In Philadelphia and Houston, in Milwaukee and Atlanta, adoring crowds of Democrats always answer yes. The call-and-response is a joyful affirmation of the Harris-Walz campaign: that the American dream is still alive, if not well, and a more perfect union is possible—together we can preserve and protect a multiracial liberal democracy in a world full of autocratic threats.
But that crowd-pleasing line was not a new addition when Harris became the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee in the most unusual of ways. Long before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed his VP, Harris had been posing the question to rallygoers in Manassas, Virginia; in Phoenix; in Jacksonville, Florida. Without knowing it, she had been rehearsing for this fall’s general election campaign for years.
Then came the Summer of Kamala. It “marked the moment Democrats stopped playing defense and went on offense, figured out how to put Donald Trump’s campaign on its heels, and never looked back,” Mallory McMorrow told me. McMorrow is the Michigan state senate’s majority whip, and so, given Michigan’s swing-state status, she is a regular on cable news assessing the state of play. She said that thousands of new Michigander volunteers, and even some pop-up homemade merch stands, were tangible signs of the summertime spike. But even more notable to McMorrow was what she called “the renewed energy in our more dedicated organizers.”
“They were always going to do the work, but it started to feel like an obligation, one that was getting harder and harder no matter how much we believed,” she said. “Now it’s an opportunity and a joy every single day.”
Joy. It is one of the most intoxicating three-letter words in the English language. The Harris campaign of joy connected with people who had all but given up on Biden. During the final weeks of summer, the “Kamala bump” was suddenly apparent everywhere: in polls, grassroots donations, television ratings, news subscriptions. Harris’s 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold, climbed back onto the New York Times’ bestseller list and stayed there week after week. Billboard reported that “Harris-connected pop songs” like Chappell Roan’s “Femininomenon” and Beyoncé’s “Freedom” experienced streaming spikes. Politico referred to the bump in a piece that predicted a spike in women running for elective office. Trump confidant Kellyanne Conway even acknowledged it, backhandedly, when she said “the Kamala bump was a direct cause from the Biden slump.”
Campaign stories were instantly hot again. Social media influencers were eager to catch up and cash in. So were old-line media companies: The Washington Post, in desperate need of a boost, said the July and August stretch that coincided with the Democratic ticket revamp was its first “sustained period” of positive subscriber growth in three years. CNN (where I now work as chief media analyst) garnered more than 6 million viewers for Harris and Tim Walz’s first joint interview.
“We came into 2024,” MSNBC contributor Errin Haines said, “with an unprecedented election that also felt very status quo—until it suddenly wasn’t.” Haines, editor at large for The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom covering gender, politics, and policy, pointed out that the electorate was “ahead of the establishment” for the first half of the year. In poll after poll, focus group after focus group, voters signaled that Biden was too old to serve a second term. That’s why, in the minds of so many, the Democrats needed to recast their lead actor.
“We go through this all the time,” a veteran Hollywood producer groused to me a few days after Biden’s disastrous debate performance made his exit inevitable. Showrunners and financiers hate the recasting process, but “we do it because it works,” the producer pointed out. Actors come and actors go for the good of the show.
George Clooney, who wrote a devastating and influential Times essay arguing for Biden to step down weeks after hosting a fundraiser for the candidate, alluded to this reality once Harris was Biden’s obvious successor. “All of the machinations that got us there,” to a candidate swap, “none of that’s going to be remembered, and it shouldn’t be,” Clooney said. “What should be remembered is the selfless act of someone who.… It’s very hard to let go of power. You know we’ve seen it all around the world, and for someone to say, I think there’s a better way forward, he gets all the credit, and that’s really the truth.”