Harris Often Sidesteps Her History-Making Potential. Walz Doesn’t.

Vice President Kamala Harris rarely points out the fact that she would be the first female president or the first Black or Indian woman to hold the job. Her running mate embraces it.

Wedged inside a crowded cafe near downtown Atlanta last month, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was powering through his usual talking points about protecting democracy and bolstering the economy, energizing a crowd of several dozen students from nearby historically Black colleges and universities.

Then, for a moment, he paused on race and identity.

“I think for all of you, being in the heart of the H.B.C.U.s, the vice president doesn’t talk about the historic nature of her candidacy — she just does the work,” Mr. Walz said, as the crowd murmured its agreement. “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 recognize what it means, what this candidacy means.”

Mr. Walz never plainly stated the obvious fact: If elected, his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, would become the first female president, and the first Black woman and Indian person to hold the nation’s highest office.

But even his passing reference to the barrier-breaking possibility was notable. Ms. Harris, whose father is from Jamaica and whose mother is from India, rarely mentions her racial identity or gender on the campaign trail. Even when her opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, falsely claimed that Ms. Harris “happened to turn Black,” she criticized his comments without directly talking about race.

Instead, it has fallen to Mr. Walz — a 60-year-old white man — to become the campaign’s more prominent messenger on race and identity. Though it’s hardly the main thrust of his stump speeches, for many, it’s no surprise why the job would fall to him.

The history-making nature of Ms. Harris’s candidacy excites at least some in the party, but there are also middle-of-the-road voters who recoil from what they see as identity politics.

Polling and anecdotal data indicate voters have grown more comfortable with women and people of color in elected office, especially over the past decade, said Tresa Undem, a public opinion researcher who studies gender. But they still face stereotypes and are perceived differently from white men like Mr. Walz, who has more wiggle room because of his own background and style.

“I think it’s wise not for her to talk about it — it just opens the door for the Trump campaign to latch on and make sexist and racist remarks,” Ms. Undem said, such as the racial attacks in some conservative circles that Ms. Harris was a “D.E.I. hire” — short for diversity, equity and inclusion.

Mr. Walz, by contrast, Ms. Undem said, was in a prime position to assuage reluctant voters’ fears and pump up what she thought was a small subset of Democrats who would be motivated to vote for Ms. Harris because of her identity.

“He’s pretty good at normalizing progressive policies; he’s probably pretty good at normalizing voting for a woman as president,” she said. “He can normalize it with the small segment of moderate swing voters who are a little bit hesitant, who might hold some of those sexist beliefs.”

Ms. Harris’s more reserved approach when it comes to gender differs from that of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who wore white when she officially accepted the Democratic nomination in 2016 in an ode to the suffragist movement.

She spoke often throughout her career of shattering “the highest glass ceiling” that has kept women out of the Oval Office. Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign was imbued with an energetic feminism, but Ms. Harris’s campaign has placed significantly more emphasis on what Democrats say are the disastrous consequences Mr. Trump’s presidency has had for women’s health and families, and on the need for an urgent restoration of abortion rights, rather than on her own groundbreaking potential.

Mrs. Clinton’s running mate, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, suggested that Ms. Harris also needed to speak less about her gender because Mrs. Clinton’s campaign had paved the way.

“Even though it is history-making, it is also slightly more normalized in 2024 than it was in 2016, which means Kamala probably doesn’t have to emphasize it as much,” Mr. Kaine said in an interview.

Mr. Kaine has some insight into Mr. Walz’s position, as the white man playing second fiddle to a woman on a presidential ticket — though he said he had not spoken with the Minnesota governor directly. He said that he had felt free to proudly trumpet Mrs. Clinton’s potentially historic moment, but that a female candidate would face unique challenges that might make her hesitate to do so herself.

“I certainly saw as a vice-presidential candidate the intense double standard that was applied to Hillary,” Mr. Kaine said. “It may be that you trigger less of that double-standardism reaction if you downplay talking about the history-making nature of the campaign.”

Addressing a group of students at the edge of Michigan State University’s campus in East Lansing, Mich., last month, Mr. Walz said at one point that he was speaking “especially to women and people of color,” before praising Ms. Harris’s debate performance and alluding to her chance to become the first female president.

“A lot of you’ve been hitting at that glass ceiling,” he said. “And as Secretary Clinton said in Chicago, there’s a lot of cracks in it, but it’s not down. You can be a part of that, to put that fist through that glass ceiling for the last time here.”

Most frequently, Mr. Walz uses voters’ surprise at a commanding performance by Ms. Harris on the debate stage in September to question whether they perhaps were discounting her qualifications because of her race or gender — though he does not use that language outright.

Mr. Walz told the crowd at a rally in Asheville, N.C., last month: “People tell me, ‘My God, she did well. She’s tough. She’s tested. She’s ready.’ And then they sometimes couldn’t help themselves, and they would say, ‘Oh, it really surprised me.’ And I would say, ‘Oh…’”

Running through Ms. Harris’s résumé, he said he asked those people, “Why would you be surprised?”

Mr. Walz’s emphasis of Ms. Harris’s qualifications — which he also does in other settings, like when he brought up her crisis experience in the Situation Room during a Fox News interview on Sunday — is a strategy aimed in part at assuaging potential concerns from voters, according to a person familiar with the governor’s thinking. And some of those concerns may stem from perceptions about what leaders have historically looked like: white and male.

The campaign declined to comment.

Voters have said they like that Ms. Harris avoids categorizing herself or making explicit appeals tied to her history-making potential. Many, in interviews, indicated a preference for her to focus on her policies and how she would improve their lives. Male voters, and Black men in particular, have drifted toward the Republican Party, and Ms. Harris is working to win back their support.

Some Black voters said they viewed her campaign’s decision to avoid a focus on race or gender as an acknowledgment that people could be turned off by such discussions.

“It goes with the history of Black Americans in America, that we always have to dumb ourselves down or can’t shed our light or have to be a shadow,” said Sherry Darby, the founder of Be. Coffee Tea Wine Cafe, where Mr. Walz spoke in Atlanta. “We can’t celebrate who we really are, because we are afraid the majority will not appreciate or accept — it’s just really sad.”

Ms. Darby, 50, said she had appreciated Mr. Walz’s mention of Ms. Harris’s historic opportunity, even with the subtlety he used.

“You have to say it, because it’s so evident and so obvious, but it’s not beat over your head,” she said. “I think the messaging they’re trying to send across is that she’s the president for everybody.”

Jalen Grant, an 18-year-old student at Morehouse College who attended the Atlanta event with Mr. Walz, said the governor struck the right tone by acknowledging Ms. Harris’s barrier-breaking status but not making it his focus.

“It’s a good thing, because at the end of the day, it’s very historical, and important that we acknowledge it and see it,” Mr. Grant said, “but what we really care about is her presidency and her policies and what she’s going to do for all her voters.”

Katie Glueck and Jazmine Ulloa contributed reporting.