Member Newsletter
I’m not the first to note this. I saw a headline somewhere over the weekend that the campaign had reset to one between the Happy Tribe and the Angry Tribe. It’s always reductive to try to capture the vast complexity of two national campaigns in a simple catch phrase or binary opposition. But those broad descriptions can capture realities that transcend the details; they are often the takeaway for those watching only at a distance.
It doesn’t take much imagination to think of Trump and the MAGA movement as the Angry Tribe. I mean, they’ve always been Team Angry, or maybe Team Grievance or Team Vengeance. But what about the Harris campaign and the earlier Biden campaign? The Biden campaign, which I supported greatly, was not a happy tribe. I don’t mean that as a criticism. Happy isn’t the only or most important part of a political campaign. Especially when there’s quite a lot not to be happy about.
The Biden campaign was a slog. We’re having to fight a political campaign to protect what most of us view as our birthright as Americans. And we thought we’d already had that fight and won that fight four years ago. Then there’s the fact that the great majority of Democrats believed and believe that Joe Biden greatly exceeded expectations despite inheriting in the White House the ravages of the pandemic and having only the slenderest of congressional majorities. And yet despite these successes, Biden has been unpopular, judged statistically as net negative favorability, since his first year in office. And unpopularity is a messenger of future defeat. For upwards of a year before he stood down as nominee he was behind in the polls, usually very narrowly, it’s true, until the final week. But behind rather than ahead.
None of that is fun or happy.
I said I didn’t mean this as a criticism. And I really mean that. Politics isn’t about fun or being happy any more than life is about fun and being happy. We want those things but often we don’t get them. And we have to remain resilient in the face of reverses and all life’s vagaries. We don’t get to bail out when things stop being fun. Some of the most important things we do in life come in moments that are not fun, not happy, in which we persist in spite of those things.
Then there’s the matter of the President’s age which has hung over his presidency at least since 2022. There’s a range of ways the President’s supporters have viewed his age — as an unfortunate liability, an exaggerated issue mainly of optics, a big deal, a small deal, an exaggerated deal. But there’s something about the matter that transcends all of this. In pre-modern societies the king embodies the state. If the king is vital, the state is strong and vice versa. It’s a standard trope in the literature of medieval and all pre-modern kingship. And we’re not entirely different despite living in a rule-of-law, civic democratic state … at least for the moment.
Biden’s physical fragility cast an inevitable shadow, a pall of fragility and anxiety over his presidency, or if not his presidency than his chances of a reelection campaign, which as the months grew shorter, meant his presidency. Especially over the last year that fragility imbued the campaign with a feeling of limits and uncertainty.
This of course paints a very dreary picture. It leaves out the legislative successes, the out-of-the-blue high-wire act wins over things like the debt ceiling and rejuvenating American alliances in Europe and Asia. It leaves out the way that expectations were so often very low and he had a way of beating them. Again and again. But again, remember: we’re not talking about good or successful or necessary. Here we’re talking about happy. And I don’t think there’s any doubt that this captures the campaign. The campaign wasn’t happy. It certainly wasn’t ebullient or joyous. It was a slog, a sort of long twilight struggle.
I’m not sure what there is to analyze about how the Kamala Harris campaign is different. What’s different is right there in front of us. I don’t think we can remove from the mix that winning, or at least having an energy that makes it seem like you’re in the hunt, is transformative. Within moments of the beginning of Harris’s campaign, Democratic small donors went to their devices and sent her almost $100 million dollars in 36 hours. Though it’s taken about three weeks for her to move into a small but significant popular vote lead, almost from the first days polls registered a jump in support. Then there are the crowds, totally eclipsing those for President Biden’s rallies and even those of Trump’s. And all of this is impossible to separate from the three weeks that preceded it, a dismal and seemingly unending passage that functioned as a vast psycho-social slingshot, pulling back with ever-mounting physical tension into as yet unplumbed lengths of despair, anxiety and fear to be able, when released, to sling forward with an unimaginable intensity.
But the character of Harris’s campaign can’t be limited to prelude and success. The Harris campaign has a different texture. It is forward-looking and loose and ebullient in a different way. As we’ve discussed in other posts, her campaign has entered the broader popular culture in ways that neither Biden nor Trump ever has. I find it very difficult to pick apart what is intrinsic to the campaign vs the feel of energy and the possibility of victory. As I’ve told people countless times in other contexts, every losing campaign is full of idiots and vice versa. It may be a chicken and egg question that is mostly beside the point. But the difference in mood, texture and message is dramatically different and there’s little question this bulks very large in the campaign’s ongoing momentum going on one month in.