Today, the backdrop of the New Hampshire stage reads “Opportunity Economy: Supporting Small Businesses” in giant letters. In a style both casual and precise—Harris wears one of her many taupe blazers, with trim charcoal jeans and pointed stilettos—she lays out details of her program onstage. The tax deduction for new businesses would rise tenfold, to $50,000, and loans of low and no interest would flow to small businesses trying to expand. Access to “venture capital” and “innovation hubs” would be set up in towns and rural areas, and capital-gains tax for high earners would come down from Biden’s plan, to 28 percent (“a rate that rewards investment in America’s innovators”). Also—the Harris touch—simplified tax paperwork: “Kind of like the 1040EZ,” she says. There is a cheer.
After the rally, Harris pays a visit to Port City Pretzels, a nearby factory owned by a mother-daughter team. Most of its employees are disabled.
“You didn’t start with this, obviously,” the vice president says when she arrives, glancing with some wonderment around the factory, which is filled with equipment and enormous crates of, one imagines, pretzels.
“We started with 500 square feet,” Suzanne Foley, the co-owner, says. “It’s hard work.”
“It’s good work,” the vice president says. The press pool leaves.
“I would love to give you a bag of pretzels,” Foley says.
“Give me a bag of pretzels—to give Doug,” Harris says. “He secretly eats pretzels at night. I’m like, ‘Honey, you got to slow down on the pretzels….’”
“It’s a resealable bag,” Eileen Marousek, Foley’s daughter and co-owner, who is pregnant, offers.
The vice president examines the bag with studious attention. “Oh, that’s—” She seems for a moment at a loss, or maybe overcome. The pretzels are of Tasty Ranch Dill flavor. “Yum!” she exclaims. “Yum!”
“You have a lot of people behind you,” Foley says, still eyeing the pretzels.
“Sixty-two days,” Marousek notes. “You can do it.”
Fifteen days later, in a place called Farmington Hills, Michigan, Harris recalls the pretzel factory. “It’s an example of the blessing I have in being able to travel the country and meet the heroes walking among us,” she tells me, “people who are not looking for that kind of attention. I told her, ‘Make sure you tell your story,’ because if more people hear it, it might inspire them to say, ‘I could do that.’”
We are standing in a side room of the Studio Center, where Harris and Oprah are taking photographs with dignitaries and supporters before broadcasting a show together—two women whose singular jobs might reflect the highest reach of I-could-do-that inspiration in the land. Harris wears an eggplant-colored suit and a black pinstripe blouse. Oprah wears burnt orange on burnt orange. On landing at the Detroit airport, the vice president descended from Air Force Two to greet the Boys & Girls Clubs of Southeastern Michigan, lined up in a double row. A boy welcomed her Peter Pan–style, hands at his hips. She mirrored him. She admired a girl’s glasses and marveled at the accomplishments of a young man. Her bodywoman approached—“Madam Vice President, it’s time to go”—but Harris ignored the summons until she’d met everyone and gathered them for a photograph. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s come together.”
Now, alongside Oprah, perched between two draped flags, she poses with her adult supporters.
“How are you?” Oprah says.
“I met you in Chicago!” someone exclaims.
A local political adviser rounds a corner for a photograph and freezes, looking back and forth between Harris and Oprah.
“I was only prepared for one!” she exclaims.
The broadcast will be streamed live on the web and on channels across the country, but the taping location, in the Detroit suburbs, carries weight: In 2016, Trump won Michigan by a hairbreadth of 11,000 votes, and Biden and Harris won it by just 154,000 in 2020. The vice president’s surest path to Electoral College victory requires her winning Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania as a trio.
The debate with Trump was only days behind her. She’d offered the former president bait, and he had taken it. When she suggested that people were bored at his rallies, he used time to insist otherwise. He concluded, of immigrants, apropos of nothing, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!” To some, the performance had seemed a signature Harris acceleration: entering a competition neck-and-neck and, through strategic moves, zooming ahead. (Her success with an abrasive Trump stood in contrast to the vice presidential debate, between Walz and JD Vance, which commentators took to be better mannered—and at best a draw for Walz.)
