“We’re in a terrible situation and no option is without risk,” a group of self-described Democratic operatives wrote in an unsigned memo last week. “Donors, pundits, and Democratic elites are freely slinging around wild ideas about dream tickets.” The document, titled “Unburdened by What Has Been: The Case for Kamala,” posited that it was time to get real—“like it or not, there’s one realistic path out of this mess: Kamala.” The memo, which is said to have circulated among Democratic donors and coalition groups, made a case for Harris as the least chaotic replacement for President Joe Biden. (The title of the document is a reference to a phrase that Harris has used repeatedly throughout the years.) Bullet-pointed action items included “push the administration to stop sidelining Kamala” and “promote Kamala as a leader of the party and the country.” The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial boards had called for Biden to resign the nomination, recently published articles teasing whether this might finally be Harris’s “moment.”
It was against this backdrop that Harris travelled to Las Vegas on Tuesday for what some hoped, or at least speculated, was part of an audition tape for a candidacy of her own. Even though it was the middle of the summer, with the Democratic National Convention roughly a month away, there was a tinge of the more primal feeling of the winter primary season—is somebody about to drop out or get pushed aside? The horse race was back on, at least for now. (In a recent CNN poll, Harris lost to Donald Trump by a smaller margin than Biden did, trailing by two points as opposed to four. Another survey saw Harris beating Trump by one point.) The Cook Political Report had just deemed Nevada, a swing state, as leaning Republican.
As Democrats in Washington, D.C., held Party meetings about Biden’s viability as a candidate—“We are ridin’ with Biden,” Representative James Clyburn insisted nine times to reporters—Harris touched down in Vegas. It was a hundred and fourteen degrees outside. The Clark County Republicans had planned to protest her visit to the state, but they cancelled, citing the dangers of the extreme heat. Harris dropped in on the men’s Olympic basketball training camp, where Steph Curry and LeBron James were both practicing; she wished them good luck in Paris. Her motorcade continued to Resorts World, where she was the keynote speaker at a festival sponsored by the Biden campaign for the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities. A large group of union members in matching purple shirts were first in line to enter the ballroom where the event would take place, right above a liquor-infused-ice-cream bar and a night club.
I walked into the event with a man named Kenneth, a Biden supporter who was skeptical of a Harris candidacy. “I know there’s a lot of issues with Biden’s age,” he said, “but I don’t think the electorate is ready for a female President. Right now, it’s old man versus old man, ideals versus ideals. If it comes down to a gender question, we’re fucked.” When I told him that some people were talking about the event as a launching pad for Harris, he gestured around the room, baffled. “This is her coming-out party, this little ballroom? Please. Rent out a theatre. It’s Vegas.” Anyway, he said, Biden would never step aside: “Who gives up power?” When I told Kenneth that I usually cover Trump, he said, “So you see the difference between fanatics and realists.”
There were a couple hundred people in the ballroom. As voters waited for Harris to arrive, they stood in line for matcha lattes and dumplings. Lizzo was playing on the loudspeakers; lion dancers were brought out for a performance in the ballroom, followed by a Las Vegas-based all-sibling Filipino pop-punk band. I stood with a group of supporters in front of the stage. “Honestly, I believe she has to be the President now,” a man named Diego said, of Harris. His wife, Carolina Avila, the president of the Chilean American Association, agreed and pointed to the empty podium where Harris was set to speak. “She’s a strong lady. For me, she is perfect. She’s come here to Las Vegas every month.” A man named Randy, who stood next to them, was annoyed by the talk of not just assembling behind Biden. “We’re voting for an ideal,” Randy said. “Democracy.”
“I don’t believe Biden is going to win by himself,” Diego replied. “He has to step out.”
Randy turned to me. “Write my stuff down, too,” he said. “The problem with the press is they talk ‘Biden, Biden, Biden’ since the debate. What about Dictator Don’s lies?” He added, “We’d all vote for a rock before a dictator.”
Then why not Harris? “She has the same idea as Biden, but she has energy, she’s young,” Carolina said. Randy’s solution: “Biden’s not going to make it four more years, anyways. He’s eighty-one. He won’t get better. So she’s gonna be President. Vote for Biden to get Kamala!”
The mood was insistent, controlled normalcy. At moments, it was almost “the lady doth protest too much”: Ron Nirenberg, the mayor of San Antonio, who was one of several speakers to introduce the Vice-President, hyped the audience up for the Biden-Harris ticket: “They swept the Democratic primaries. They are the leaders of our Democratic Party.”
The optimism in the room might have been more persuasive had it not been so carefully calibrated. I missed the entrance of Padma Lakshmi, the Indian American author and chef, who was speaking at the event, because I was watching a newspaper reporter confront campaign staff about how journalists were not permitted to leave the enclosed press pen. He was saying it was abnormal to be so confined from voters, as the crowd cheered for Lakshmi saying Trump is trash. “They’re in panic mode,” another reporter said, of the campaign. (Over the weekend, at a soccer watch party sponsored by the Biden campaign, a press aide sat in on and recorded all interviews with voters; the week before, a pool reporter described the deputy communications director for the Biden campaign in Nevada swooping in to stop interviews when voters turned critical of the President.)
In the late afternoon, Harris came onstage in a light-blue suit, to loud applause. She spoke for exactly fifteen minutes, affirming the Administration’s commitment to inclusivity and countering hate, before moving on to topics such as the impact of medical debt on credit scores, and student-loan forgiveness. For many of the people in the room, this was their first real introduction to Harris. “We don’t know much about her,” Swadeep Nigam, an older man who is on the Nevada State Board of Osteopathic Medicine, told me. “She’s not Dick Cheney. She’s not visible.”
Many of the attendees said that the media was too fixated on Biden’s age, and that publications would be better served focussing on the dangers of Trump and of Project 2025, an effort by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, to reshape the U.S. with right-wing policies. In front of the ballroom, Harris, too, suggested it was time for the news cycle to return its focus to Trump: “There is so much at stake in this moment, includly—including, sadly, that there are some issues that require, I think, a lot more attention from the press. And there are some issues that, sadly and most recently, have not been covered to the extent that they should, commensurate with the seriousness of the matter.” The Biden campaign, she said, still firmly believes that democracy is on the line—and who would dare draw the country into a sideshow about switching candidates to run against a man whom Democrats have deemed the “Xenophobe-in-Chief”? “Trump wants to turn our democracy into a dictatorship,” Harris said. “What kind of country do we want to live in: a country of freedom, compassion, and rule of law, or a country of chaos, fear, and hate?”
I asked two twentysomethings what it was like to hear Harris speak. “Louder? More volume,” one said. I found Nigam again as the crowd dispersed. Nigam has participated in local Republican politics, but he wouldn’t say whether he would vote for Biden, Harris, or Trump. “It was the same repetitive talk,” he said, of Harris’s speech. “Reminds me of Walter Mondale in 1984, or Reagan. It’s nothing different. It’s nothing in particular. The talking points were just to ignite the crowd. Even Mrs. Clinton talked about this stuff.” When I asked him how the event could have been better, he replied, “Padma Lakshmi should have been cooking some food.” He told me that he thought the D.N.C. in August would be a repeat of the 1968 Convention in Chicago. “We have good institutions, so we will survive as a country,” he said. In the ballroom, a trio of friends drank matcha lattes. Two favored Kamala; one stuck with Biden. “We’re all in no matter who it is,” one told me. “Honestly, I don’t particularly care.” With Trump on the other side, he added, “I would vote for a corpse.” ♦