Why VP Harris is seen as critical to Biden's reelection campaign

Vice President Kamala Harris is on a mission to court a distinct part of the Democratic base.

"She's really been mobilizing a lot of the voters that we need ... like young people, women, voters of color," said Sheila Nix, Harris's chief of staff for the 2024 reelection campaign.

These groups were all critical to Biden's victory in 2020, but polls suggest his support among young voters and voters of color is slipping. Some Democrats see Harris, a 59-year-old Black and Asian woman, as being better able to motivate these key blocs by leaning into her personal experience and perspective than the 81-year-old President Biden.

So she's not just traveling the country for the president, as a vice president typically would in an election year. She's tasked with trying to re-engage voting groups that Democrats desperately need to win reelection.

Harris has been crisscrossing the country talking about issues that'll energize those core constituencies, and she frames it all as a part of a broader fight for freedom.

This past month, Harris has discussed marijuana legalization at the White House with rapper Fat Joe, toured a clinic that provides abortions in Minnesota — a first for any president or vice president — and visited the bullet-pocked classroom in Parkland, Fla., where a gunman killed 14 students and three staff members in 2018.

How it's going

Despite the assumption that Harris might be able to reactivate key voters, she, like Biden, has had persistently low approval ratings in polls.

But Terrance Woodbury, founder of HIT strategies, a polling firm where he focuses on voters of color, thinks the polls don't tell the complete story.

"One thing we found since 2020 is that the vice president's approval rating and