The applause was thunderous, the cheering at top decibel and it went on for a full three minutes before Vice President Kamala Harris could even stand at the microphone at Temple University’s Liacouras Center on Aug. 6 and say, “Good evening, Philadelphia!”
Democratic presidential nominee Harris was in Philadelphia to introduce her vice presidential running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The duo could not have had a more welcoming debut than the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection: The Liacouras Center was packed with a crowd that looked like America—racially diverse, gender diverse, age diverse, unlike a Donald Trump rally.
JD Vance Spreads Rancor
A few hours earlier, Trump’s VP pick, JD Vance, was at a small venue in South Philly—his first foray to the city. He tried to stir up animus against Harris with suggestions she is anti-Semitic. Vance claimed that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who was among the final three candidates under consideration by Harris for her running mate, had been “forced to run from his Jewish heritage” to be considered by Harris, only to be rejected.
Harris and Shapiro have been friends for over a decade. Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, and her two stepchildren are Jewish. Shapiro introduced Harris and Walz at the Temple event, rousing the crowd with a fiery speech. Harris gave him a gracious tribute when she took the stage.
The two events could not have been more emblematic of how much the tenor of the presidential race has shifted in just 17 days. Where Democrats were in hand-wringing despair and third-party candidates like bear-killing anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were seeing a surprising rise in polling as disaffected Democrats sought alternatives to President Joe Biden, now the mood has shifted to that palpable excitement witnessed in Philadelphia. And despite all efforts by the Trump-Vance team to foster anger and grievance, the momentum is with the Democrats. As one pro-Harris ad notes as the VP strides down the steps of Air Force Two, “As America turns the page, Kamala is ready.”
Kamala Harris Is What MAGA Fears
Harris is everything the Trump-MAGA GOP hates: a progressive, pro-Roe, pro-LGBTQ, pro-union, pro-student debt relief, pro-Affordable Care Act, pro-Social Security and Medicare woman of color with a long resume of accomplishments in executive positions who has never lost an election in 25 years.
Harris is offering voters a youthful energy that was absent from the Trump-Biden match and her platform is a forward-moving, progressive-oriented, just-centrist-enough, all-Americans-matter series of policies that builds on the successes of the Biden-Harris tenure while expanding on issues that were continually stymied by the GOP House, like true immigration reform and climate initiatives that actually benefit red states most.
Trump Truth Social Attacks
Unsurprisingly, with polls showing that in just over two weeks Harris has turned the presidential race around, Trump is resorting to his long-established modality of name-calling in non-stop social media attacks. Where Joe Biden was trailing Trump, Harris is pushing ahead. That surge has unsettled the GOP nominee so much he’s left the campaign trail and returned to posting on social media around the clock on his Truth Social site. With all the venom, vitriol and vituperation he’s been known for in the past, the man who promised a unifying message after his assassination attempt last month in Butler, Pennsylvania is now making up racist names for Harris, while also claiming she is both being manipulated by “Barack HUSSEIN Obama” and that she perpetrated “a coup” against President Biden to force him to withdraw from the race.
As Harris was preparing for her campaign rally in Philadelphia, Trump was seething over that choice on Truth Social and projecting a scenario where a regretful Biden hijacked the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago and demanded his position as nominee back from Harris and the delegates.
This is where Trump is: fearful, angry, desperate. He wants the opponent he had, the infirm and distracted Biden who lost the debate. That’s the opponent he was sure he could best.
So were Democrats.
But now it turns out the woman who has never lost an election is magnetic, dynamic, charismatic and exactly what Democrats needed to energize a waning electorate that wanted neither Trump nor Biden, but wanted Biden even less.
Youth Voters Returning to Harris
Now it seems everyone wants Harris: donations are pouring in. Volunteers are lining up. Youth organizers like Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, co-founder of March for Our Lives and president of Leaders We Deserve, are challenging their supporters to fall in for Harris-Walz. As Hogg told MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid on Tuesday night after the Philadelphia rally, the Harris-Walz ticket “gives me hope.”
The Gen Z and Gen Y voters like Hogg’s supporters who were either uncommitted or actively fleeing Biden are ready to embrace Harris’s relative youth, her poise and her progressivism. They want her message of an equitable America which resonates with them and offers them a future vision that is not all-white, all-male, all-Christian, all-straight like the Trump-Vance ticket.
