, like her support for banning plastic straws or openness to allowing felons to vote, are likely to be more abstract for most voters — but can be weaved into a narrative of a zany coastal elitist.

A Democratic polling memo, first reported by Semafor, drove the point home: Harris’s chief liability is simply that she is perceived as too liberal. That line of attack may be amplified by her home state and her identity — it’s notable that her image has frequently popped up in Republican attack ads alongside Squad members, with whom she shares little beyond being women of color — but it finds fuel in the decisions of her first campaign. The Trump campaign has not yet trained its fire on a singular attack but it is likely to soon; an AP analysis found it’s currently outspending Democrats on the air 25:1.

Democrats can take some solace that Harris is already campaigning in a different way, at least stylistically. A veteran of her California operation, who worked closely with Harris before her time as vice president, praised the “new confidence and swagger and comfortability” in her first appearances. “It used to come off as cookie cutter. But I think it comes off more genuine now because you’re not watching the wheels turn in her head.”

A key test will be Harris’s selection of a running mate. Ostensibly, an ideal selection would be someone with rural or red state credibility — Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro lead most lists. The Democratic campaign world is already jostling over the best choice. (An operative with experience in Democratic gubernatorial campaigns described Beshear as having a “glass jaw,” while three different sources with experience in Pennsylvania politics mentioned Shapiro’s ambition before anything else about him).

Ultimately, Harris will be responsible for her own reintroduction to the electorate. And the core question now facing her camp — whether a woman of color can be elected president, especially after having taken the stances she’s taken — adds to the sense that an already enormously consequential race has become even more existential. 

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