Here’s what Kamala Harris must do to seal the deal

Jonathan Martin is POLITICO’s senior political columnist and politics bureau chief. He’s covered elections in every corner of America and co-authored a best-selling book about Donald Trump and Joe Biden. His reported column chronicles the inside conversations and major trends shaping U.S. politics.

FLINT, Michigan — With a “Vehicle City” sign behind her, Vice President Kamala Harris stood last week in this pillar of the American auto industry and unspooled lines that would have left Michigan motormen from Walter Reuther to Mike Murphy beaming.

She detailed exactly how many auto plants closed while Donald Trump was president (six), hammered the Republican ticket for not committing to a Lansing GM facility and evoked one of those great old art deco bas-reliefs of brawny workers as she vowed to “invest in the industries that built America — like steel, iron and the great American auto industry.”

And yet.

To borrow another Motown metaphor, Harris has the lyrics down but the melody isn’t quite there. It wasn’t hard to find voters at the rally as nervous as they were excited.

“We need young guys, I’m worried about young men,” Maureen Hayes, a Harris supporter who works in sales at an auto supplier, told me on the way out of the rally. But Hayes, sporting a Lions hat and camo pants, added a measure of hope to her sense of dread: “I don’t think young men vote as much as women.”

For all the uncertainty looming over this election just under a month before Election Day, the matter at hand may be less complicated than either party thinks. Should Harris win, it will be because Democrats were the party willing to dump their older, unpopular standard-bearer and that the country was simply not going to again elect the president who overturned legal abortion, committing that rare, and politically ruinous, step in American life of depriving people of a previously granted right.

It was an expertly crafted, locally tailored version of her stump speech aimed at the metal-benders of the Midwest.

The potentially historic gender gap, as Hayes nodded to, could doom Trump. However, she and the other voters I spoke with on a gorgeous fall night have good reason to be concerned. This is an extraordinarily close race and Harris must do more to signal that she’ll govern from the political center.

She and her top advisers plainly recognize as much.

That’s why former Rep. Liz Cheney was airlifted off the university and business lecture circuit and placed by Harris’ side in Wisconsin last week. And it’s why the biggest reveal from Harris’ “60 Minutes” interview this week was not Harris saying she owns a Glock and yes she’s fired it (though that can’t hurt) but her new answer on why she’s changed positions from her disastrous 2020 presidential bid.

Wisely discarding her August answer that her “values haven’t changed,” the vice president used the question this time to send a message to moderate voters by invoking four significant words: consensus, common ground, compromise.

She’s been vice president for nearly four years, Harris said, and she now knows that’s what Americans crave.

She needs to go further, though, and in ways that could irritate the left and even some of her former Senate Democratic colleagues.

Harris should say she’ll work with Republicans on behalf of all Americans and stand up to the extremes in both parties because, America, she knows the dirty little secret is many GOP lawmakers she served with are as exhausted with extremism and extremists like Donald Trump as she is.

It’s not just she who wants to “turn the page” and find “a new way forward,” to borrow two of her slogans, but many Republicans, too. Some of them are also tired of families being torn apart over Facebook comment threads, the incessant bickering that’s overtaken Washington and being held hostage to a party leader whose lies and demagoguery they must own as long as he’s a threat to return to power and exact retribution.

The most nagging question she gets, and will get again up through the election, is why she’s changed her positions. Well, she can use that to get on to the offensive in ways that both confront Trump and reassure those voters who won’t vote for him but aren’t sure they can pull the lever for her. Now, this is where it gets more awkward within her party. But no Democratic nominee in modern history has been granted more latitude with her base to just win baby than Harris and she ought to use it.

Harris should name names among Republicans she’ll work with, making official what Washington is already buzzing about: that Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska will be the GOP version of Sens. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) in next year’s iteration of a closely divided Senate.

And she could cite the likely future GOP leaders by name, noting that she served with Sens. John Thune of South Dakota and John Cornyn of Texas.

Harris could go further, too, to deliver that message. She could say that while she hopes Democrats will retain the Senate, she will work with a GOP majority, too, and find a compromise with them on the looming must-do next year — avoiding an across-the-board tax hike when the Trump tax cuts expire.

Harris grasps the power of imagery, that’s why she went to the Arizona-Mexico border and then stage-managed “60 Minutes” coming to the Cheney event in Ripon, Wisconsin, birthplace of the Republican Party. So why not send a message about your commitment to work across party lines by showing up in other symbolic locations?

Go to Maine under the guise of stumping for the electoral vote in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District and hold an event at the Margaret Chase Smith Library in Skowhegan. Harris could summon Smith’s bravery against the demagogue of her day — Joe McCarthy — and vow to work with Collins, the Maine woman who has a picture of Smith in her office and could well chair the Senate Appropriations Committee next year.

The vice president could make a similar commitment by standing in Murdo, South Dakota, Thune’s tiny hometown, or do so in Cornyn’s Texas, perhaps in College Station, home of the presidential library of the last president who was handed a divided government upon taking office: George H.W. Bush.

