The Opinions - Michelle Goldberg on the Kamala Harris Sugar High

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

With Democratic enthusiasm for Kamala Harris at a fever pitch, the New York Times Opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg spent a day in Atlanta at one of her rallies speaking with voters. In this audio essay, Goldberg argues that the energy among voters she met there is real, and more importantly, will last.Thoughts? Questions? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. My name is Michelle Goldberg. I'm an opinion columnist at the New York Times. So I was recently in Atlanta covering one of the first rallies of Kamala Harris' presidential campaign. And one of the things that I wanted to understand going to the Harris rally was there's been a lot of talk in the media of, whether this is a sugar high, whether she's in some short-lived honeymoon period and the energy is going to fade once she comes under a lot of sustained scrutiny from the right. And, you know, I'm not going to pretend that one rally gives you the answer to that question. But I wanted to see for myself just how real this explosion of enthusiasm was.

So I covered the election in 2016. You know, I was going to Trump rallies and also to events for Hillary Clinton. And I just remember being at the DNC. And even though the DNC was kind of orchestrated extremely well, I just had this feeling in the pit of my stomach that like the energy was with Trump. And I kept saying to myself, well, you know, anecdote isn't the same thing as data and the pollsters must know what they're doing, but I just don't feel good about this. And I think that the outcome of that election has taught me, you know, not always to trust my own intuitions over the data, but to take intuition seriously.

And I think to really form those intuitions, you just have to be there. There was 10,000 people lined up hours before it started in this really punishing southern heat. Inside, people were dancing, they were ablient, they were so excited. The comparison people kept making over and over again was to Barack Obama in 2008. It feels amazing. It feels like I went to the Obama inauguration in D.C. in just the energy there, right? In 08, people were excited about the prospect of unity

and transcending partisan divisions. And now people were really excited to have somebody who was going to fight. I spoke to a lot of people at the rally who said they were going to vote for Joe Biden, but they weren't going to volunteer for Joe Biden. They weren't going to go to rallies for Joe Biden. Would you have been doing that regardless or has kind of... Honestly, for Biden, and I'm being honest. I was going to vote for him.

I was riding with him to the end, but I wasn't doing the footwork. So what changed? She changed. She became the nominee. She changed. So I'm just supporting one of my own. Now people feel not just like Kamala Harris can do this, but like we collectively, the anti-Trump coalition can do this.

And that feeling is infectious. A lot of people I was just asking them where they got their t-shirt since they had obviously gotten them pretty quickly. So I see you've got this turn already. Yep. Did you make it or did you? No, I got it off TikTok. Oh, really? Yeah, TikTok.

It's very difficult to judge from your own TikTok feed if you're on it what other people are seeing because the algorithm is so personalized. So I asked her what kind of content she was seeing. Had Democrats been, had a presence on TikTok before? And it felt like what I read was that it was like pretty Trumpy before. It was very, it was, I would say it was very Trumpy before. But I mean, you could almost, it was like a switch flipped. And all of a sudden you had all these, you know, people posting up content. And it just sort of started to change overnight.

And now I would say I see much more Kamala stuff than I do, you know, Trump stuff. And what that tells me is that the. huge explosion of kind of Kamala Harris content is not just reaching people who are in a bubble. It's also reaching people who were previously getting served a lot of kind of Republican material. Hi, nice to meet you. I've just been talking to people about the vibe here. Yes. What vibe?

What are you talking about? It approached one woman who was wearing the light green and pink of the, A.K.A.s, which is Kamala Harris's sorority. You an A.k.a. I am an A.k.a. How could you tell? Her name was Tracy Naylor. She was a pediatrician. And one of the things, again, that I was talking to people about was how they felt about Kamala Harris four years ago. Because something I think that has befuddled some observers is,

you know, Kamala Harris' 2019 presidential campaign was. no great success. So I asked Tracy Naler, you know, how did you feel about her the first time her in? And she had not been that impressed by her. How did you think, were you a fan back at 2020 when she ran the first time? Not exactly. I think I succumbed to the narrative about her, okay? And I didn't really, and I'll admit that I didn't really do enough of my own homework about what she had done. And so I wasn't thrilled about her because I just didn't know enough. And then suddenly there was this deliverance.

I'm a person that believes in spirit and I'm a person who believes that, you know, but God. And I say that a lot, but God, things can happen and turn around in just a moment that can change everything. And I feel like that's what's happened. And this is not only a political movement. this is a social movement. This is an inflection point, and this is, to me, a spiritual movement.

Hey, I like your shirt. Oh, thank you. Tracy Half the Way was standing in line, you know, many hours before the rally started. And she had a T-shirt that said, we are not going back like ever, which is a mashup of one of Harris's applause lines. We are not.

And a lyric from the Taylor Swift song, We are never ever getting back together. Hard swift. Amazing. And she had Harris-themed friendship bracelets that she was going to hand out. This was her second ever political rally. She was someone who would have voted reluctantly for Joe Biden, but definitely wasn't going to make crafts for Joe Biden.

Now she's going to volunteer. This is a game changer. She's a game changer. And has she, have you always felt like that about her? Or has it? For me, it wasn't even excitement about Joe Biden being inaugurated and winning the election. It was seeing a woman of color, a child of immigrants, because that's me. I'm a woman of color.

My parents were immigrants. To see her elevate to the second highest office in the country just brought so much hope for me and my children. I have two daughters. The Biden campaign was deeply depressing. And one thing that I think people who, who study and write about politics can sometimes underestimate is the role of emotion. How a candidate makes you feel matters often as much as whether they agree with you on each of your specific issues.

So it's not that Kamala Harris had a political profile, had a kind of policy agenda that was different than Biden's. But it was really just that all of a sudden Democrats who had felt this sense of intense dread were liberated from it. You know, all of a sudden they have a candidate who's able to take the fight to Trump, who's able to give an inspiring speech, who has a certain glamour and charisma, and who also was able to bring the party together. I mean, it's certainly not that Kamala Harris is a lock, but she has a substantial chance. And I think that Kamala Harris gives us a sense of not just standing up to Trump, but really laughing in his face. That is empowering to people. It's empowering to people to laugh at these figures instead of cowering in front of them. So I came away from the rally in Atlanta feeling like the enthusiasm could be really durable.

The reason I think this enthusiasm could be durable is because people underestimate how much of getting involved in politics has to do with becoming part of a real-life social movement, making those connections, joining those groups, being in community. Something I saw that kind of made me feel hopeful was all of these really kind of cool, stylish women taking selfies with the crowd in the background. If a campaign is something that gives people a sense of fomo, you know, that kind of people feel like being associated with will enhance their own persona, then there's a lot of incentive to keep it going. Harris is going to come under a withering barrage of attacks for sure. But I think that this campaign at this moment was answering a really deep emotional need that a lot of people felt and that they are not going to easily give up on.