CNN
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Kamala Harris hadn’t even started building up to her ending when the crowd in Las Vegas — more fired up than any poll would suggest — started chanting, “Four more years!” But she made sure everyone heard the line she’s come up with: “Trump abortion bans.”
And not one pro-Palestinian protester interrupted her that day, or, for that matter, over her four-day campaign swing West.
The vice president is clearly feeling energized these days. She is more engaged. She is looser. Aides say she was the one who pushed to explicitly call out former President Donald Trump as responsible for every rollback in abortion rights, and she is clearly feeding on the old prosecutorial rush of tearing apart the opposition’s argument.
In a conference room in the back of a campaign office in a Las Vegas strip mall, Harris said she is finding the last few months, on the attack and able to zero in on the contrast with Trump, “very liberating.”
“You can’t forget that for the first probably year and a half, we were landlocked. It was basically me and Joe and a Zoom screen,” she told CNN, in an exclusive interview at the end of the multiday campaign swing, built in part around getting her to battlegrounds Arizona and Nevada, and around what staff has found to be helpful downtime back home in Los Angeles cooking Sunday dinner. “Being out and being able to just have real conversations and not soundbites in an interview — it is liberating.”
No one in the vice president’s orbit, including Harris herself, needs to be reminded how the disappointment and disenchantment from her first years on the job still hang over her, or how odd it is that some voters say in interviews with CNN and outside focus groups they are inclined toward Biden but are turned off by Harris.
CNN’s conversations with two dozen aides to the vice president, the reelection campaign and other top Democrats also show the paradox that even the most Biden-centric aides have been forced to grudgingly admit: There is another swath of voters turned off by the president — and their internal data shows Harris will be critical to getting them if Biden wants to win a second term.
After years of being shunted to politically toxic and fruitless parts of the administration portfolio, such as overseeing migration negotiations with Central American leaders, or clearly junior varsity ones like chairing the National Space Council, these days are so full of plum assignments for Harris that her trip to Arizona was originally supposed to be to promote the latest round of student loan debt cancellation — only to get quickly changed when the state Supreme Court ruled that Arizona must adhere to its 1864 abortion ban.
“She has been front and center on so many of the most politically potent issues right now,” said Julie Chavez Rodriguez, who was a top aide to Harris for years before becoming the Biden reelection campaign manager, calling these “new opportunities to speak to the coalitions we know she already has a deep affinity to, but on issues that are top of mind for those voters.”
“As a former prosecutor, she can prosecute the case on so much,” Rodriguez said.
It means getting to talk about gun control and reaching out to younger voters like the gym full of high schoolers in Vegas who cheered even more loudly for her than they did when Marvel actress Xochitl Gomez took the stage first. (“She’s killing…
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