Over the past two weeks, the national political conversation has been utterly transformed as reenergized Democrats recognized that with Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket, the election had become a real contest once again.
Meanwhile, dismissed as weird and tarred by their association with the over-the-top authoritarianism of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 planning document, Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans have, for the most part, struggled to get a word in since — something we haven’t seen since 2016.
We thought this might be a good time to look back over the last couple of weeks and take stock of all the writing and thinking we at The Ink and the interview subjects who’ve shared their thoughts with us have done on the meanings and potential of Kamala Harris’s presidential bid.
This exchange, from the finale of Harris’s Atlanta rally this past weekend, captures the shift as well as anything we’ve seen. It comes down to making the coming election about a fight for freedom.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Do we believe in freedom?
AUDIENCE: Yes!
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Do we believe in opportunity?
AUDIENCE: Yes!
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Do we believe in the promise of America?
AUDIENCE: Yes!
THE VICE PRESIDENT: And are we ready to fight for it?
AUDIENCE: Yes!
THE VICE PRESIDENT: And when we fight —
AUDIENCE: We win!
THE VICE PRESIDENT: — we win!!
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Just after she announced her candidacy, we laid out ten thoughts on how Kamala Harris could prevail in November, based on what we’d heard from some of the most insightful thinkers on democracy and the fight against fascism.
It’s not enough to ask people to “save democracy.” People are less motivated to mitigate harms than to create something great. Therefore, the pro-democracy movement needs to argue that it is saving democracy for its own sake, yes, but also saving it to make your life better in tangible ways. It’s what political scientist Daniel Ziblatt calls the “bank shot to save democracy”:
Read “How Harris crushes Trump”
Republican campaigners have been mispronouncing — or, rather, dispronouncing Kamala Harris’s name for a long time. Since the beginning of Harris’s vice-presidential candidacy in 2020, we’ve been looking into how Republicans have used this tactic, why it’s worked to sow and reinforce divisions for so long, and what that says about America.
The other day, when Senator David Perdue, Republican of Georgia, referred to his colleague of many years as “Kamala-mala-mala, I don’t know, whatever!”, I immediately recognized him. All my life, perhaps like you, I have run up against the unwillingness and inability of many Americans to say my name correctly.
Kamala Harris has remade the Democratic presidential campaign’s messaging, focusing on freedom, and the future, and managing to wrest control of the public conversation from Trump.
But the most important thing may be this: No longer is Donald Trump driving the public conversation. In fact, if you’ve been paying attention to pretty much any news outlet, the Republican campaign is mostly playing defense or catchup, for once, struggling to get over vice-presidential pick J.D. Vance’s tall stack of gaffes, or dealing with the torrent of mockery sparked by the recognition that the best way to talk about MAGA is to point out exactly how weird it is, how totally out of step with American life its candidates and advocates are.
Anand was on Morning Joe this past week, talking about Kamala Harris’s transformative first week of campaigning, and why it’s so important that she’s a player in the culture, striking the right emotional chords, and giving the Democrats the real engagement with emotion that’s been missing for too long. She’s making people feel things — and making it clear she’s fighting for those things.
There’s a memorable scene in Kamala Harris’ memoir, The Truths We Hold, in which she recounts taking a tough phone call in a political dispute (in this case, from Jamie Dimon). And what does she do, unconsciously, as she picks up the phone?
She takes off her earrings.
The key to turning the conversation around? On the one hand, it’s been the campaign’s focus on the language of freedom and the future — but it’s also been about how proxies, organizers, activists, and Democratic voters have finally found the right way to talk about Republican leaders. No matter how antidemocratic and frightening their plans might be, they’re not supervillains — they’re out of step with their fellow Americans, creepy, weird.
Could “weird” become the new “deplorable” — or is it a fundamentally different critique that can resist that kind of co-optation? We suspect it’s the latter, though it’ll take some care to keep it on track (and just hear us out here).
That’s because there’s a right way to do it, which is to call out Republican leaders as the creepy, intrusive, control freaks that they are. That keeps the pressure on the Republican Party’s leaders and their relentless drive to take away our freedoms and take charge of the private minutiae of our lives.
Read our open thread on “Weird”
Organizer Ross Morales Rocketto assembled 200,000 White Dudes for Harris on a Zoom call and has reached hundreds of thousands more since — numbers (and intensity of support) he just wouldn’t have considered possible during the Biden phase of the Democratic campaign.
It’s so powerful that all of these people came together to organize around her as a candidate, as white men. I think, to me, that’s the thing in this that has the most power to it, is that all of these white men came together, different political views, different parts of the country, and are here to help elect the first Black woman, the first South Asian woman, the first woman president.
