Harris doesn’t talk about her father. That might be a mistake.

“Everybody knows she’s a Marxist,” Trump said, instantly sending nearly every viewer under age 40 to their online dictionaries. “Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics. And he taught her well.”

Harris gave no sign of having even heard Trump’s remark; she didn’t mention her father once during the entire 90-minute debate. This was partly because of a strategic decision to ignore Trump’s personal attacks, and maybe also because, outside of her convention speech, she has generally avoided talking about Donald Harris, her Jamaican father, at all.

Whatever the reason, it seems to me that, by not talking more about both of her parents and her mixed-race identity, Harris is failing to exploit an opening she has with voters who might well decide the election.

Before we get to Harris in this moment, though, you have to understand the long-simmering rift in the Republican Party when it comes to immigration, which I would characterize as an argument between conservatives and nativists.

The conservatives — the Reagan-Bush coalition, broadly speaking — generally cheered legal immigration, because they mythologized America as a “city on the hill” where the world’s outcasts came to worship and assimilate. These Republicans drew a sharp distinction between the industrious, rule-following immigrants they idealized on one hand and undocumented foreigners sneaking across the border on the other.

But then you had the much smaller faction of nativists, led by fringe figures such as Pat Buchanan. (I traveled a bunch with Buchanan during his final campaign for president in 2000; at the time, his rhetoric struck me as dangerous, though compared with Trump, he might as well have been Hubert Humphrey.) The nativists wanted to close the gates to immigrants, period — or at least the non-White kind. They saw America as threatened, both culturally and economically, by a flood of outsiders.

After Trump took office in 2017, a lot of his supporters complained to me that I was wrong to portray him as a nativist, that Trump was in fact a traditional conservative who only wanted to fix a broken system. (His border wall, he declared, would have a “big beautiful door.”) They were quickly proved wrong. Trump almost immediately set about making it harder to legally immigrate to the United States.

Seven years later, the balance in the GOP has turned on its head; the nativists are running things, and the ever-dwindling conservatives are in exile. Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), have taken the war against immigrants to an extreme that would be absurd if it weren’t so manifestly cruel. In last week’s debate, Trump wasted no time in raising this folk tale about legal Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating people’s pets — a story Vance (whose own wife is the child of immigrants) has been gleefully spreading even as aspiring Americans in his own state face death threats because of it.

You can imagine that all of this appalls a lot of traditional conservatives who remain undecided. They don’t want to vote for Trump, but they need to be convinced that Harris isn’t hostile to their basic values.

Harris’s origin story — her birth to two educated, immigrant parents, and the adversity she overcame after they divorced — affirms everything these voters believe about that city on a hill. And yet, for reasons I find baffling, Harris barely touched on it during her CNN interview last month or in the debate. She briefly mentioned her mother, but that’s only partly illuminating; it feels incomplete, a story we’ve entered in the second act.

Maybe she thinks her Jamaican roots are too outside the mainstream of America, both Black and White. Maybe she wants to avoid the immigration issue altogether, considering it a weakness (which it is). Or perhaps she just doesn’t like talking about her father — or worries about what he might say.

Absent dads have been something of a recurring theme in Democratic campaigns; both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama struggled with their feelings about fathers who abandoned them. But both made those fathers central to their personal and then political narratives. (Obama wrote an entire book about his.)

Harris, on the other hand, has mostly avoided discussing her father, an economist and professor emeritus at Stanford, for her entire political career. In a 2003 interview, according to Erica L. Green of the New York Times, Harris summed it up this way: “My father is a good guy, but we are not close.”

The tension between them flared into the open in 2019, when Harris joked during a radio interview about having smoked weed because she’s part Jamaican. Her father issued a blistering rebuttal on Twitter, now known as X, accusing Harris of having shamed her family “in pursuit of identity politics” and calling her comments “a travesty.” Awkward.

I can’t begin to know what’s at the bottom of their relationship, but I continue to think that steering clear of the subject is a missed opportunity for her. Her parents’ immigrant story embodies her sharpest contrast with Trump — more than policy or temperament or race. It offers anti-Trump conservatives a way to see her as someone who reaffirms their values and their vision of an assimilationist society, even as they vehemently oppose open borders, and even if they don’t agree with her politically.

If I were on Harris’s team, I’d think about her giving a high-profile speech between now and the election — much like Obama’s speech on race in 2008 — that directly takes on immigration by having Harris recount her parents’ story, as she did briefly at the convention in Chicago, and then explain how it shapes her politics. When you have a vulnerability, steer into it. When you have a chance to connect with undecided voters, grab it.

But that’s assuming Harris wants to talk about any of this again. Politics is straightforward enough to navigate. Families, less so.