Trump Questions Harris’s Race
Last week, Trump was the featured guest for a panel of Black women journalists at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ). In a contentious exchange with Rachel Scott, the senior congressional correspondent for ABC News, Trump declared that Harris “isn’t Black.”
Trump said, “So I’ve known her a long time, indirectly, not directly very much, and she [Harris] was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage.”
Trump then said, “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” he continued. “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
There was an audible gasp in the room as Trump said this. Harris has always identified as Black and South Asian. She attended Howard University as an undergraduate where she was a member of a Black sorority.
Scott pressed Trump on whether he thought Harris was a “DEI hire,” and he said, “I don’t know. Could be, could be.” And accused Scott of being “nasty.”
Racial Animus, Misogynist Name-Calling
Trump is using racial animus to unite his base against Harris, focusing on immigration which has loomed as a singular issue for voters, even though it impacts few Americans directly. It was a theme for Vance in South Philly, even as he stood in the most immigrant-heavy neighborhood in all of Philadelphia, mere blocks from the historic Italian Market, which is now equally the Asian and Latin@ market. Vance had two women speak about their distress at the rise in crime in Philadelphia, which they claimed was due to immigration, even though crime is down in the city 38% and immigrants have had no impact on crime stats here.
Trump PAC ads pose the same chilling imagery of a dark-skinned Harris among dark-skinned migrant criminals while white Americans suffer from her inattention and “dangerous” policies. Trump-Vance ads present Harris as the same race as the migrant criminals they allege are stealing services from white Americans.
Trump’s Greatest Hits
On ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Aug. 4 that Trump falsely questioning Harris’s racial identity at the NABJ conference was an “impulse” move, not a strategic one.
“This is what happens, George, and this is how you can tell that this race is changing, because what happens is, when Donald Trump’s ahead and he feels like he’s comfortably ahead, he is willing to go with conventional, smart political advice,” Christie said.
He continued, “As soon as he thinks it’s getting close, he goes back to the greatest hits. You saw this at the convention — when he didn’t think he was getting the reaction he wanted from the beginning of the speech, he went back to the greatest hits. You saw it at the NABJ, and you saw it last night in Atlanta,” Christie said, referencing Trump’s attacks on popular Georgia GOP governor Brian Kemp, as “disloyal” and “a bad guy.” Trump will need Kemp’s help to win the Georgia vote in November.
It’s not just Christie voicing concern about Trump veering off message. Over the weekend, Trump once again praised Russian leader Vladimir Putin after Biden just secured the release of Americans Putin had held captive.
Then in a succession of Truth Social posts, Trump called Harris “low IQ,” “dumb,” and said she lacked the “mental capacity” to debate him while calling off the ABC debate scheduled for early next month. Harris said she would be there speaking to the American people about her platform whether the former president showed up or not.
As GOP strategist and former Trump administration appointee Matthew Bartlett told Politico on Aug. 5 of Trump, “This is what you would call a public nervous breakdown.”
Bartlett said, “This is a guy who cut through the Republican primary like a knife through butter. This is a guy who pummeled a semi-conscious president in a debate and literally out of a race. And now this is a guy who cannot come to grips with a competitive presidential race that would require discipline and effective messaging. And we’re seeing a candidate and a campaign absolutely melt down.”
Harris’s Momentum Builds as Trump Seethes
It’s nearly two more weeks until the Democratic Convention in Chicago, which begins Aug 19 and runs through Aug 22. Two weeks for Harris to continue to rebrand herself as the leader America craves, a soignée woman of vision, clarity, compassion and energy who speaks directly to historically marginalized groups like Black and brown voters, LGBTQ+ people and working poor women trying to survive on minimum wage.
That promising candidate is pitted against the man who is now the oldest candidate in American history whose playbook is failing him, whose unpolitical running mate is dragging his own complex baggage behind him and who now has to face a former veteran and Midwestern farm boy with a history of public service on the debate stage.
It’s a match many Americans have long craved. But only voters can prove this country worthy of the tectonic change Kamala Harris offers in the face of America’s worst history, now embodied by Trump and Vance: embedded, baked-in, systemic racism and misogyny. The weeks till November will tell.