Out of options and unable to mount a coherent attack, Donald Trump has turned to the racist playbook and dusted off a tactical misunderstanding of Kamala Harris’s identity, implying that she can’t possibly be both Black and Indian — and in the process alienating tens of millions of multiracial Americans.
And so here we have Kamala Harris, who is descended, in one branch of her family, from high-caste people who rejected caste; who was conceived because two people of different backgrounds came together to fight racial caste in America; whose mother knew she would have to be twice as tough to survive that American caste system of anti-Blackness and who nonetheless still confronts questions about her Blackness; who herself has triumphed over the American caste system again and again, and who has, all the while, been trailed by questions of whether she is sufficiently committed to dismantling that caste system, in all of its tentacular devastation, not just to personally transcending it; and who, on the day of her anointment as vice-presidential nominee, called to mind yet another ghost of caste haunting this moment and all of us.
Read “Yes, Kamala Harris is both”
The vibe shift Kamala Harris’s candidacy has brought to the campaign and to Democratic enthusiasm may seem surprising, but her skill, depth, and willingness to fight when it matters have been there to read in her memoir all along.
From her first official campaign appearance in West Allis, Wisconsin this past Tuesday, Harris has begun laying out a compelling vision, making the coming election about freedom (for more on the importance of framing things that way, we suggest checking out what messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio has to say) and more precisely about a choice between two visions for the country and the future: freedom or chaos.
Read “Speaking truths and making them real”
The first official ad from the Harris campaign — set to the tune of Beyoncé’s “Freedom” — set a new tone and signaled that the campaign meant to reset the conversation by reclaiming a basic American idea that for too long had been left to the Republicans to define.
The first Kamala Harris for President ad launched today, and it digs into a concept we’ve been discussing for a while now — the need for Democrats to reclaim the idea of freedom — that most central American virtue. And it offers a distinctly positive take on the idea. Harris talks not about freedom from, but about the freedom to be.
Read “Kamala Harris on freedom”
When the future seemed unclear following the Biden-Trump debate, we theorized that there were only three paths forward for the Democratic campaign. Biden and Harris have followed the two that hold the best possible outcome for democracy.
With the situation still fluid and the argument still raging, we at The Ink wanted to break down three of the paths forward. They fall into three categories of the human response to a threat: fight, flight, or freeze.
Some of them give American democracy more of a future than others.
Read “Biden’s choice: Fight, flight, or freeze”
When we talked to sociologist Arlie Hochschild about her new book on Appalachia’s turn to the right, she laid out a path for how the Harris campaign could speak to rural Americans — potentially repairing the years of perceived neglect that have broken the Democratic Party’s relationship with a critical constituency.
She could go and visit the guy I was just describing who said, “I don’t see the difference between me in Murray’s trailer court and my black brother in the inner city,” she could go to him and say, “You know, you’re right.” And so what we’ve got to get together is continue the work of Joe Biden in the Build Back Better bill and all of this money that actually Biden has put into red states because they are the poorer states.
So I think she could and would be heard. And she’d have to remember that it wasn’t very many years ago that this was a Democratic place. In fact, it was quite a cosmopolitan place because a lot of these coal camps had Poles, Italians, and Blacks up from Alabama. And everybody was digging coal. And so these were centers of tolerance, and 80 percent went for Roosevelt and for Clinton. And it wasn’t until they thought there was a war on coal and their industry was being hit by the Dems, and that’s been hard to recover from.
Read “Pride, shame, and what Democrats must say to rural Americans”
Podcast host and journalist Liz Plank has been pioneering a new approach to reaching swing-state voters: a combination of deep canvassing and speed dating she and Anand have dubbed “flirt canvassing.”
I’ve just been talking to men and I’ve been going to particularly male-centric spaces or environments. I went to a tailgate at a Phillies game in Pennsylvania. I went to a day club in Arizona. I’m basically going to swing states, I’m going to male environments where men are there to just hang out and not talk about politics necessarily. And I start talking to them. Yeah, I do some light flirting. I’m not misleading them necessarily. I am single, but I’m definitely there to connect with ’em and talk with them. And then I end up talking to them about politics, talking to them about who they’re voting for, what’s important to them. At the Phillies game, my goal was to talk to them about Project 2025, because it’s a 900-page document on purpose so that most of us don’t end up having the time to read it.
Messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio has told us many times that pro-democracy forces need to learn to tell the better story, throw the better party. And with Harris, it appears the Democratic Party has begun to learn that lesson.
The pro-democracy movement has in recent years somehow allowed the fascists to throw the better party. To be the exuberant, joyous ones. To be energetic. She is reminding us that you can’t just appeal to the head; you have to throw a cookout that people want to be at. Period.
Read our notebook on Harris’s debut rally
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This post was originally published on The.Ink.