The most unusual thing about Kamala Harris’ convention speech? She hasn’t given a high-profile one before

CHICAGO — Most presidential nominees in the modern era created star-making turns at national conventions that filled out their profiles and laid the foundation for their acceptance speeches years later.

Until recently, while Kamala Harris has sporadically captured the nation’s attention, she has never detailed her origin story or established herself on a large stage in ways that Barack Obama did in Boston in 2004, when the young Illinois senator first captured Democrats’ imaginations. Or as Ronald Reagan did in Kansas City in 1976 , when the former California governor and conservative darling overshadowed the GOP nominee by asking whether future generations would credit them for saving the world from nuclear destruction.

For Harris, whose vice presidential nomination speech came during a convention in 2020 disrupted by the Covid pandemic, Thursday night truly is a first. It underscores the hairpin turn Democrats took from President Joe Biden to the vice president over the last month and illustrates just how few details about her personal story have penetrated in the minds of the electorate — even among some longtime allies.

“Many people are talking about her life, and there have been some wonderful videos this week looking back on her, but even I have not known some things,” said Barbara Boxer, whose Senate retirement paved the way for Harris’ election to her California seat in 2016.

While an early career convention speech itself can’t fully convey a candidate’s background and motivations, it helps raise interest and sets a tone for how a political official is viewed.

So sudden was Harris’ rise — despite serving nearly a term as vice president — that small but symbolically significant periods of her life story are only now getting air. “I didn’t even know she worked at McDonald’s ,” Boxer added.

As Harris prepares to address the convention on Thursday night, advisers and allies outlined an address in which she will connect her own personal story — a middle-class daughter of immigrants whose mother purchased their first home when her daughters were nearly in their teens — with the American dream.

One Harris campaign official granted anonymity to discuss speech preparations said the vice president will discuss what motivated her to become a prosecutor — her work to protect survivors of sexual abuse and homeowners impacted by the foreclosure crisis — and she will cast Donald Trump, the former president, as a figure of the past, while promoting her role in a more hopeful and optimistic future.

The official said Harris plans to tie Trump to the controversial Project 2025 agenda, which he has sought to distance himself from, arguing it would rip away people’s freedoms and increase the cost of living. Harris also will root her vision in her sense of patriotism — or love of country — while she will argue Trump talks down to the nation.

“The delegates in that room are some of the most hyper-aware, involved people in politics. Yet for many of them, this will be the first time they’ve attended a speech by the vice president or seen her in this setting,” said Brian Brokaw, an adviser to Harris during her past runs for office in California. “And that's part of why there is such excitement. There’s a newness that really hasn’t been part of her story outside of her home state for most of her political career.”

In her first run for president, in 2019, Harris briefly rocketed in polls after tangling with Biden on the debate stage over school busing for desegregation. And her own campaign launch in Oakland — a powerhouse speech to 22,000 supporters — reverberated across the country. More recently, since assuming the nomination, she has held energetic rallies across battleground states.

But conventions — long seen as a place for up-and-comers to promote their brands — are another story. In 2012, Harris delivered a listless address in Charlotte, North Carolina, that was forgotten by all but aides and confidants of the then-state attorney general. Some blamed key edits to the text by the Obama team designed to tone down what Harris saw as her righteous fight with both the federal government and big banks to hold out for a larger settlement coming out of the mortgage crisis.

Four years later, while running for Senate, she drew Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez in California’s November runoff election, squelching what many believed would have been a prime opportunity to showcase Harris had she run against a Republican. Adding to the frustration among some of Harris’ advisers, Sanchez on the eve of the DNC in Philadelphia told a Spanish-language interviewer that the reason Obama endorsed Harris was because both of them are Black.

And during the depths of Covid in 2020, Harris made her DNC speech from a nearly empty hall in Wilmington, Delaware, where the number of vertical signs representing state delegations far outnumbered the news reporters in the room. That came after Harris’ plans to serve as the top counter-messenger to the Republican National Convention with a well-publicized speech in Washington was foiled when Biden jumped into a hastily planned TV interview, immediately overshadowing her address.

It’s been a slow process over the years for Harris to open up about herself publicly. Aides over her Senate and first presidential run routinely urged her to update her well-trodden material, which she now appears to be doing.

“She's going to reintroduce herself in a way that I think is going to be really powerful,” Rep. Robert Garcia , a freshman member from Long Beach, California, and a close Harris ally, said from the convention floor. Garcia said the week has been about “building her legacy and building what she’s done — her record. But we’re also spending a lot of time talking about the future.”

Harris’ chance to dwell more on her personal story comes ahead of what aides anticipate will be a challenging stretch of the campaign that is expected to include her first formal sit-down TV interview since late June, where she’s likely to be pressed on her policy pivots. For now, people like Boxer say they believe she’s made strides in delivering more consistent performances.

“I don't think I have ever witnessed such a change in a candidate,” Boxer said. “And I think it's because of her work as vice president. She was sitting at the knee of someone who knows this political work better than I would say anyone right now in the country.”

Perhaps no figure in the Democratic Party has tracked that change more closely than Markos Moulitsas, founder and publisher of the liberal Daily Kos and a Harris delegate. In 2019, Moulitsas burst with excitement after Harris’ speech to the throng in Oakland, describing her as the perfect mix of toughness and polish.

But he soon soured on Harris, expressing deep disappointment when she refused to aggressively take on her critics. At the time, he pointed to then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s takedown of Harris in a primary debate, contending it was worthless to fight for her candidacy if she wasn’t willing to defend herself.

About five years later, in a convention hall in Chicago, Moulitsas said he was all-in.

“The Harris that we’re seeing now is not the Harris that we saw in 2019. It’s as though she spent the last four years really honing the craft, getting better at speaking, getting better at relating with people,” he said. “Her operation is more professional and focused, and it's really allowing for her inner joy to come through that we just didn’t see at that time.

“People are complaining about all the reliance on vibes,” he added. “But that’s part of what people vote for. That’s why George W. Bush won twice, even though people like me tore their hair out. She’s not sitting there trying to sound like the smartest person in the room. She's trying to bring joy and energy and enthusiasm to politics and, oh my God, the package is there: She's got everything else you may need — the intelligence, the smarts, the tactics.”

Whether she would have benefited from an earlier opportunity to lay down a marker was of little concern to former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who chaired the 2012 DNC, considered challenging Harris in 2016 and is making a second run for California governor in 2026. “Knowing her, she’ll give a very good speech,” he told POLITICO.

But he didn’t set the bar too high, either.

“Will it top Michelle Obama’s?” he asked. “I doubt it. But I think she’s going to give a very good speech.”