The NY Times today has a nice piece about the “Kamala vibe shift” showing how people are getting excited about politics again. (How weird to have them speaking to non-Trump voters for a change.)
“It’s gone from the dread election to the hope election, overnight,” said Amanda Litman, who runs a group that recruits progressives to run for office.
Campaigns are not won and lost on vibes alone. But they can encourage voters to open their wallets and volunteer their time — and right now, the buoyant mood among Democrats is translating into early signs of strength for the campaign.
The Harris for President campaign has raised $130 million from mostly small donors in just a matter of days, while the high-dollar fund-raising world whirls to life. Democratic organizers are reporting a surge of interest from volunteers. And, yes, there are the memes, a sign of organic interest that the Biden campaign never mustered.
Kamala hype TikToks abound (which the Republicans are saying is nothing but Chinese propaganda) but the memes are everywhere. I don’t think I’ve seen this level of Democratic fun since 2008. And then there was still a lot of lingering resentment from the close primary. There’s none of that present in this one.
It’s tempting to be dismissive of all this as very, very uncool but as Jill Filipovic remains us in her great newsletter today, most Americans are uncool so don’t rain on their parade.
I hope she doesn’t mind that I post the whole thing because I think it’s important:
There’s a ton of energy around Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, and at least some of what’s happening, is, to borrow from the kids, cringe. It’s cheesy or awkward or goofy or earnest. It’s thoroughly uncool. It’s things like a family band singing about JD Vance to the tune of an ABBA song. It’s an affinity-group call for white women where donations are solicited by imploring participants to “use your privilege for good.” It’s homemade coconut glasses at Harris rallies.Subscribe
Some of it is entirely bonkers, and a lot is extremely silly. Some of it is just imperfect (see, e.g., JD Vance saying that people without kids shouldn’t be able to vote, and then people who have faced fertility struggles speaking about how painful it is to hear that, and then people correcting them that actually it’s bad to restrict votes from non-parents no matter what the reason). It is only going to get cringier.
But here is the task: If we want to beat Trump, it has to be all hands on deck — and hands off the cynicism and cool-teen posturing and one-upmanship that so often characterizes Democratic infighting, and made Democratic politics so insufferable and toxic in 2016.
Because you know who is extremely cringe and very not cool? The average American voter.
And you know who really wants to vote for Kamala Harris? Black voters, and Black women in particular. Latino voters, and Latinas in particular. MSNBC moms and dads, and the moms in particular. Idealistic young people, and young women in particular. Women who cried when Hillary lost and wore pussy hats to the Women’s March.
When people are this hyped up about something, they’re going to express it in ways that may not appeal to a too-online 27-year-old in Bushwick or a gender studies PhD candidate in Berkeley or to me personally. I don’t mean that to denigrate too-online Brooklyn 20-somethings (of which I have been one) or gender students PhD candidates (of which I could have been one). I do mean it to say that it’s actually good if political campaigns appeal to normal people, and it’s bad to shame normal people for liking normie things. It’s also good to remember that not everything is for everyone; just because a particular argument or frame or response doesn’t speak to you, or leaves you out, doesn’t mean it doesn’t appeal to some constituency of voters.
In other words, keep the snark to the group chat.
And certainly resist the temptation to use someone else’s well-meaning but imperfect organizing or commentary as a platform to boost your own ego or demonstrate that you are actually a person who Gets It. Ask yourself: Why am I doing this? What point am I making? Is the person I’m criticizing actually doing any harm, or are they generally doing good, just in a way that doesn’t really appeal to me or is missing something? Does anyone else remember that much-photographed sign held up at the Women’s March that said something like, “Don’t Forget: White Women Voted for Trump”? Don’t be that person. I am sure that person felt very good about themselves. But the reality is that the white ladies of the Women’s March were not Trump voters. Neither are the MSNBC moms donating to Harris, or the college-educated feminists living in big American cities, or the Boomer dads texting their kids the anti-Vance ABBA parody. The Bernie Bros who loved to roll their eyes at the middle-aged wine moms may have made their podcast subscribers laugh, but they weren’t making any converts.
Shaming people out of organizing, or even out of their enthusiasm, does not help any cause. If you want to keep Trump out of the White House, it’s worth asking what you can add and where you can contribute — and whether picking apart what other people are doing is really a good use of your time.
(Be as critical as you want on text, we all have to vent).
Trump voters have shown that there’s power in political fun. I don’t understand their particular version of it with the weird clothes and the cheering for mass deportation but I guess that’s just their jam. I think Democrats should be able to have fun with politics too or least be allowed to be earnest about them without being slammed by their own allies. It’s a big country. Let people fly their freak flags with joyful abandon if that’s what it takes to defeat fascism.
And personally, I think that family band JD Vance sen-up is one of the most droll things I’ve seen in a long time. Lol.