U.S. Vice President and 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks at the campaign rally at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, August 20, 2024.KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP/Getty Images
In the exuberant weeks since she became the Democrats’ surprise presidential nominee, Kamala Harris has said she is “bringing back the joy” to the political party, and an election campaign, that had spent months anxiously contemplating the prospect of losing to Donald Trump.
But as they gather in Chicago for a convention carefully stage-managed to deliver the party – and, they hope, the country – into Ms. Harris’s hands, Democrats haven’t merely exhibited a surge of enthusiasm. They have shown a willingness to adopt the tactics and tone of the man they have long condemned, seeking to give Republicans what Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Congresswoman, this week called “a dose of their own medicine.”
They are calling opponents names. They are questioning the courts. They are comparing crowd sizes. They have produced a political advertisement depicting him, as the Harris campaign said on X, “slurring and confused.”
They’ve even adopted some of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric.
The party’s convention this week has elevated the Democrats’ occasionally off-colour turn. On Monday night, after crowds chanted “lock him up,” President Joe Biden described Mr. Trump’s uneven commitment to facts using a word Mr. Trump himself has long favoured: “sad.”
Jamie Raskin, a Congressman from Maryland, called Mr. Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, a “pet chameleon,” and ridiculed the Supreme Court as a “kangaroo court.” United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: “Trump is a Scab.” Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker mocked Mr. Trump as “rich in only one thing: stupidity.”
On Tuesday, Ms. Harris and her running mate Tim Walz held an event in the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, taunting Mr. Trump from the same stage he occupied almost exactly a month ago when he accepted the Republican Party nomination.
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“Not only do we have massive energy at our convention – we got a hell of a lot more energy at where they had their convention. Right here,” Mr. Walz said. When a volley of cheers faded, he took a moment for another jab at Mr. Trump: “Oh, that one guy is going to be so sad tonight. So sad. So sad. So sad.”
It is not the first time the campaign has chosen a venue beloved of Mr. Trump.
Earlier this month, Ms. Harris held a rally at a Detroit airport hangar. The Harris campaign then posted a video of the gathering on Mr. Trump’s social-media platform, Truth Social, with a jibe that “the content of this video may upset” the former president. Mr. Trump falsely claimed images of that rally were faked; he also proclaimed earlier this month, without evidence, that he drew more people to Washington than Martin Luther King Jr.
“Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Mr. Trump said.
On Tuesday, former president Barack Obama lampooned Mr. Trump as a man with “the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes.”
Former U.S. president Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama delivered a one-two punch at the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 20, urging Americans to back Kamala Harris in her 11th-hour presidential bid against Republican Donald Trump.
Reuters
Crowd size has been one of Mr. Trump’s best-loved indicators of success; on Google, searches for the term first spiked during his 2016 election campaign and have soared again in recent weeks.
Unlike before, however, it is Democrats now driving some of that conversation.
“This is a reflection on how politics have changed post-Trump,” said Frank Luntz, the prominent Republican pollster and strategist.
“No slam or smear is out-of-bounds any more, and all the candidates are doing it. It’s the corroding of civil, respectful discourse, and it’s going to get even worse before it ever gets better.”
The changes in tone nonetheless mark a shift from the decorum Democrats once tried to maintain.
At the party’s 2008 convention, Barack Obama accepted the party’s nomination with a nod to his opponent. “I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain,” Mr. Obama said then. Eight years later, Michelle Obama stood on another convention stage to declare: “When someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. No, our motto is, ‘When they go low, we go high.’”
On Tuesday, Ms. Obama offered a modified dictate: “Going small is never the answer,” she said, adding: “Going small is petty, it’s unhealthy and quite frankly, it’s unpresidential.”
The Harris-Walz campaign has cribbed liberally from Mr. Obama’s 2008 presidential run, making “hope” a central credo of its own campaign. It has promised to cast its gaze to the future, with Ms. Harris saying Tuesday, “Together, we will chart a new way forward.”
But the former president remains central to how Democrats are fighting the election. On X, the Kamala HQ account is filled with video clips of Mr. Trump. On Monday, Mr. Trump’s campaign counted 147 mentions of their candidate at the Democratic convention.
“Democrats have no vision or solutions to our nation’s problems,” the Trump campaign said in a statement.
“They would rather talk about President Trump than the problems facing our nation due to Kamala Harris’ failures.”
While Mr. Trump has long been accused of peddling lies and disinformation, Democrats, too, have earned criticism for stretching the truth.
Fact-checkers at The Washington Post have denounced as “mostly false” Democratic claims, made repeatedly, that Mr. Trump sought to make multiple cuts to social security and Medicare. Other critiques of the former president’s performance during the pandemic are “exaggerated.”
Democrats, however, make no apologies for their new rhetoric, confident that success in polls – which now show a tighter contest, including slim leads for Ms. Harris in some areas – is unnerving the bombastic former entertainer who for years has known no real American equal in delivering insults and ridiculing foes.
“Donald Trump is realizing that Kamala Harris is a box-office smash, and it’s driving him crazy,” Senator Ed Markey said. He likened the current mood among Democrats to the jubilation he saw on television as a boy, when John F. Kennedy became president in 1960.
“We now have the most enthusiastic Democratic base that I’ve seen in a generation,” he said.
Terry McAuliffe, the former Virginia Governor and one-time chair of the Democratic National Committee, argued that his party is not deliberately responding in kind to Mr. Trump.
“We’re not playing the game. People are showing up. It is exploding,” he said, before pointing to “record crowds” and new records in donations and volunteer registration.
It is, he said, “a magical moment for the Democratic Party. We are going to elect the first woman – first woman of colour – to be president of the United States.”