Bynum first reached out to Harris last year when the two discussed over the phone for 30 minutes how management could play a role in increasing investments in underserved communities. His answer was simple: “Well, Madam Vice President, if you really want to know what’s going on, you come to the Mississippi Delta.”
Sure enough, it arrived months later.
Swinging to Grenfell is part of the Vice President’s Office of the Vice President’s unremarkable strategy, one in which it has focused on the ways in which administration policy intersects with overlooked communities. I’ve brought it to other remote and unconventional places, including a recent swing to Sunset, Louisiana, a rural town of less than 3,000 people, to promote the department’s work to expand rural broadband. This manifested itself in the ways in which she handled some very expensive items in the White House.
Weeks after the bipartisan infrastructure bill was passed into law, Harris held a briefing with administration officials to discuss part of the bill related to electric car charging stations — an interest that has driven her since her time in California politics. As the staff moved from page to page in the briefing document, I asked them questions. How will 500,000 charging stations be built and distributed? Who will build them? What does this mean for neglected communities?
“[She said] Talk to me about a community that has fallen behind, a rural community. Where are they going to go? How will they be placed there? Mitch Landrieu, a senior adviser to the president, told Politico. “Now talk to me about an urban neighborhood left where people rent.”
A month later, she was in Brandywine, Maryland, a majority-black city — although not exactly an area at the forefront of electoral politics — talking about electric vehicle stations and announcing the administration’s plan to make sure its charging network reached communities like theirs.
The electoral benefits of going to remote communities in non-swing states certainly seem limited to those in the Beltway, especially at a time when the White House is trying to shift its polls lower and win praise for the state of the job market. But administration officials stress that the symbolism of the vice president’s trip is important, and when linked to some of the larger announcements, it has a clear positive trend.
“It’s not necessarily that we’re going to win Mississippi or Louisiana, but it does make a difference in people knowing they are being seen and heard,” senior adviser to President Cedric Richmond told Politico. “And what we hope is that communities across the country that are similar to those will see that we see them even if we don’t make it into their own community.”
For most of the past year, Harris’ strategy has played a large part behind closed doors in conversations that often took place in the ceremonial offices of the vice president in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. But as Covid restrictions eased, she pushed her team to go the route more, adding those unconventional twists along with high profile travel to places like Poland and Philadelphia.
“Obviously as a team we’re working through places you haven’t been, what places are we going to highlight?” Harris’s domestic policy adviser and one of her longest-serving aides, Rohini Kosoğlu, said. “But some of our last stops were because she said, ‘We need to get to the south.'”
Administration officials say Harris is known to return from his travels with stories or ideas that he believes could influence White House policy. Landrieu, for example, said his staff received material from Harris’ team and then moved it “to the Cabinet Secretaries’ meetings and then start over and continue the work.“
For Harris, the trips have an added benefit as she finds a foothold in her second year as a vice president. Despite being Biden’s No. 2, she remains somewhat of a unknown to voters across the country after her rapid rise to the position of vice president. She polled constantly in the 1940s and 1930s, and there was talk among Democrats that she was not currently in a good position to succeed the president if he chose not to run again in 2024.
But allies say the pandemic has made it difficult for the administration to actually get out, see voters and sell their achievements so far. “I feel like the administration is putting its feet up in the sea. It communicates more. It comes out more. It really redoubled efforts to make sure that the It is there. “In addition to bringing a bunch of people to Washington, she’s able to really get out and get people really excited about the work.”
Vice Presidential Historian Joel K. Goldstein says Harris’ approach can help her turn a corner on how she is perceived in the press and around the country. “It’s part of cognition so that six months from now, people are writing stories about how effective it is internally and not why her crew is leaving,” Goldstein told POLITICO.
“You’re putting yourself in the position, if done right, of being someone who is there to help other people in the department, not someone who’s competing with them,” Goldstein added. “And that puts you in a position where people will come to you with things and will respond to your requests.”
In addition to the slight increase in travel, Harris’ media strategy has also expanded. She’s sat with a number of national media outlets over the past six months, and her team has also increased the number of interviews with the local press and journalists who don’t normally sit with a vice president. The goal is twofold: to continue to find ways to talk to people who have been overlooked and to bypass what they see as some of the focus of the reporting process in DC journalism.
“It is not a natural inclination [in D.C.] To focus on these things. He’s far from the Beltway, said Herbie Ziskind, senior advisor to Harris Communications. And when the Vice President goes to Poland and Romania and meets with world leaders and refugees and then returns, then the next morning she boards a plane and flies to Selma. Much of that may not be noticed at the Beltway Press.”
