Kamala Can Win

Kamala Can Win

Hope will be an essential resource for her campaign. At her first rally, she succeeded in providing it.

This is the bottom line: she has a chance to win.

In just two and a half weeks, both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have visited Wisconsin, an essential state for any Democrat to reach an Electoral College majority. Biden’s first rally after his disastrous debate with Trump was in a middle school gym near the airport in Madison, where he then filmed his interview with George Stephanopoulos. Two weeks later, unable to mount a convincing recovery and facing increasingly dire poll numbers, he announced that he would step down as the party’s nominee. Harris’s first rally after this decision—on the morning that she secured the number of delegates she needs to become the Democratic Party’s nominee—took place in a high school gym near the airport in Milwaukee. I attended both events, and the contrast between the two was stark.

Events such as these are filled with loyal Democrats: invites go out to those who have volunteered and donated to campaigns in the past. The atmosphere at Biden’s rally was supportive but grim. Speakers touted Democratic achievements and the danger of Trump, and Biden was certainly better on script than he had been during the debate. After his speech, he visited the overflow room and after saying a few words, did a bit of crowd work with a sleepy child from a mixed-race family. When parents of the child introduced themselves as his “two dads,” Biden didn’t miss a beat: “Dads are hard to raise!” he joked. These fathers would be voting for any Democrat in the fall. But Biden’s physical frailty was unmistakable, as was the frailty of his campaign. Though he interpreted the crowd’s presence as support for him to continue in the race, one-on-one conversations, where there were many doubts about whether he could be a competitive candidate, told a different story. And outside, there were two groups of protesters: one waving flags for Palestine and another calling for him simply to step down as a candidate for the good of the party.

It took another two weeks for Biden to absorb the messages those protesters—and more importantly, his political allies, the polling, and fundraising numbers—were telling him. He wouldn’t defeat Trump, and if that task was as important as he claimed, someone else would have to do it. Rather than a potentially chaotic mini-primary, his endorsement and those of other significant Democrats (as well as unions including the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and AFT), quickly shifted to Harris. If Biden had declared that he was not running a year ago and allowed an open primary process, no one can say whether Harris would have triumphed. Her 2020 primary campaign did not prosper, and as vice president, she burned through staff and struggled with her assigned portfolios. But the Harris who showed up in Milwaukee on July 23 seemed both confident and ready to meet the moment.

The crowd was ready too. The record-setting donations—more than $50 million in one day—that poured into the Democratic Party as soon as Biden stepped down indicated pent-up demand from rank-and-file Democrats. The atmosphere at the rally was similar. People were happy to be there. Democrats who had driven in from more conservative parts of the state expressed relief about being among fellow partisans. The crowd was diverse by race, occupation, and age. In breaks between speakers, rallygoers got a wave going around the gym with the “Kamala” signs handed out by the campaign. Biden himself was treated with great respect—almost every speaker thanked him for making a difficult decision that placed the country’s interests above his own, drawing generous applause. (This also was made into a clear contrast with Trump, who would never do such a thing.) But everyone I spoke to agreed that it had been the right decision for Biden to step down. Mothers spoke about their grown children who had told them that they weren’t going to vote for Biden, but would vote for Kamala. (And they spoke about their aging parents and the struggles they faced.) Biden had promised a bridge to the future, and, however reluctantly, he had now provided it.

What’s more, there was genuine enthusiasm for Harris herself. She was not just occupying the role of “generic Democrat,” but exceeding it. The basic outlines of her campaign, and why it might work in 2024, seem in place. To make the contrast with Trump, she focuses on her career as a prosecutor. As district attorney, she says, “I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Other than this professional background, and some discussion of the fact that Harris spent a few years living in Wisconsin as a young girl (her father, the Jamaican post-Keynesian economist Donald Harris, taught at the University of Wisconsin in Madison from 1968 to 1972), biography was left largely to the side. The person who introduced Harris did draw thunderous applause for saying that she would finally break the glass ceiling, but her campaign seems to think that letting Republicans point out her race and gender, which they will inevitably do in a leering and offensive way (calling her a “DEI candidate,” for example), is better political jiu-jitsu.

Still, her identity is important. Invocations of Roe and Dobbs ran throughout the rally. Restoring safe access to abortion will be a central theme of the campaign, and Harris can stand up for it in a way that Biden could not. In addition, she folded it into a broader critique of Trump’s authoritarian personality, as well as the dangerous contents of Project 2025. (“Can you believe they put that thing in writing?” Harris seemed to ad-lib at one point during the speech.) The causes of reproductive freedom and protecting democracy were united by the theme of freedom, both rhetorically and musically. Now that Beyoncé has blessed the campaign’s use of “Freedom” (from 2016’s Lemonade), it was used as both entrance and exit music.

The positive agenda of the campaign—beyond the danger of Trump—was not presented in great detail but was briefly sketched. The standard Democratic promises to protect Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act were all made. But she also committed to the goals of ending child poverty, enacting support for child care, and paid parental leave. These programs were cut from the Build Back Better agenda and are still on the table, if sufficient support can be found in Congress. There was not much that indicated a post-Keynesian or pre-distributional agenda, but there was a particularly enthusiastic roar from the crowd when she mentioned the possibility of every worker having the opportunity to join a union.

How well her message will reach outside of the Democratic base that filled the arena remains to be seen. Not every day will go as well as this one did. Trump and Vance have most of their supporters locked in, and they will find lines of attack. Racism and sexism have not suddenly vanished from American politics, although she renders those attacks so obvious that they may be partially defused, at least for some. But nothing about her personality nor the content of her campaign yet suggest the opportunity to halt some of the party realignments under way. Harris would be wise to choose a vice-presidential candidate who can speak from personal experience about the needs and experiences of working people.

Though for the moment Harris has managed to secure endorsements from practically every part of the Democratic coalition, internal tensions will also surely reemerge. The event’s only heckler, an older man who walked with a cane, began shouting “Will you stop the genocide in Gaza?” midway through the speech. If Kamala heard him, she ignored him, and he was led away gently by security. But as he went, a few people in the audience quietly whispered to him that they too would also like to see the administration change course. They didn’t understand their presence in the crowd as an endorsement of Biden’s approach toward Israel. But even if no one knows just how different her approach would be as president, they can hope.

If Kamala wins, that hope will be an essential resource for her campaign. On this day, she succeeded in providing it. Hope that she might continue the things Democrats appreciate about the Biden administration, while improving on the things they don’t. Hope that she can draw out the vulnerabilities of the Trump-Vance ticket in a way that Biden could not. Hope that their canvassing, their donations of time and money, would not go to waste. Hope that the country can be better, and a place that they can be proud of.

Senator Tammy Baldwin, who is up for reelection this year, was conspicuously absent in Madison for Biden’s visit. But she showed up in Milwaukee for Kamala. She, at least, seems to think that Kamala will help her, and that she will be able to help Kamala. The crowd thought so too. They had been waiting too long for their party to offer them a viable candidate, which perhaps made it easy to overlook some of her campaign’s potential weaknesses. But in a way that is critical for modern presidential campaigns, Harris was successful in offering people the feeling that they could participate in something that matters. At one point, she drew a contrast between the backward-looking agenda of the Republicans and the forward-looking one of the Democrats. “Which kind of country do we want to live in?” she asked. “The Kamala one,” someone in the crowd yelled. Kamala stopped, smiled, and waited for the cheers to subside.

Patrick Iber teaches history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.