Kamalapalooza

To understand the Kamala Harris phenomenon, you have to understand the depth of hopeless agony that Democrats—politicians, activists, ordinary voters—felt in the aftermath of June’s presidential debate. It was an agony perhaps best grasped by reference to those classical tragedies in which free will cannot do anything to prevent the catastrophe. Donald Trump had re-revealed himself to be an idiotic, brazen liar—he lied about the size of the January 6 mob, about Biden’s tax plans, about Democrats aborting babies “after birth.” But all that anyone could think about was an ashen president barely able to string together audible, responsive, grammatical sentences.

By the Fourth of July, Joe Biden’s approval rating stood at 36.9 percent, the lowest yet in his term. A chorus of pollsters—Zogby, Reuters, Economist, Ipsos: their very names evoke Greek oracles—pointed to a November victory for the would-be despotic kleptocrat and terminator of the American experiment over the stubborn old Scranton pocketbook king. The stars seemed to align even more fatefully when a young man armed with his father’s AR-15 fired at Trump during a Pennsylvania rally. Trump emerged with a bloody ear, a politically galvanizing identity as an assassination survivor, and iconic photographs involving a scrum of Secret Service agents and Old Glory fluttering against a blue sky.

At 1:46 PM on Sunday, July 21, after nearly a month of insisting he would stay in the race, Biden announced that he was standing down. Half an hour later, he endorsed his vice president as the Democratic nominee. By 9:00 that night, nearly $50 million in small-dollar donations had poured in. By Monday night, Kamala Harris had received enough pledges from Democratic National Convention delegates to effectively wrap up her nomination—a “coronation,” grumbled a few critics, but there was no other pretender to the throne. Most remarkably, the party grassroots spontaneously expressed overwhelming support for Harris. There was an explosion of volunteering (in the battleground state of Michigan, the number of campaign volunteers more than doubled to three thousand within forty-eight hours of Biden’s statement, with 100,000 signing up nationwide), organizing (a Win with Black Women Zoom call attracted 44,000 participants), donating (the campaign raised $126 million in the first three days), and pro-Harris TikTok memes made and consumed by the demographic that had eluded Biden—young people. It was truly extraordinary: a nomination by acclamation.

On Tuesday night Harris held her first rally, in electorally crucial Milwaukee. “We are not going back,” she proclaimed. “Not going back! Not going back!” echoed the crowd. Her slogan was already set. On Thursday morning, she released her first campaign video. Its theme was freedom, and its theme song was Beyoncé’s “Freedom.” By the end of the first week, Harris’s favorability had increased by eight points, to forty-three, while Trump’s had dropped by four points to thirty-six. Whereas Biden had trailed Trump nationally by six points, Harris had almost instantly drawn level. And whereas Biden had been trailing in Wisconsin (by four points), Michigan (by five points), and Pennsylvania (by four points), by Friday night a Fox News survey showed Harris tying Trump in all three states. Everything had changed utterly.

Except that Donald Trump is not going anywhere. Republican attack ads will aggressively portray Harris as a ditzy, inauthentic West Coast liberal, and right-wing social media operations will try to amplify divisions within the anti-Trump bloc. Harris’s nomination honeymoon will end. She will come under lopsided media scrutiny, and outlets such as The New York Times and CNN could very well launch a pious, nihilistic crusade against her on some relatively piffling pretext. Trump, meanwhile, will almost certainly not be the subject of a crusade. On the contrary, the same media will continue to treat him with the exasperation, affection, and forbearance reserved for an ever-prodigal, ever-returning son.

That’s the lay of the land. Victory won’t come easy. What can Harris and her team do to maximize her chances of winning?

It begins with the insight that, notwithstanding the chanting rally crowds (“Ka-ma-la! Ka-ma-la!”) and the coconut tree memes and the whole Kamalapalooza, Harris’s current popularity is only somewhat connected to her personal traits, which at this stage are relatively unknown, even to those who follow politics closely. Fundamentally, the Kamala craze reflects the elation and hope and unleashed power of a party base unexpectedly freed from its gloom and despair. The ActBlue movement is back.

Recall that in 2020 people supported Joe Biden not because he had uniquely appealing qualities but because he was the anti-Trump candidate with the D after his name. As the D guy, he was deposited in the White House by a Blue Wave set in motion, well before his presidential run, by an informal network of grassroots groups such as the Women’s March and Indivisible and Swing Left and Run for Something, almost all of them powered by the small-dollar donation platform ActBlue. These groups were the visible features of a vast progressive organism that came into being over the course of 2017 and then kept growing. At the smallest level, it consisted of countless private social interactions and pro bono deeds that were informally unified by a shared purpose: the electoral defeat, locally and nationally, of President Trump and his party. The organism grew and became self-aware. It sometimes called itself the Resistance. It turned into the most effective, and most undervalued, liberal grassroots movement since the civil rights era.

