CHICAGO — Kamala Harris’ team was weeks into the laborious process of writing what they expected to be a high-profile vice presidential speech for the Democratic National Convention when their world changed, two sources told NOTUS.
President Joe Biden announced he would exit the race and endorse Harris to succeed him, setting her team off on a sprint to rally her party around her bid in what felt like record time for an unprecedented moment.
And in that time, her speech went from being simply important to the most crucial speech of her career. The vice president and her team didn’t throw away their framework, one person involved in the speech preparations said. Instead, they retooled it.
“The message has always stayed the same,” a Harris aide said, noting that the team will tweak the specifics until the very last moment.
Harris plans to tell the American people not just her own story but also her vision for the future, according to people with knowledge of her preparations.
Those close to her believe the speech will inform the American public who she would be as president, interwoven with personal anecdotes that outline how she would govern and how her lived experience shapes her plans for office.
“People still want to know more about who’s the whole Kamala Harris,” said Glynda Carr, the president, CEO and co-founder of the Higher Heights for America PAC. “Her life story really connects to how she’s going to govern.”
The process to get Americans to understand not just who Harris is but also what motivates her has drastically intensified. Her campaign has raced to define her before Republicans and former President Donald Trump do, rejecting their claims that she’s a liberal Californian ready to throw the country into crisis by enacting her own version of communism.
In the whipsaw four weeks since Harris’s rise to the top of the ticket, it’s become clear she’s more politically deft than she was last time she ran for president. But Thursday’s speech will still be the most high-profile moment she’s faced.
“She’s gonna tell people who she is, why she’s doing this and what she wants to do,” said Jamal Simmons, Harris’ former communications director. “Because I don’t think that people really know.”
The vice president “feels a lot of pressure” from the high stakes of the moment, two people close to the vice president’s team told NOTUS.
“The vice president puts a lot of pressure on herself, on almost everything,” one of those people said. “This idea of being the first but not the last is a very present marker for her emotionally, so she is genuinely concerned about doing things well so it lands the way she wants and she lives up to the moment.”
The vice president doesn’t have a reputation as one of the party’s best speakers. But people who have worked for her in the past or remain close to her told NOTUS that she’s meticulous in preparing for moments like this because of the pressure she takes on.
“This is the most important [speech] you’re gonna deliver,” said a Democratic operative close to her team. “You gotta get a bump coming out of the convention, right? This is the first time you’re out of the shadow, you’ve got to lay out a vision. What she has to achieve in the speech, not just the delivery of the speech, is pressure, and it’s that important.”
People who have written for Harris or been part of the process before denote the arduous and sometimes daunting process that writing a speech for any principal, but certainly the vice president, requires. That’s in part because of the historic nature of her presidential bid and Republicans’ insistence on highlighting any small slipup or mistake.
“She would always say, whenever we were even recording just a [direct-to-camera] video, ‘This is a national address,’” fully aware that it could be posted on YouTube or X and go viral, the former aide said.
“The whole country could be watching it,” Harris would tell her staff.
The vice president has been pushed by aides over the past few years to include more personal anecdotes in her speeches, something she is not typically inclined to do.
“Policy is her friend,” another former aide said. “She likes to be specific and make things very plain.”
Adam Frankel, a communications staffer first brought on during Harris’ rocky first year as vice president, is leading the speechwriting, two people close to the process said. Aides across the spectrum have pitched him ideas and ways to frame things.
In the past, Harris has often crowdsourced ideas on what to address in big moments. She’s used scholars like the Princeton professor Eddie Glaude to bring historical context to her remarks, two people familiar with the process told NOTUS, sometimes speaking with him before big moments or directing staff to get in touch.
“When it comes to a speech like this which, she’s known for months, was going to be this big signature speech that would be remembered in history,” the first former aide said, “she’s gonna want to know her history. She wants to know: How did people who have done this before, like great luminaries, how have they faced these moments when the eyes of the nation and the world were on them?”
And one person said that in these sessions, because of the comparison to great orators, there’s sometimes a tension between writing profoundly (and not flowery) and using plain language.
While the process can change, most people who NOTUS spoke with said Harris’ speechwriting sessions typically kick off with aides pitching her on what the speech should say, often written in an outline. Other times, Harris knows exactly what the message should be and pushes her team to find the right language.
“It’s a lot of the Socratic method and then declaration,” the other former aide said. “She’s teasing out the details and then end of that process it’s like, ‘What are the ideas?’”
Putting together the speech involves Harris and her staff discussing the subject and workshopping different frameworks until they agree on one. When the actual drafting begins, she’ll make changes throughout. After that taxing process, they reach the line-edit stage.
Then prompter practice begins, with a small group of aides actually in the room, to allow Harris to feel out the cadence and make edits.
Some of that process is now happening in Chicago, where a select few top aides are out of sight at the Park Hyatt, pouring over the speech up until the last moment.
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Jasmine Wright is a reporter at NOTUS.