Donald Trump's right-wing supporters hope to return him to the U.S. presidency. To prevent that, the Democrats have undergone some drastic changes in leadership and strategy over the past few months.Umit Bektas/Reuters
Nearly eight years ago, Donald Trump’s triumph over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election bent the arc of United States history, crowning the former television entertainer as the country’s most consequential politician.
Mr. Trump has not merely altered the politics of a Republican Party now largely remade by his brand of loose-tongued, profane and unpredictable leadership.
He is also at least partly responsible for the transformations within the Democratic Party that led to the upending of this year’s presidential contest in its final months, with President Joe Biden’s withdrawal and the breakneck consolidation behind Vice-President Kamala Harris in his stead.
Kamala Harris has been busy campaigning for president since the current office-holder, Joe Biden, decided in late July that he would not run again.Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters
The embrace of Ms. Harris is a reflection less of her particular strengths – her stump speech remains little changed from when she was Mr. Biden’s running mate, and she has offered few indications of how she would govern differently from him – than of the ways the Democratic Party has, for now, been brought together by fear of a common enemy.
For the party, little else matters.
“We must, we must, we must defeat Trump,” Mr. Biden told CBS News recently, as he explained why he abandoned his re-election bid last month.
Nancy Pelosi, the powerful former House speaker who arguably did more than any other Democrat to engineer Mr. Biden’s withdrawal, offered a similar explanation. “My goal in life was that [Donald Trump] would never set foot in the White House again,” she told reporters earlier this month, after Kamala Harris became the party’s new presidential nominee.
Organizers prepare the podium and thousands of balloons at the United Center in Chicago, where Democrats hold their convention from Aug. 19 to Aug. 22.Alex Brandon/AP; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The sudden anointment of Ms. Harris has brought a flourish of exuberance to Democrats, as the party prepares to celebrate its new nominee – and her strengthening place in polls – at its national convention, which begins Monday in Chicago. Democrats boast that Ms. Harris has restored joy to a party that had been convulsed by anxiety over Mr. Biden’s age and mental acuity.
Her nomination has, for now, helped to cover over deep fissures within the party over immigration and foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, where the U.S. has continued to arm Israel despite growing international concern over Palestinian casualties in the Israel-Hamas war.
When protesters interrupted a recent Harris campaign event with shouts of “Kamala! Kamala! You can’t hide! We won’t vote for genocide!” Ms. Harris was withering in response. “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that,” she said, in one of the few unscripted moments she has allowed since becoming the party’s nominee. “Otherwise, I’m speaking.”
Inside the party, critics have become supporters. James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute and a prominent Democrat who is close to Bernie Sanders, had warned that Mr. Biden risked an exodus of supporters with his support for Israel. But Mr. Zogby now supports Ms. Harris. “To date, I don’t have complaints,” he said. “I continue to be impressed with the fact that she is operating as an inclusive candidate that I would vote for.”
The focus on the threat posed by Mr. Trump has been welcomed by those who still fault their own party for enabling the former president’s rise to power in 2016, when he defeated a Clinton campaign that had underestimated its opponent.
“I don’t know that we would have had Trump if they hadn’t laughed at the idea of him ever becoming president,” said Virginia Ramos Rios, a former campaign manager for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman, who is among the party’s most prominent progressives.
For Ms. Ramos Rios, Ms. Harris represents a fundamental rebuke to everything Mr. Trump is and stands for: a woman who has espoused liberal policies, and the daughter of a Black father and a South Asian mother.
Ms. Harris, Ms. Ramos Rios said, “shows that the U.S. is not Trumpville. It’s not MAGA.”
Ms. Harris's messaging on the Trump campaign – that the ex-president is 'weird' and unfit to govern – comes after months of dire warnings from Mr. Biden about the threat to U.S. democracy.Julia Nikhinson/The Associated Press
For Ms. Harris, and the party whose flag she now bears, the next few months will be a test of whether that is enough.
Before his departure, Mr. Biden built his campaign around dark warnings about the threat to U.S. democracy posed by Mr. Trump, who continues to argue – against all evidence – that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
But Mr. Biden spent months struggling to gain an advantage before late June, when a disastrous debate performance precipitated his withdrawal.
“Biden wasn’t winning the polls even before the debate,” said Larry Cohen, the former president of the Communications Workers of America. Mr. Cohen is now board chair of Our Revolution, a political action organization with ties to Mr. Sanders, the progressive senator.