The ActBlue movement has not reinvented political activism: it relies on fundraising, writing postcards to voters, staffing phone banks, protesting, knocking on doors, posting on digital media, Zooming, chatting over a glass of wine. It has, however, figured out something special: if hundreds of thousands of passionate, talkative, well-informed liberals—a large number of them middle-aged women—purposefully circulate in their communities, they not only spread the word but, by their presence and example, change the vibes and the milieu. They make liberal politics seem dynamic, meaningful, and doable. From early 2018 onward, newly politicized and organized Americans have ensured that Democrats have overperformed at the ballot box—especially in the special elections, midterms, and ballot measures that for years had been dominated by GOP voters.

Biden and his team failed to understand or acknowledge this. The ActBlue movement—its energy, its boldness, its up-to-date political knowhow—had no part in the Biden entourage. Instead the president surrounded himself with old Washington hands whose political playbooks, like his own, relied on the received wisdom of the 1990s, when it was viewed as politically savvy for a Democratic president to distance himself from his base to win over “moderate” voters. This school of thought holds that America needs a strong Republican Party, young people don’t vote, Israel must be supported at any cost, good policy takes care of politics, and the party grassroots are not to be trusted.

That political strategy didn’t work. The more Biden’s administration delivered on the issues that Trumpist white working-class voters professed to value (a strong job market, a strong border, strong infrastructure, strong manufacturing), the less popular the president became. The more he embraced the Republican Party as a bipartisan partner in government (on the American Rescue Plan, on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, on his general PR), the more extreme and emboldened it grew. Now the insurrectionist Mike Johnson is the speaker of the House, the corrupt Supreme Court acts like a far-right legislator, and Donald Trump again stands at the threshold of power.

The Washington chapter of Harris’s political career began in 2017. She has little personal experience of Republican politicians being upright guys with good-faith conservative opinions. She gives no sign of believing that working-class heartland families figure out their political allegiance by gathering at the kitchen table and studying the candidates’ positions on the issues. She seems naturally aware that Americans inhabit a hypermediated reality, which is to say, their political consciousness is formed not by exposure to vertical data messaging—the politician or the union leader or the news anchor handing down policy information—but by a complex flux of social narratives and emotional currents and vibes.

The ActBlue movement has proven that it knows how to navigate that flux. Now Harris finds herself its superstar leader. It is a political privilege that is almost impossible to fathom: the loyalty of an enormous, battle-hardened, electorally formidable, deep-pocketed army of anti-Republican warriors who have quickly filled her campaign’s coffers and erased Trump’s polling advantage in the battleground states.

The question for the Harris campaign, then, is what to do with the grassroots coalition she has inherited. The answer is to do the opposite of what Biden did. In part because he was quixotically fixated on earning the approval of Trump-voting Rust Belt white guys, in part because he didn’t understand the new political landscape, the president declined to align himself with the grassroots. This weakened their morale and efficacy and, as a consequence, his own favorability. Harris must do everything in her power to harness them.

There is every sign that she will. Harris appears to be very much in tune with her supporters. She emphasizes her experiences as a criminal prosecutor, casting Trump as a perp: her first TV ad, just released, affirms that she is “fearless” woman who “put murderers and abusers behind bars.” “When we fight, we win,” she called out in Milwaukee, to the delight of her audience. “We are a people-powered campaign,” she said at a rally in Atlanta on Tuesday. “After I announced my candidacy, we saw the best week of grassroots fundraising in presidential campaign history.” She seems to relish the role of the movement leader, as well she might, bearing in mind how well it has served her. July was, according to her campaign, the best grassroots fundraising month in presidential history. Sixty percent of July donors were women. The number of Gen Z donors, compared with June, increased more than tenfold.

But leadership is a two-way street. Harris must make strategic decisions with her coalition’s wellbeing—its unity and energy—at the forefront of her thinking. That means, for example, doing nothing that will increase the divisions within the party over Israel–Gaza, which is the most internally contentious policy issue her campaign faces. It means consulting with grassroots advisers about building her brand: they will help her to avoid the deadly boilerplate tone that undermined the appeal of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Al Gore. It means recognizing her ever-growing debt to the movement and finding ways to incorporate that recognition in her campaign personnel. That debt isn’t only only political; it’s personal. Harris’s weakness, from when she last auditioned for the job of president in 2020, has been the accusation that she’s a careerist and a phony—the opposite of a movement politician. When she wears the mantle bestowed on her by the ActBlue movement, the fighter’s mantle of the anti-Trump, there is nothing phony about her.