"Harris" vs. "Kamala"

Some afterthoughts about a presidential slogan.

Quiara Vasquez raised a good question in her comment on yesterday’s newsletter about the new Kamala Harris “Harris for President | Let’s WIN This” slogan:

Hm, this leaves my biggest question unanswered (although this is more in the realm of “navigating politics as a woman” than branding) - why’d her team end up on HARRIS FOR PRESIDENT rather than KAMALA FOR PRESIDENT? I think everyone, hater and supporter alike, calls her Kamala in casual conversation.

I have no sources within the Harris campaign, so my response, for what it’s worth, falls within the realm of speculation:

1. The stakes are too high right now for casual conversation. When a woman (especially) emphasizes her last name over her first, she’s signaling that she wants to be taken seriously and as a professional and not informally as a friend.

2. “Harris” puts the vice president on equal footing with her opponent, who has never branded himself as “Donald.” Contrast this approach with the (losing) first-name strategies of Jeb!, Beto, Amy, and Hillary. (Republican Nikki Haley used her full name in this year’s primaries, a more formal tactic. So did Sen. Marco Rubio in 2020.)

3. Despite her many years in the public eye, and even though its pronunciation is pretty straightforwardly phonetic, Kamala Harris’s Sanskrit given name is still perceived as “exotic” and “hard to pronounce” by many Americans.¹ (I’ll have more to say about “Kamala” next week.) “Harris,” the surname of Harris’s Jamaican-born father, is easy for monolingual English-speakers² to pronounce; it’s familiar to Americans as a surname and trade name (Harris Tweed, Harris Ranch, Harris Poll³, et al.) Even though last-name-basis reads as formal, the familiarity of “Harris” gives the candidate an approachable (and dare I say “Anglo”?) edge.

Also worth noting: Unlike Hillary Rodham Clinton, the last woman to become a Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris has not taken the surname of her husband, Douglas Emhoff. The message: She’s her own woman.

In other news:

• The Harris campaign issued a press release on Thursday headlined “Statement on a 78-Year-Old Criminal’s Fox News Appearance.” It gets even better.

• I’m liking the “We choose ___” line in Harris’s first campaign ad. For starters, it celebrates choice. And it reclaims “freedom” as an American value, not just a conservative talking point. For more analysis, see

  The.Ink
  : “It’s not just a Beyoncé song — it's about reclaiming an American ideal.”

1. Oy, how I can relate. I’ve given up correcting people who pronounce the first syllable of my quite-common Jewish surname like the “fried” in “fried eggs.”

2. i.e., most Americans.

3. It’ll be fun to see how the Harris Poll polls Harris.