Expert Breaks Down How Kamala Harris' Campaign Has 'An Opportunity To Really Mobilize Women Voters'
On "Forbes Newsroom," Iowa State University Profressor Dr. Kelly Winfrey spoke about Vice President Kamala Harris' ability to appeal to moderates, and the changing dynamics of the presidential campaign.
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00:00Let's talk about that appeal because moderates are the main conversation, those voters that are not committed to a party, maybe looked at the election before and said, I don't want to see another 2020, I don't like either candidate.
00:16Now we've had a whole switch up with Harris coming in. What do you think that's going to do? What does she need to do specifically that maybe Biden wasn't doing for moderate voters?
00:26I think one thing is that she's gotten people excited and interested. I know personally, as a voter and as someone who studies politics, I kind of resign myself to this is going to be a slow train wreck of a campaign from both sides.
00:41And then overnight or middle of Sunday afternoon, that all changed. And so the amount of energy that this switch up has caused among Democrats, among anyone who's kind of an anti-Trump voter, I think is noteworthy.
00:58The big thing for her, I think, in terms of moderate voters is making sure that she can win the same voters Biden won in 2020. So if there were moderate Republicans who were not happy with Trump, people who don't vote as often, young people, things like that, that maybe voted against Trump and for Biden, getting those folks mobilized are important.
01:20I also think Harris has the potential to mobilize women voters in a way that hasn't been done in quite a while. In 2016, Hillary Clinton obviously didn't win. She did foretell some things that might happen, especially around reproductive rights.
01:37Now that we are in a post-Dobbs world where we have increased restrictions on reproductive rights in a lot of states, there's an opportunity to really mobilize women voters in particular around issues around rights, especially against someone like Trump, who has a questionable background at best in terms of his treatment of women.
01:57So there's a lot of opportunity there. I think there's also a lot of opportunity with young voters that maybe Biden didn't have. Like I said, it seemed like it was going to be kind of just a boring campaign of two old men.
02:10And now we've got Harris engaging with Gen Z on social media and really trying to connect. And I think that's another big part that we'll see is to try to get younger folks to turn out, maybe more like we did in 2008 when Obama was mobilizing some groups that weren't already typical voters.
02:30Now, I've been covering this campaign now for a year and a half ahead of the Iowa caucuses. You and I have been talking for a year and a half about it. And even far back as, you know, when Nikki Haley got into the race, talking about what a woman in this race would look like and how it would change things up.
02:49Now, this is a whole different dynamic we weren't expecting. But one thing I hear over and over again when I was on the campaign trail is just a ton of people saying, I just don't want to vote for Trump. I just don't want to vote for Biden. But I still want my party to win.
03:06And so now we've talked about a lot of issues, kitchen table issues, economy, obviously immigration. That was something that Kamala was supposed to be in charge of for the Biden administration. So what do you think is now going to be of her track record, things she's done in the past? What do you think is going to be brought up either in her favor or possibly against her?
03:28I think the big things, you know, reproductive rights will be a big issue. LGBTQ rights will be a big issue. And that is a very clear divide. And that's those are both issues that overwhelmingly the population sides a little more to the left on. Now, that might not be the primary issue they vote on, but that's one area.
03:51You know, she was handed an immigration crisis whenever they took office, which was, I'd say, a little unfair to her as a new VP to have to start taking that on. But she did make some progress. She's also been very active with Joe Biden in economic recovery work, leadership in the Senate.
04:11Her background is a prosecutor, something that she's talked about when she was running for the nomination in 2019. It's come back into the conversation again. She's a prosecutor versus a felon, that sort of narrative that she's on the right side of the law. And larger questions about the role of government and our democracy will probably be big issues, given where the Supreme Court's decisions have landed in the past few years.
04:38And things that both parties have said about where they want the country to go. So I think we're going to see kind of some big picture conversations around what we want government to be doing for people or not doing for people. And what is that role? And what is that role for different types of people?