Photo: Fabien Deglise Le Devoir Anne Trompeter, of Chicago's northern suburbs, says her 18-year-old son changed his mind about the campaign trail this week, becoming very excited about voting for Kamala Harris in November.
Fabien Deglise In Chicago
Published at 0:00
- United States
This week, Anne Trompeter, a young woman in her sixties who works in marketing in the northern suburbs of Chicago, did something she had not dared to do since the start of the American election campaign.
“I donated to Kamala Harris’ campaign,” she says. “My sister did the same thing. We’re so excited to see her take Joe Biden’s place and so relieved that he’s withdrawing from the race.”
The vice president’s spectacular entrance this week at the head of the Democratic ticket, who will face Donald Trump in November, has not only changed the tone of the current electoral contest. It also seems to have reinvigorated a specific vote in the corners that both political camps traditionally seek to secure a victory in November: white women living in the suburbs.
“It’s about me,” says Barbara Schechtman, an AIDS prevention and control consultant, with a smile from Evanston, a city north of downtown in the third-largest city in the United States. “Until now, I wasn’t very excited about this campaign. But now, it gives me new hope. Women in the suburbs, but also African-American women, are going to be attracted to this candidacy. And not only them, because Kamala Harris is young, she’s eloquent, she’s strong and, above all, she’s a radical departure from Donald Trump, who is old and crazy.”
In just 48 hours, the vice president, who had previously been discreet on the media scene, was propelled into the spotlight by “securing” the support of more than 3,000 delegates on Tuesday to succeed Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate. The changing of the guard will be made official at the latest at the Democratic National Convention, which begins on August 19 in Chicago. It needed 1,976 delegates.
In a visit Monday night to the Democratic campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, and a first political rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, Kamala Harris set the tone for her campaign by presenting herself as one of two options now available to Americans: freedom versus chaos, she said.
Speaking of her past as California attorney general, the likely Democratic nominee recalled that she “took on defendants of all kinds.” “Predators who assaulted women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own personal gain. So listen to me,” she said, “I know people like Donald Trump. And in this campaign, I will be proud to compare my record to his.”
From North Carolina on Wednesday, the populist hit back by presenting his new opponent as a “new victim to beat,” while renaming her “Kamala Harris the liar.” She is “the most incompetent and far-left vice president in the history of the United States,” said the politician, himself voted the worst president of the United States in 2024 by the American Political Science Association. Since 2020, the man has also been peddling a series of lies about the last presidential election, about electoral fraud that his entourage and the country's justice system have never managed to demonstrate, and he shamelessly promotes “alternative” realities about immigration, crime, unemployment, inflation… to stir up hatred and anger among his troops, even if this almost always places him in contradiction with the facts, the New York Times.
A new contrast
“We have entered a completely different campaign dynamic,” summarizes Virginia Sapiro, professor emeritus of political science at Boston University, in an interview. Now, Trump is the oldest and most tired person in this race. The Democrats are counting on the support of a majority of college-educated women anyway, but it becomes very stimulating for other segments of the electorate, for African-Americans, for young people… who might not have participated in the race if Joe Biden had been the candidate.
She adds: “People generally vote based on their political beliefs, less on their gender or color, but Kamala Harris’s arrival certainly gives her the assurance that the Democratic base will mobilize for her and come out to vote.”
The effect already seems palpable, according to an Emerson College poll conducted earlier this week, which found an instantaneous 16-point increase in youth voting intentions for Harris in Arizona compared with the previous month, 8 points in Georgia, 5 points in Michigan and 11 points in Pennsylvania, key states for winning the White House.
In a mostly Republican suburb west of Chicago, Dale Juffernbruch, whose face betrays his Japanese heritage from Hawaii, was nonetheless surprised this week by the enthusiasm for Kamala Harris, the vice president having said very little about herself and her program. “I’m waiting to see and hear,” she said. “But she seems a little too liberal for me.”
Still, just days after taking the reins of the Democratic campaign, Kamala Harris is already making people dream, elsewhere in the Chicago suburbs, of a first African-American woman president with Asian roots who would occupy the Oval Office. “She will probably divide voters, because she is a woman,” says Anne Trompeter. “And I say that with sadness, because I believe that we have reached a point, as a society, where the question of gender and color should no longer matter in an election. Especially when we are dealing with a candidacy of the very high caliber like hers.”
“There is enough water that has flowed under the bridge since Hillary Clinton’s defeat, and I believe that Kamala Harris’ team will learn from the mistakes that were made at that time,” adds Barbara Schechtman. “Kamala Harris became the first female vice president and had a great run. Why would things be any different in the White House” ? “
In 2016, the white vote went in favor of Donald Trump, at 47%, to the Democrat's 45%. Hopeful of winning the election, Hillary Clinton had also run a low-key campaign in several key states, such as Wisconsin, which ended up opening the door to the White House for Donald Trump.
A bad fate that Kamala Harris' campaign team is trying to ward off by ensuring party unity around her candidacy, which was done less than 48 hours after the announcement of Biden's withdrawal, by seeking the support of several bigwigs of the political party, including Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, on Friday, and by announcing an intensification of the holding of political rallies and meetings in the seven states that could decide the future of the two candidates next November. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia are among them.
“The next 100 days are going to be tough for her,” says Lauren Alexander, a Democrat living in Chicago’s First Belt, while assuring that she will vote for her, in order to prevent “Donald Trump from returning to the White House.” “The rest of things will depend a lot on the choice of her running mate,” which should be revealed in less than two weeks. “All I hope is that if, unfortunately, she doesn’t win the election, we won’t put this failure on the back of a black woman who would have led the country to its downfall,” she concludes.
This report was funded with support from the Transat International Journalism Fund-Le Devoir.