When Hillary Clinton ran for president back in 2016, her rallies were a sea of blue posters with bold letters reading “I’m With Her.” Clinton was the first woman to be nominated for president by a major political party and, as such, centered her campaign around her gender. Now, in 2024, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris hasn’t done the same. Harris is not using her gender or racial identity politics as the basis of her campaign; Republicans are.
When Harris was first announced as the Democratic nominee, Republicans had to compensate for the sudden removal of President Joe Biden. For them, Biden was an easy target — old, stuttering and no longer in touch with younger generations. It was easy for them to attack his identity as an elderly white man, as this distaste for his identity aligned with many Democratic voters’ beliefs. But Harris posed a challenge. She was young, she was female, she was a woman of color and she brought a seemingly fresh perspective to the electoral process.
Harris’s campaign has recognized what Clinton’s campaign could not: identity alone does not make a candidate. Rather, her campaign has focused on her middle-class upbringing and her track record as a prosecutor. By making her identity a part of her campaign, Harris would be practically handing out reasons for conservatives to claim that she is an unfit candidate. In choosing not to use her identity as a primary campaign strategy, she is making a strong decision. Voter statistics prove this. According to a study by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Scholars, more than 82 percent of Generation Z respondents expressed their primary reason for supporting Harris was something other than her identity.
Left with no other options, Republicans have taken Harris’s almost nonexistent use of her identity and run with it. Ironically, the Trump campaign has relied on Harris’s identity more than herself. Donald Trump and JD Vance are instead resorting to plain old racism. In July 2024, at a gathering of Black journalists in Chicago, Trump claimed that Harris “happened to turn Black.”
During 2016, Trump’s campaign did things right. He didn’t capitalize on his own identity — wealth and fame — but rather chose to recognize what people wanted: someone who felt relatable to them. These strategies powered him all the way to the presidency. And this strategy is precisely what Harris is doing this time around.
There are certainly some instances where Harris uses her identity, such as capitalizing on the mispronunciation of her name by Republicans — a shirt on her website, for example, reads “Ka-ma-la.” While this could be viewed as a form of identity politics, it is a much more specific aspect of identity to which Democrats can become attached. This represents a difference from the right, which focuses on more general aspects of identity: race and gender more broadly, without specifics.
Harris’s use of identity proves her campaign’s competence in knowing both her voters and the potential political tactics of the right. Like the 2016 and 2020 elections before it, this election cycle reveals that the social climate matters more than the identity of your opponent.