The Scene
ROMULUS, Mich. – For the first time in a long time, Democrats wanted to talk about their crowds.
Their voters were trudging a mile from mud-bound cars to see the newly completed presidential ticket. They were fainting in the heat as they stood through warm-up speeches and ran out of bottled water. They were pinning new lime green “brat” buttons on their shirts and wearing fresh “Cat Ladies for Kamala” gear. They were chanting (“KA-MA-LA”) over the protesters who’d showed up to demand an arms embargo on Israel — protesters who used to get heard more clearly over the nervous is-he-okay quiet of Joe Biden’s speeches.
“I feel a lot better than I did in 2016 at this time,” said Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell, gazing out at 15,000 people in a hangar of Detroit’s international airport on Wednesday. She was one of the few Democrats to warn that Hillary Clinton was vulnerable in the state in that election.
“I don’t know how I can explain it to you,” marveled Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, 36 hours into his role as the Democratic candidate for vice president. “Walking into that arena in Philly, or that field out in Wisconsin, or right here — to what I have been told is the largest rally of the campaign.”
The presidential nominee delivered a drum-tight stump speech, which has differed so little from state to state that anti-Harris accounts on X have already spliced videos together to try to drum a scandal out of the repetition. In the hangar, for people hearing it for the first time, every line hit — denunciations of Donald Trump and Project 2025, the slogan that “we’re not going back,” a thank-you to Joe Biden, and promises to lower prices and help “build wealth” for the working class.
“Understand: In this fight, we are joyful warriors,” Harris said. “We know that while fighting for a brighter future may be hard work, hard work is good work.” The cheer was loud enough to set off decibel warnings on Apple watches, and she repeated the line: “Hard work is good work.”
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David’s view
The first days of the new Harris/Walz ticket had gone so well, after the “switcheroo” from Biden to Harris went so well, that Republicans were describing it as a “sugar high”. And the new campaign’s first problems were already starting, nudged along by Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who chased the ticket from city to city to egg on questions about Walz’s 24-year National Guard career. (It ended before his unit was deployed to a combat zone, a simmering issue in all of his campaigns.)
Still: For the first time since the COVID pandemic shut them down, Democrats are getting the sort of in-person energy that they became used to under Barack Obama. For the first time since 2012, they are rallying behind a ticket that is not dogged by some existential crisis — Hillary Clinton’s deathless email server investigation in 2016, Biden’s risk-averse social distancing in 2020, this year’s panic about nominating an 81-year old man who’d lost his fastball somewhere in a Rehoboth beach house.
“We just had this huge distraction with Biden and his age and everything,” said Alpesh Patel, 50, a software engineer who had taken a break from knocking doors for Harris to show up early for the Michigan rally. “Now we can focus on the job at hand. Walz is fine. I think any of them would have been fine.”
This has been a deeply irritating moment for Republicans, who exited their convention last month with a unified party and a weak opponent. They chanted “Fight! Fight! Fight!” like Donald Trump had, after being grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet. It was hard to imagine the country moving on from that, a sentiment I heard from Democrats, too.
They are much less worried now that Trump’s survival and quick thinking won him the election in July. The shooting in Butler, Pa. feels more to them like the two failed assassination attempts on Gerald Ford, which didn’t factor into his 1976 re-election bid. Harris’s new stump speech suggests that the choice now is between a hopeful Democratic-led country and a Trump-led country of “chaos, fear, and hate,” which, if you squint, files everything going on with the MAGA movement as a crazy distraction that Americans can move on from.
If this ends up being the Democrats’ high point, it’s not that high. On this day in 2020, Biden led national polls by 6.9 points; on this day in 2016, Clinton led by 7.9 points. Harris leads the same poll averages by 0.5 points, and runs weaker than Biden’s 2020 polling in most swing states.
So why are the crowds for this ticket so large and so joyous? Why was I watching giddy voters line up along a security fence to see Harris exit Air Force Two, or groups of Democrats pose for photos with the police officers who’d secured the event all day?
My conversations with voters, under the din of Beyoncé songs (Harris’ walk-out music) and “Born to Run” (Walz’s walk-out music), suggested that Democrats were just overjoyed to have a normal presidential ticket, surrounded by other Democratic winners. They had been beating Trump-aligned Republicans locally already, and Walz was one of the Democrats pulling that off in his own state.
“Tim and I get along because we both lead according to a three-part strategy: Get shit done,” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said at Wednesday’s rally.
There will be bad days, gaffes, stories that get out of control. But there is zero nostalgia for the Biden-led ticket, and a mood much more like 2012, when Democrats knew Barack Obama could excite their base but worried that he would run out of swing voters. In their third run against Donald Trump, they’re less worried about their ticket; they’re less afraid of his powers, epitomized by his shrunk-down rally schedule. That is the mood right now, and we’ll see how it lasts.
Room for Disagreement
The Detroit-area rally also marked the first clash between Harris and voters she needs: Supporters of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. I was not far from the group of women who chanted “Kamala Kamala, you can’t hide; we won’t vote for genocide.” Harris’s response to them got the biggest positive crowd reaction all day.
“You know what, if you want Donald Trump to win, then say that,” she said. “Otherwise, I’m speaking.”
This was the one return to a norm of the Biden-led campaign: Gaza activists threatening not to support the ticket, and reporters paying attention when they did so. Leaders of the “uncommitted” delegate bloc held a press conference before the rally, then met with Harris, then released a statement saying that they wanted a formal meeting to discuss, among other things, an arms embargo. Harris’s foreign policy advisor quickly ruled out that policy: The Biden-Harris administration is looking for a ceasefire, not any other changes in the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Notable
- In the New York Times, Katie Rogers looks at the joy bursting out at these first Harris-Walz events: “Adopting joy as a political shield has also allowed Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz to throw some bare-knuckled punches at Mr. Trump and his running mate.”
- In the New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang asks how long Harris can run without serious questions about her policy shifts since 2020: “The press, it seems, will have to persist in the thankless task of demanding answers, even if we risk disrupting the good times.”