This study presents a nonlocal framework to capture the mechanical behavior of semicrystalline polymers in highly damaged regions. To capture the dominant active mechanisms, a viscoelastic viscoplastic rheological model accounting for ductile damage (VEVPD) is introduced into the thermodynamic framework, based on which the constitutive laws are derived [1]. At high levels of damage, the material goes through a softening instability, and computational models have difficulty driving physical and unique responses. To address this limitation, a nonlocal gradient-enhanced approach is adopted to capture the material behavior in highly damaged zones. To this end, the thermodynamic potential is enhanced with a nonlocal term. The resulting extended thermodynamic framework yields the constitutive laws of the nonlocal model, and the localized state variables are regularized by the interaction between their nonlocal counterparts. Based on a return mapping algorithm, the model is implemented on a user-defined subroutine (UMAT), and a commercial FE code (ABAQUS) is used to extract the mechanical responses. To solve the nonlocal equation, the analogy between the steady state heat and nonlocal equations is used as a thermomechanical model in ABAQUS (HETVAL subroutine), in which the nonlocal variable is replaced by temperature. In terms of nonlocal variable choice, two separated options are discussed: first, based on the scalar damage; second, based on the hardening state variable. A parametric study is performed to evaluate their efficiency in providing physical and unique responses during the material softening. The results provide good evidence that the nonlocal model, based on the nonlocal hardening state variable, is more efficient to yield mesh objective and physical responses at highly damaged areas compared to the model using nonlocal damage variable [2].