After rocky start, Kamala Harris emerges as the Biden campaign’s lead prosecutor on top issues

CNN —

Kamala Harris hadn’t even started building up to her ending when the crowd in Las Vegas — more fired up than any poll would suggest — started chanting, “Four more years!” But she made sure everyone heard the line she’s come up with: “Trump abortion bans.”

And not one pro-Palestinian protester interrupted her that day, or, for that matter, over her four-day campaign swing West.

The vice president is clearly feeling energized these days. She is more engaged. She is looser. Aides say she was the one who pushed to explicitly call out former President Donald Trump as responsible for every rollback in abortion rights, and she is clearly feeding on the old prosecutorial rush of tearing apart the opposition’s argument.

In a conference room in the back of a campaign office in a Las Vegas strip mall, Harris said she is finding the last few months, on the attack and able to zero in on the contrast with Trump, “very liberating.”

“You can’t forget that for the first probably year and a half, we were landlocked. It was basically me and Joe and a Zoom screen,” she told CNN, in an exclusive interview at the end of the multiday campaign swing, built in part around getting her to battlegrounds Arizona and Nevada, and around what staff has found to be helpful downtime back home in Los Angeles cooking Sunday dinner. “Being out and being able to just have real conversations and not soundbites in an interview — it is liberating.”

No one in the vice president’s orbit, including Harris herself, needs to be reminded how the disappointment and disenchantment from her first years on the job still hang over her, or how odd it is that some voters say in interviews with CNN and outside focus groups they are inclined toward Biden but