On a drizzly Tuesday morning in a suburb of Milwaukee, two days after President Joe Biden’s announcement that he would no longer be seeking reëlection, Kamala Harris’s supporters began arriving at West Allis Central High School, two hours early, to see the presumptive candidate at her first campaign stop in the upended race. Outside, guests checked into pop-up tents advertising a Biden-Harris block party and still bearing the URL of Joe Biden’s suspended campaign. Inside, attendees took their seats in the bleachers of the gym, their apparel reflecting a broad coalition of Party loyalists. They wore rainbow-pride-flag baseball hats, construction helmets and union vests, and T-shirts with images of Rosie the Riveter. There were women dressed in pearl necklaces and suits in the signature pink and green of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the sorority that Harris had pledged when she was a college student at Howard University; a man wore a sweatshirt that said “Voting Is My Black Job,” a reference to Donald Trump’s claim that immigrants are taking away “Black jobs.”
The mood was joyous, verging on giddy. It had been less than a week since the Republicans had concluded their Convention in Milwaukee on a note of triumph and seeming invincibility. Donald Trump had survived an assassination attempt in what some of his followers were interpreting as an act of divine intervention; Biden had fallen ill with COVID amid calls for him to step down; and the Democratic Party had found itself at a political nadir. The idea that, only a few days later, fired-up Party members would be gathering for an ebullient rally in the same city had been unimaginable.
“The enthusiasm level in the state of Wisconsin went from a morgue to a state of celebration in twenty-four hours,” Michael Crute, the host of “The Devil’s Advocate,” a syndicated progressive talk-radio program, told me, as he waited for the rally to begin. Crute, who describes himself as a “Berniecrat” and wore a Wisconsin Badgers baseball cap, said that the day before Harris’s rally he had seen his own show’s listenership increase more than twenty-five per cent over the week before.
The national response to the fifty-nine-year-old Harris becoming the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee had been immediate. The Party’s leadership and her nearest political rivals quickly endorsed her, and by Tuesday morning she had earned the commitment of enough delegates to potentially secure the Democratic nomination. In two days, she received more than a hundred million dollars in donations, sixty-two per cent of which came from first-time donors; and, according to her campaign, fifty-eight thousand volunteers signed up to stump for her. Beyoncé gave permission for her song “Freedom” to be played at rallies.
In a swing state with razor-thin margins of electoral victory—in 2020, Biden edged out Trump by less than twenty-one thousand votes—changes in mood can be enough to alter an election. “Harris is what we’ve been waiting for,” Crute said. “I feel great about the fact that she probably picked up that twenty-thousand-vote margin in one day.”
In the gym, expressions of optimism were all around. Déysha Smith-Jenkins, who is a thirty-year-old owner of a small multimedia company and a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, wore an apple-green suit and green-and-white Nikes. She attended the rally with her father and described the change in outlook since the end of the R.N.C. downtown, the week before, as a one-eighty: “I literally felt an energy shift.”
“We were living under a funk for quite some time,” a local volunteer Democratic organizer in his seventies named Keith Schmitz, who stepped in from the rain wearing a blue plastic raincoat, said. He described himself as “elated” and “relieved” that the Party had unified around a candidate so quickly. He referenced the 1924 Democratic Convention, at Madison Square Garden, when delegates met for sixteen consecutive days and cast more than a hundred ballots before finally choosing a candidate—“We don’t want that kind of mess,” he said.
His friend Ana-Maria Troast mentioned that even her thirty-year-old daughter was expressing enthusiasm. “This has been hard for her, even the first time,” Troast said. “She said, ‘They’re so old mom, they’re so old.’ She’s so much more excited now.”
“Now they’ve got the old guy, and we’ve got someone who’s got a five in front of her age!” Schmitz said.
