Democrats Are Finally on the Offensive Line

It has been more than a half century since the Democratic Party believed that we could do impossible things. After being chastened by a silent majority and rocked by a Reagan revolution, Democrats retreated into what seemed like a permanent defensive position. From policy to rhetoric, the party operated under the assumption that this is a center-right nation and it wasn’t their place to ask us to change. Even when the party was fired up and ready to go out for our nominee, we were swept up more in the charisma and personality of the candidate than any particular policy prescriptions or vision of government. Behind the nominees of this young century, Democrats have been disorganized, reactive, devoted, fretful, guarded, and dutiful. It has taken Kamala Harris’s ascendance to the nomination for Democrats to become ambitious.

Underneath the open joy and enthusiasm of the four-day 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC), there was the verve and will and drive for accomplishment that has characterized the few weeks that Kamala Harris has led the party. By the end of the DNC, Democrats were ready to rebuke Trump and the fascist cult movement that formed around him, to embrace the electoral work of creating new swing states, and to reset the country’s outlook on everything from abortion rights to childcare, energy and labor to our justice system—all under her banner. And it is no surprise as to why: It is easy to believe that we can do impossible things when following someone who already is doing so.

Even setting aside the litany of firsts that her win would represent—first woman, first Black woman, first person of South Asian heritage, first child of two immigrants in almost two centuries—Kamala Harris has been handed one of the most difficult political tasks any candidate has ever assumed. With an unprecedented handoff and an endorsement from a sitting president, Harris consolidated the party behind her in a matter of days, sought and vetted a running mate in barely two weeks, and reorganized the party convention in less than a month. At every precarious step, she has built on the support and momentum to generate fresh waves of enthusiasm, broadcast her message, and support the whole ticket state by state. Under the withering spotlight of the 24-hour news cycle, Harris has operated on her own terms, deflecting missteps and elevating successes with a deftness that stuns the political classes and enthuses the base. We’re not watching a political campaign; we’re witnessing a political miracle.

“Shouldn’t” is etched over every inch of her candidacy, and yet Harris persists, rejecting the limited framework of what has heretofore been possible. Based on her stunted 2019 campaign, Kamala Harris shouldn’t be so clear, so concise, so charming, so capable, yet she is. Based on the normal timetable for running and managing a campaign, the Harris team shouldn’t be able to be up and functioning in places even beyond the scope of the inherited Biden apparatus, yet they are. Abortion rights have been at the political margins for decades, so Harris gives the issue an extended review in primetime across all four nights. Fundraising records are being smashed; voter registration is through the roof; volunteer hours are piling up at a prodigious rate. Kamala Harris isn’t waiting to be told what she can do, and thus every action she takes bolsters a virtuous cycle where the disaffected and disengaged begin to believe that we can rewrite the rules at the same time that our belief further supports the energy of her candidacy.

Because beating Donald Trump in this election is the easy part; preventing the next Donald Trump—by reforming our system, our government, our politics to reject such a person on sight—is the impossible task. Just as so many things have gone right for Harris to be a possibility, so many points of our democracy have had to fail for Donald Trump to still be a threat. We are a country with broken laws overseen by broken enforcement administering a broken campaign system run by at least one broken party out of two viable ones. We have broken courts interpreting statutes that a broken Congress can’t or won’t fix. We have a broken means of electing a president, when a margin of millions of votes can be ignored due to where those votes are cast. But even a clear and unambiguous victory on Election Night won’t be enough to turn the page—with Donald Trump on the ballot, election results are the beginning of a much more dangerous fight, not the fair end of a campaign.

Regardless of the margins in the popular vote or the Electoral College, Trump will use every breach and failure of our electoral system to seize power. He will rally Republican officeholders to repeat and defend his outrageous lies about theft, fraud, and abuse; he will ply Republican-appointed judges with nonsensical arguments with the expectation that they will do his bidding. He will summon his obsessive followers to disrupt vote counting and attack election workers; he will sow doubt about the results in every listening ear—and sow fear into everyone else.

The answer to this—besides the practical countermeasures of election lawyers and federal responses to any threat of violence—is also the beating heart of the Harris campaign: enthusiasm. The energized Democratic Party is no longer waiting passively to react to Trump and Republicans, instead inspiring voters and volunteers to take initiative and drive up the margins everywhere we can. Between the twin traumas of the 2016 Election and January 6, 2021, the Democratic faithful are taking nothing for granted. If the point is that a close election can be stolen, then we will make this election impossible to steal.

In a way, Kamala Harris is less an avatar or representative of Democratic excitement than a conduit. For those of us who have waited to counterpunch, to strike back, to assert our values without embarrassment or apology, the greatest change between Biden and Harris isn’t policy or posture, but permission. Harris is the first Democratic nominee in decades to challenge the assumption of conservatism as the driving force of the American project. Her convention featured a sea of American flags and enough U-S-A chants to put the Olympics to shame, while also very clearly being diverse, liberal, and compassionate—reforging the connections between Democrats, democracy, and old-fashioned patriotism. She has put issues that are important to major Democratic constituencies—economic justice, labor rights, voting rights, and restoring the right to privacy—front and center in her vision for the country. And on issues where she doesn’t reflect the preferences of the base, Harris has demonstrated the capacity to listen, learn, and change. 

She has put issues that are important to major Democratic constituencies—economic justice, labor rights, voting rights, sex equality, and restoring the right to privacy—front and center in her vision for the country. And on issues where she doesn’t reflect the preferences of the base, Harris has demonstrated the capacity to listen, learn, and change. 

It is a daunting task to defeat Donald Trump by large enough margins in more than enough places to secure a safe and peaceful transfer of power, but Kamala Harris is running the campaign capable of doing it. Unlike her predecessors in the Democratic nomination, she isn’t pivoting to the center or retreating from a fight, taking us for granted or stoking our reasonable fears. She isn’t telling us what we won’t get, limiting what we can expect, or hyping up the threat of the opposition. The Harris campaign is engaging us, exciting us to end the electoral threat of Donald Trump—and then to imagine what lies beyond him. Because once we know for sure that we’re not going back, the only thing left is deciding how we move forward.