Why has Kamala Harris downplayed her gender and race on US campaign trail?

When Hillary Clinton spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 as the first woman to be nominated for the presidency by a major party, she was introduced with a video montage of all the men that had held the office until that point. As she appeared on screen, the montage crashed into shards to the sound of broken glass.

It wasn’t a subtle message. “We just put the biggest crack in that glass ceiling,” Clinton said.

Eight years later, the second woman to clinch the Democratic Party’s nomination has chosen to go in a different direction. She doesn’t focus on her gender, nor on the fact that, should she win, she would be the second Black president and the first South Asian one.

Clinton’s campaign slogan was “I’m with her”, and she donned white pantsuits in reference to the suffragette movement. But Kamala Harris has made it a point to skirt questions about her gender – and her race – at times appearing visibly annoyed by them.

“Next question, please,” Harris answered during her first televised interview with her running mate Tim Walz when asked to respond to Republican candidate Donald Trump’s comment that she had “turned Black”.

It’s a strategy that precedes her run for president. In 2017, for example, when she was California’s attorney general, reporters asked her what it was like to be the first woman on the job.

She famously responded: “I really don’t know how to answer that question because you see, I’ve always been a woman, but I’m sure a man could do the job just as well.”

While there is no question Harris’s candidacy is historic in more than one way, she has deliberately downplayed the more identity-focused aspects of her campaign in favour of pitching herself as a candidate for “all Americans”.

Cracked ceilings

That’s in part because so-called identity politics are often a divisive issue for the electorate she’s trying to unify, particularly in recent years, with a backlash brewing in some quarters to progressive “woke” politics.

But analysts say it is also because the historic nature of her run is already visible to all and needs little emphasising.

Other candidates in past elections have already broken race and gender barriers. As a result, experts say, it no longer seems implausible that a woman of colour should hold the highest office in the land.

“Her gender and race really aren’t part of the narrative of this campaign. It’s just been normalised to an unprecedented degree,” Tresa Undem, a public opinion researcher focused on gender, told Al Jazeera.

She credited Clinton, in part, for paving the way. “Most voters are much more concerned about policy and what she might do for them than the historic nature of this campaign.”

Undem also noted that emphasising Harris’s race and gender plays into efforts to weaponise identity against her, as some Republicans have attempted to do in branding her a “DEI” candidate, short for “diversity, equity and inclusion”.

Trump, for instance, has questioned her race and made sexist insinuations about her personal relationships, and his running mate JD Vance attacked her lack of biological children.

“Obviously, racism is still an issue in this country. Sexism is still an issue,” said Undem. “Those don’t change overnight.”

But public perceptions are changing, she added, pointing to polls that show women are increasingly seen not only as equal but as better leaders than men.

Still, progress is not linear, Undem stressed. The election of the first Black president, Barack Obama, was followed by the election of the man who sought to paint him as a foreigner, Trump.

The first female presidential candidate, Clinton, ultimately lost to Trump, a man accused of sexual misconduct by two dozen women. That election was followed by a women-led protest movement, waves of protest for racial justice and the #MeToo moment.

“Things are changing,” said Undem. “But we’re still in the middle of it.”

A post-identity politics campaign

Rather than follow Clinton’s lead and “leaning into” the gender politics of her candidacy, Harris seems to have taken a page out of Obama’s book. Though the historic nature of his candidacy and win were in plain sight in 2008, Obama’s campaign did not make it the central theme of his run.

“Obama’s campaign in 2008 wasn’t about him making history. It was about what he was going to do for the American people and how he was going to help particularly middle-class families improve their lives,” said Mike Nellis, an adviser to Harris’s 2020 campaign and a founder of the group “White Dudes for Harris”.

“Kamala is running the same type of campaign, which is, her campaign is not about her. It’s about you: ‘Here’s how I’m gonna help you,’” he added.

Nellis also said that Harris has little time to make her case to American voters. After all, she only entered the race in July, after the withdrawal of incumbent President Joe Biden.

“Talking about the history-making aspect of it would be a waste of time because it’s self-evident. Everybody knows and sees that,” Nellis said. “But also, it’s more important that she communicate to people what she’s going to do, particularly because she has a condensed timeline.”

Nellis argued that Harris is running a “post-identity politics” presidential campaign, seeking to unify voters disenchanted with the divisiveness and vitriol of recent US elections.

That’s striking a sharp contrast to her rival, Trump – who has made the campaign primarily about himself but has also exploited grievances between communities, most notably with his rhetoric on immigration.

“Trump’s entire campaign is based on resting that thumb on the scale, stoking the divisions, telling predominantly white men that all your problems are because of immigrants or because of feminists or whatever,” Nellis said. “Harris is running a campaign for all Americans. She’s being smart.”

Rainbow flags and pink hats

While the Harris campaign has often downplayed her identity, her team has, at times, made subtle references to it, particularly when targeting certain communities.

That was the case when her running mate, Tim Walz, spoke to students from historically Black colleges in Georgia.

He told them Harris “doesn’t talk about the historic nature of her candidacy. She just does the work”. He then added, “But I think for all of us, there is a moment in time to understand what’s happening here. I think, I feel, especially amongst young people, they recognise what it means, what this candidacy means.”

But while Harris’s identity has earned her the enthusiastic support of some voters, Undem noted that most make their choice based on much more than identity affinity.

“Very rarely do we hear voters say, ‘I’m voting for her because she’s a woman,’” said Undem. “What they’re adamant about, especially Republican women and independent women, is, ‘I’m not going to vote for her just because she’s a woman.’”

Analysts told Al Jazeera that efforts to highlight Harris’s identity as a Black and South Asian woman have fallen flat with certain progressive voters, who disagree with her support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

“Kamala Harris is leaning into her identity with certain audiences and not with others, but that idea of sort of tailoring your story to your audience is part of politics,” Dalia Mogahed, former research director at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, told Al Jazeera.

“I do think that her identity is sometimes emphasised with Muslim voters as a way to convince them to overlook some of the issues around Gaza and to contrast her with a very white male Trump, who weaponises racial tropes against the Muslim community and against other communities of colour.”

But that pandering might backfire, critics say.

“When you’re reducing it to identities like being a woman, or African American, or queer … They use identity reductionism to really just create fragmentation and fear,” said Rasha Mubarak, a Palestinian American community organiser from Florida. “They just decorate themselves with rainbow flags or pink hats so that people are plugging their nose and voting. But it hasn’t worked. And it will not work.”