Over the past weeks, in an unprecedented process that has rocked the presidential race and arrested the attention of the country, Vice President Kamala Harris took the place of Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket, launched a vigorous campaign of her own, and selected a vice presidential running mate. The Democratic base appears enthused about its candidate in a way it hasn’t been since the Obamamania of 2008, with Harris far exceeding expectations around the size and direction of jolt she might bring. I’d imagined a more gradual taking of the reins, likely conducted with a tone that mixed in a great dollop of sobriety and sadness over Biden’s departure from the race — not a prescription or the “right way” I thought things would go, just my assumption about such a transition.
Was I ever wrong, and never more gladly so.
Harris hit the ground running with high energy, confidence, good humor, and a no-holds-barred attitude towards her opponent. On this last point, she quickly moved to frame the choice as one between a no-nonsense former district attorney and a recidivist criminal. It was particularly impressive to see her categorize him as such, cutting him down to size and crucially communicating that he was a “type” that she knows all too well. I’d speculate that this ability to put Trump in perspective, to suggest what a small man he really is, has been key to the revival of Democratic base enthusiasm. After all, Democrats had spent much of 2024 watching as President Biden failed to land effective blows against Trump (as measured in Trump’s consistent lead or tie with the president), even as Trump evaded accountability for his crimes and seemed increasingly to be America’s inevitable next president. It was as if Democrats had been collectively sharing a nightmare, unable to evade the disaster that all could see coming in surreal slow-motion, until Harris woke them up and reminded them that Trump is eminently beatable.
The seemingly overnight transmutation of Democratic anxiety into enthusiasm has been helped along greatly by Harris’s positivity and high spirits — the “joy” that VP pick Governor Tim Walz attributed to her in their first joint public appearance. Harris not only showed awakened Democrats there was a way forward, but that this campaign and the renewed hope they’re feeling is cause for celebration, for happiness, even.
With her defiant and contemptuous attitude towards Donald Trump, her willingness to put the extremist Project 2025 agenda front and center in her critiques of his candidacy, and her “We’re not going back" mantra, I would hazard that Harris has consciously made herself into the avatar of a pro-democracy American majority I’ve discussed before. This majority believes in American’s egalitarian ideals, either embraces or has no great objections to the U.S. being a multiethnic nation, and generally agrees with the idea of an activist federal government that acts to improve Americans’ lives. This is a majority that some have called the anti-MAGA majority, which has accurately reflected how its energies have been tied to what it’s against perhaps even more than what it’s in favor of.
But with Harris’s attitude that Trump can be beaten, even as she affirms that her campaign is the underdog, we may be at a point where the pro-democratic majority starts to coalesce more consciously about what it’s for. Indeed, the idea that Democrats are fighting for certain ends, and not just against Donald Trump and right-wing extremism, is something that Harris herself has articulated. Her foregrounding of “freedom” as a core Democratic value echoes the urgings of many political analysts and commentators who have been advocating that the Democrats use such language (and as Ron Brownstein reminds us, this turn in Democratic emphasis can be linked, at least in part, to the fact that the GOP has been busy taking away American freedoms in recent years). Practically speaking, it captures the consequences of MAGA’s anti-democratic threat, so that this threat is made much more tangible, and in the process turns the tables on a GOP that has long claimed the freedom mantle (at least rhetorically). The Harris campaign has defined some specific freedoms — the right to bodily autonomy, the right to be free of gun violence — but its obvious, more general power is the idea that every citizen is free to live their lives as they choose and to themselves define what freedom means.
Because so many Democrats view a second Trump term as likely disastrous for American democracy and basic freedoms, Harris has also been able to campaign without yet fully articulating a concrete platform for her presidency. There is also a general expectation that her agenda would not be a wild departure from that articulated by President Biden’s campaign, which is a non-unreasonable preliminary assumption to make. Personally, I’m ambivalent about how specific Harris should be about her vision for a second term at this point in the campaign. The overriding necessity right now is to defeat Donald Trump and to delegitimize the authoritarian threat posed by the Republican Party, and Harris is performing the necessary role as defender of American democracy, particularly through the “freedom” talk I’ve noted. Along these lines, there are clearly some areas in which Harris has articulated a sharper vision — the aforementioned abortion rights and gun control measures among them — and which are in line with mainstream Democratic Party opinion. Such positions represent a repudiation of the repressive, chaotic, pro-violence politics of Trump and the GOP, and give substance to a democratic and freedom-embracing vision of the United States.
But for now, and for at least some time longer, I’d argue that it’s sufficient to acknowledge and celebrate the sense of possibility that this candidacy has opened up — the increasing feeling that America’s future is not firmly set on a dark and unavoidable trajectory. At the most basic level, it’s fundamentally healthy for a society to see its future as open and malleable, rather than foreclosed and ominous.
And I’ll even go a step further and say that Harris’s lack of a firmly delineated vision isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the American majority. Harris has given the public space to think big and positive again; the longer this period lasts, the more it may in turn pressure her into thinking bigger than she otherwise might have. A superb example of this is Anand Giridharadas’s new blog series about big ideas for a Kamala Harris presidency; his first interview, with the brilliant Astra Taylor, provides just one example of how we might think bigger and bolder in this time of transition, as Taylor discusses the transformative potential of debt forgiveness in a way that ties it to Harris’ discussion of freedom. There is something fundamentally democratic about this period; it’s a time when “[p]art of the work of earning our votes should involve listening to Americans about our visions for the country and our place in the world,” as Roxanne Gay puts it in an excellent column talking about this unexpected time of revived re political imagination.
Cultivating mass enthusiasm and individual initiative about a wide-open future is all the more important since certain crucial aspects of our political world have not changed over the past three weeks. The most looming is Donald Trump and the GOP’s continued dedication to re-taking the White House and controlling Congress via efforts properly described as a slow-motion insurrection. From voter suppression to creating an intimidatory air of menace and barely-contained violence, and committed to returning to power a man who promises to be a dictator on day one, the Republican Party has substantially parted ways with American democracy. Recent reporting on state-level efforts to subvert the vote certification process in Georgia in the event of a Trump loss is just one example of an effort to corrupt American democracy with the aim of placing a GOP strongman in power. The single most powerful blow to GOP insurrectionism would be a blow-out win by the Harris-Walz ticket, but Republican electoral schemes mean that even in the event of a clearly huge Democratic victory, the party could still try to cast doubt on the election results. Those who cast votes for Kamala Harris would need to meet such efforts with a mixture of resolve and contempt, and hold fast to the rightness of their optimism and the non-negotiable worth of their votes. Dreaming big now, and insisting on a campaign and a future Harris presidency that dares to be transformative, can only help us overcome a GOP that would drag us backwards by any means necessary.