Opinion by Michelle Goldberg on August 2, 2024.

Michelle Goldberg

Opinion

ATLANTA — Tracy Nailor, a 56-year-old Atlanta pediatrician, wasn’t particularly impressed with Kamala Harris when she first ran for president. “I think I succumbed to the narrative about her,” she said. She thought Harris wasn’t experienced or accomplished enough to merit the Democratic nomination. “I just didn’t know enough,” she said. “I didn’t do my homework.” Instead of Harris, she supported the trusted, familiar Joe Biden in the last election.

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But as Biden’s most recent presidential campaign ground on, her faith wavered. She knew it was going to be hard for the aging president to win again. “I was not hopeless, but I was definitely concerned,” she said. Amid all that worry, the sudden ascension of Harris felt like deliverance. “I’m a person that believes in spirit, and I’m a person who believes that but God. And I say that a lot: But God.” She meant that no matter how desperate the situation and improbable the possibility of rescue, God can always turn things around. “I feel like that’s what’s happened,” she said. “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.”

I met Nailor in a hallway of the Georgia State Convocation Center, where around 10,000 people had gathered on Tuesday for a raucous and ebullient Harris rally. She was dressed in the pink and green of the AKAs, the Black sorority that both she and Harris belong to, and was reveling in the event’s electricity. “I’ve lived in Atlanta for almost 30 years,” she said. “I’ve seen people that I haven’t seen in decades. It’s just so hopeful and so much happiness.”

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Nearly two weeks ago, Democrats and Republicans alike felt as if Donald Trump was going to coast back to the White House. Many thought Democrats were in a trap, caught between a declining president who couldn’t properly campaign and a probable successor whose reputation was lackluster at best. The vibe shift since Harris became the nominee has been whiplash-inducing, leaving some conservatives suspecting a plot. “Her sudden Taylor Swift–level stardom is as faked as intelligence-agency assessments of Hunter Biden’s laptop,” wrote Michael Brendan Dougherty of The National Review in a column titled “The Kamala Harris Psyop.” But having just seen Harris’ fandom up close, I can attest that it is very real.

I don’t really blame conservatives for being confused by the sudden explosion of excitement for Harris, who didn’t come close to igniting Barack Obama-level enthusiasm when she ran for president in 2019. Plenty of Democrats are surprised by it as well. Part of the outpouring of joy is the result of the weight suddenly removed from Democrats’ collective shoulders, now that they no longer need to prop up an increasingly weak candidacy. But part of Democrats’ new exuberance is rooted in who Harris is.

In her last campaign, undertaken at a time of millenarian expectations on the left, the phrase “Kamala is a cop” probably hurt her. But at a moment when the Democratic Party wants to memory-hole calls to defund the police, some who were once turned off by Harris’ record as a prosecutor are thrilling to her law-and-order case against Trump. Her pop culture fluency is delighting Democrats who’d either never known or forgotten that politics can be fun. Well before there was serious talk about Biden dropping out, queer influencers had started memeing Harris into icon status; on the Hard Fork podcast, the journalist Casey Newton said a friend had made him a Harris-themed coconut tree T-shirt back in February. That meant that when she became the presumptive nominee, there was already an online repository of affectionate Harris content waiting to be remixed and made viral. And the more it went viral, the more Democratic voters emerging from a carapace of dread wanted to be part of it.

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Hours before Harris’ Atlanta rally began, I met Tracy Hathaway, a 41-year-old nurse from Georgia’s conservative Forsyth County, in the long line outside. Her shirt, which she had made that morning, said, “We Are Not Going Back Like Ever,” a mash-up of a Harris applause line and a Taylor Swift lyric, and she had a handful of pro-Harris friendship bracelets to hand out. It was only Hathaway’s second time attending a political rally; the first had been two days before, when she joined hundreds at a Forsyth campaign event with Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky. When Biden was in the race, she said, imitating beleaguered exhaustion, “It was like, all right, we’re going to vote blue.” Harris, she said, was a “game changer.” As an Asian woman who, like Harris, is the daughter of immigrants, she saw the vice president as a role model for her young daughters, and she couldn’t wait to volunteer. “I’m just kind of jumping on the bandwagon and try to get everyone around me excited,” she said.

For some Democrats, the prospect of seeing a woman of color defeat Trump promised cosmic justice for the monumental insult of the 2016 election. The day before the rally, I went to a potluck with a group of suburban women activists in Marietta, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. Most were middle-aged and had been propelled into politics by the shock of Hillary Clinton’s defeat. “We were literally on the precipice of making history,” said Patricia Fulton, 54, who was wearing a Harris T-shirt and custom-made Harris earrings. “And then we fell off the cliff into hell.” She described a potential Harris presidency as a Hollywood ending to a long national nightmare. “This is the story we always wanted to tell,” she said.

One of the many problems with Clinton’s campaign was that some women felt embarrassed or intimidated to show their support publicly. I often think about the fact that Pantsuit Nation, an influential pro-Clinton Facebook community, was a closed, secret group, an understandable choice in a race rife with trolling and abuse, but one that obviously limited its persuasive potential. There is no similar sheepishness about Harris’ campaign. For the first time, a female candidate for president is being buoyed by mass popular zeal.

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There’s no way to know if the fervor will last. Conventional wisdom holds that Harris is currently enjoying a honeymoon that will inevitably fade as she comes under sustained attack from the right, but no iron law of politics says that’s true. Yes, she’ll have to explain her shifting positions on issues like fracking, single-payer health insurance and border enforcement. But when it comes to Trump, we’ve seen that the feelings he evokes in his supporters matter more than the inconsistencies in his record. Maybe he’s unique, or maybe that’s just how politics works in a highly polarized country with a short attention span, a fragmented media and a longing for change.

At the rally, I asked Nailor how she compared the energy around Harris to that of Obama’s campaign in 2008. “It’s similar in terms of the happiness and the hope that we have, but it’s different because it’s a woman,” she said. “And so I can look at you, you can look at me, and we’re two women, and we get it. I’m telling you something. I go on my walks in the morning, I see women of color, and we just look at each other. And we just smile like, yeah, sis, we got this. We got this.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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