Do old-guard Republicans or centrist independents on Philadelphia’s Main Line or in Michigan’s Bloomfield Hills know exactly who these lawmakers are? Of course not. But the vibes are the point. These voters don’t want white papers, they just crave reassurance Harris isn’t a lefty.

It’s just a more egalitarian way of messaging what Harris’ brother-in-law and Uber macher, Tony West, is shrewdly doing in private with small groups of centrist business executives across the country. It’s an effort, incidentally, that I know is paying dividends because some CEO types have told me he makes a compelling pitch that Harris is indeed, as she repeated on “60 Minutes,” “a capitalist.”

That sound you hear is the pounding of keyboards as Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and his lieutenants deride any such effort. I get it. Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) is a wily survivor and it’s not unreasonable to think that Democratic Senate candidatescould prevail in Florida or Texas given what happened the last two elections in Georgia, another state where theyweren’t given a chance to win Senate seats.

But Harris needs to look out for herself and not worry about Schumer’s momentary feelings. Or, frankly, those of others in her party.

Which leads to me suggesting an even more daring gambit: Harris ought to consider preemptively naming Mitt Romney as her secretary of State.

Don’t even do it in exchange for his support. It would be more powerful if she says she’ll name him to the post without the perception of a Trumpian quid pro quo.

It’s the job Romney coveted enough to share that infamous frog leg dinner with Trump in 2016. And what better way to convey to middle-of-the-road voters that you mean what you say about putting Republicans in your government? It’s also not without precedent that a new Democratic president would include a Republican appointee in a high-ranking national security post: Barack Obama retained Robert Gates at the Pentagon, and during the Iraq War no less.

Yes, those were different circumstances, but this is no ordinary time or ordinary election.

So go to Salt Lake City and stand in Temple Square — perhaps in front of Brigham Young’s Lion House — and tell the young-for-77 Romney that he has one last mission to serve the country he loves. Play to his sense of patriotism and invoke yours by reminding voters of how Trump runs down America.

How do you think that would go over with the Mormon voters of Nevada and Arizona, particularly those already appalled at Trump’s scapegoating of migrants?

And speaking of vibes, so much of the discomfort Trump skeptics have with voting for Harris, or any Democrat, is out of fear she will be captive to the left’s identity police. As much as she should denounce extremists of all sorts, see above, there must be a way she can triangulate by condemning both Trump’s race-baiting and the left’s campus culture.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think Harris — a woman of Jamaican and Indian heritage — would be called a racist. And I know from having covered her for a decade that she’s no faculty club progressive, much more comfortable dropping a “motherfucka” than taking care to say “Latinx.”

Lest you think this is all a plea for Harris to unthinkingly embrace centrism and run as the rightful heir to No Labels (RIP), there are instances she should out-populist Trump.

One of the most prominent moderates in Democratic politics told me that Harris should confront a powerful constituency in her own party, Big Tech, and hold it accountable for what kids are seeing on their phones in ways that would delight parents across political lines.

A number of Democrats were also mystified that Harris didn’t move heaven and earth to make Trump own his boast late last month that he didn’t pay overtime. Of course, candidates shouldn’t jump on everything the news cycle hands them. Yet here was an example of Trump openly alienating working-class voters by saying he “hated” overtime, the lifeblood of so many Americans, and playing into her central theme that he cares only about himself and his wealth.

And why isn’t Harris doing more to remind voters that Trump would be an 80-something president? Eric Holder shouldn’t be the only Democrat saying Trump “has not put two sentences together in the last two years.”

It’s a far more delicate matter, but she should consider breaking with President Joe Biden on the Middle East. High-level Democrats in Michigan are growing more alarmed because Israel’s incursion into Lebanon has made this a much more personal issue there for Arab Muslims and Christians alike who have relatives in Lebanon.

If conveying to them that, unlike Biden, she’ll halt the weapons flow to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is critical to Michigan and consistent with her own expressed values, why wouldn’t she do it?

Don’t take my word for it, just listen to what Sen Gary Peters (D-Mich.), a survivor of more than one difficult race there, told me over the summer. “Be who you are,” Peters said of Harris and the Middle East, and if you have those views “be clear about” them.

And that was before pro-Trump mail started flowing into the homes of Michigan Arabs saying Harris (and her husband) “unwaveringly support Israel” and into the homes of Michigan Jews claiming she’d “embolden anti-semites.”

Harris’ coalition is precarious, to put it mildly.

And as she dutifully rattles off the fact-checked bill of particulars from her teleprompter and briefing book, perfectly enunciating all the lyrics, her opponent is lying with impunity and running a baldly demagogic campaign.

Let’s be blunt: Some voters who insist they just don’t know enough about Harris are using that line as a fig leaf because they’re uncomfortable with her race, gender, liberalism, experience or some combination thereof. It’s like the NFL fans who for some reason preferred their old white quarterback to the Black guy now under center.

There are, though, hundreds of thousands of voters of goodwill who detest Trump but need more reassurance from Harris.

The vice president would do well to listen to the person who, more than anybody, is the reason why she’s her party’s nominee today.

Harris will “have to” govern from the center, said Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, “because that’s where the public is.”

Ben Johansen contributed to this report.