The rally had originally been planned as a Vice-Presidential campaign appearance, but the change in circumstances had brought about a last-minute venue switch, and details about where it was going to be held had been sent out late the night before. The lack of campaign paraphernalia was noticeable, although a few rally-goers had improvised. Someone had printed out “YES WE KAM!” on printer paper; one woman had scribbled “MADAME PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS” in black marker on a white T-shirt. A man in the bleachers was wearing an “Obama ’08” shirt, but a rare glimpse of Biden’s name in the crowd turned out to be a campaign lawn sign that had been folded in half to make a Harris sign. There would be several references in the speeches that afternoon to the President’s “selflessness” and “patriotism” for leaving the race, but, if the Wisconsin crowd was any indication, the average Democrat is ready to forget Biden’s bad summer, and very ready to move on. By the time the national anthem was sung, a crowd of more than three thousand people had filled the bleachers and official campaign signs had arrived. The signs were navy and white, and said “KAMALA” in sans-serif font on one side, and “USA” on the other. The crowd did the wave; they danced to a soundtrack of Janet Jackson and Stevie Wonder. They fanned themselves with the signs in the muggy gym and chanted, “Ka-ma-la, Ka-ma-la.”
Harris was introduced by a full entourage of Wisconsin politicians. “You know, guys, you know me, and I don’t get wound up about much,” the bespectacled Tony Evers, the governor of Wisconsin, said, in his flat Midwestern accent. “But on the Tony Evers excitement scale that goes from ‘Holy mackerel’ and maxes out at ‘Heck, yes,’ I am jazzed as hell to be welcoming our next Democratic nominee to Wisconsin, Vice-President Kamala Harris!” Senator Tammy Baldwin, who is facing a reëlection challenge from the Republican candidate Eric Hovde, was greeted by the assembled Democrats with a sustained roar. The state politicians’ speeches indicated the themes that the Party would be pushing around Harris’s candidacy: her background as a prosecutor and, later, as attorney general of California; her support of reproductive rights. The Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project was mentioned several times as the playbook of the future, should Trump win the Presidency. “If you haven’t seen it, Google Project 2025; look it up when you get home and send it on to others,” Evers told the crowd. “It’s extraordinary, extraordinarily horrible—and we all know that they’ll work hard to enact a national abortion ban.”
Finally, shortly after one-thirty in the afternoon, Harris herself was introduced by a local educator whose student loans were forgiven under Biden’s student-loan-relief plan. Beyonce’s “Freedom” came on and the crowd went wild, welcoming Harris with prolonged applause. Wearing a navy-blue blazer and pearls, she walked to the podium, greeting her audience with a laugh and basking in the outpouring of good will that will be hers to sustain or squander in the hundred and five days before the election. She emphasized, to a crowd that included many longtime Party volunteers, that “the path to the White House goes through Wisconsin,” expressed gratitude for Biden’s endorsement, and, with previous speakers having already laid the groundwork, elaborated on her past as a courtroom prosecutor.
“I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she said. “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.” The crowd knew where she was taking this; she had used very similar language in a 2020 campaign ad that had been making the rounds again on social media on Sunday. They broke into cheers when she said, “So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.” She painted a portrait of the Trump campaign as doing the bidding of billionaires. “On the other hand, we are running a people-powered campaign,” she said, promising a “people-first Presidency.” She portrayed the Republicans as focussed on the past, and the Democrats as the Party of affordable health care, affordable child care, and paid family leave. She described “building up the middle class” as a defining goal of her future Presidency.
For now, there were no tough questions or thorny confrontations. Harris did not speak about the border, the cost of living, Gaza, or trans rights. Like the other speakers, she concentrated on domestic politics, even as campaigning gave her an excuse to be absent during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress on Wednesday. (Harris will instead meet with Netanyahu at the White House, on Thursday; he is scheduled to meet with Trump, at Mar-A-Lago, on Friday.)
The speech leaned into the bread-and-butter promises of the Party: the protection of voting rights, an assault-weapons ban, preventing cuts to Social Security and Medicare, reproductive freedom. Her statement “We trust women to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do” was a rallying cry for this moment, but it could have been a line in a Democratic politican’s speech from any recent decade. If Harris has a more detailed vision of her Presidency, she was not going to share it at her first campaign stop. Instead, she reached for a tone of grand political oratory. “What kind of country do we want to live in?” she asked, “A Kamala one!” a voice shouted out from the crowd, and Kamala grinned. “And, to your point,” she said, “do we want to live in a country of freedom, compassion, and rule of law? Or a country of chaos, fear, and hate?”
“Do we believe in the promise of America?” she continued. “And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight—” The audience responded, “We win!”
“We win!” Harris said. And, for the first time in weeks, a large group of Democrats seemed convinced that it might actually be true. ♦