In his view, that suggests merely campaigning on the dangers posed by a second Trump presidency wasn’t enough. “In general, I think you have to run for things, not just against,” Mr. Cohen said. “They have to campaign on, ‘This is how we will govern,’ as well as, ‘Trump is diabolical.’ ”
One of Ms. Harris's stated priorities is to restore legal protections for abortion, which the U.S. Supreme Court rolled back during the Trump presidency.Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
Ms. Harris, like Mr. Biden, has promised major change that she can achieve only if Democrats secure unassailable power in Congress. Those changes include enshrining abortion rights in law, and putting in place new restrictions on guns, including universal background checks and a ban on selling assault weapons to civilians.
What she needs, Mr. Cohen said, is to articulate clear priorities that she can achieve in her first few months in office. “What are we going to do in the first 100 days? Because everything else becomes messaging,” he said.
The party’s convention will offer a moment of sustained attention – time to make the case for the kind of leader Ms. Harris wants to be and the policies she wants to pursue.
Not everyone thinks it’s wise to open that discussion, given the likelihood that elements of the party will disagree. “It’s a pragmatic decision – that the party has to appear unified if Donald Trump is going to be defeated,” said Nadia Brown, director of the women’s and gender studies program at Georgetown University. She is the author of Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites. “The Democratic Party knows they can’t afford to have those kinds of conversations in public right now when they have to be really together on trying to defeat Trump,” she said.
But a failure to articulate a clear policy agenda risks ceding ground to Mr. Trump, who has already sought to depict Ms. Harris as an empty vessel, once calling her “dumb as a rock.”
Photos of Democratic presidents line the walls of a United Auto Workers office in Wayne, Mich., where Ms. Harris stopped to rally support in a crucial battleground state.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Matt Grossmann, the director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University, has kept close watch on how campaigns have operated in Michigan, a key swing state that Ms. Clinton lost but Mr. Biden won.
Ms. Clinton, he said, erred by running national ads in Michigan, rather than messages tailored to people in the state. But the 2020 election provided an even greater lesson for Democrats, he said: Talking about Mr. Trump has only limited motivational power.
“Messages about Trump – positive and negative – were very ineffective at moving voters compared to messages about Biden,” he said.
“And I expect that to be even more true this time.”
A Trump supporter walks past an anti-Trump protester before one of his recent campaign stops in Asheville, N.C.Jonathan Drake/Reuters
Mr. Trump is a known quantity, his impression on the American public so fixed that major events – his conviction on 34 felony counts, his defiant survival of an assassination attempt – did little to shift voter inclinations.
Ms. Harris is less well known. For her, this election may ultimately turn on who prevails in the effort to convince voters of who she really is.
Is she the liberal-leaning former district attorney that Mr. Trump has sought to associate with the social ills of her home state of California? Or can she be convincing in her description of herself as a prosecutor who was tough on big business, and who will show the same dedication to lowering pharmaceutical prices and controlling inflation?
Polls show Ms. Harris is now performing as well as a “generic Democrat.” That’s an improvement on Mr. Biden. It’s not yet clear it’s enough to win an election that remains months away.
“It’s going to be a battle to define Harris,” Prof. Grossmann said. “That all is still up in the air.”
This election will be Mr. Trump's third attempt to take the U.S. presidency, after one that succeeded in 2016, and one that did not in 2020.Janie Osborne/The Associated Press
But some party elders are confident that it is Mr. Trump himself who matters most in this election. He won in 2016 as an accomplished entertainer with a charismatic television presence who was promising a new approach to politics.
Voters then “hadn’t seen how disastrous a Trump presidency was,” said Ed Rendell, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee and former governor of Pennsylvania.
He pointed to Mr. Trump’s chaotic time in the White House, his controversial approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, his dalliances with dictators and his role in the 2021 riot on the U.S. Capitol. (Mr. Trump has built his campaign around other aspects of his time as president, including a reduction in the number of illegal immigrants and the country’s economic performance before the arrival of elevated inflation.)
But the deciding factor this year, Mr. Rendell believes, lies less in how Ms. Harris is perceived than how Mr. Trump’s fortunes have changed. Not only did the former president lose in 2020, but Republicans underperformed in the past two midterm elections.
“Because of what he did in office and what happened on Jan. 6,” Mr. Rendell said, “Trump is a much weaker candidate than he was in 2016.”
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