Kamala Harris stood in the Washington Ellipse shortly after dusk, one week before Election Day.
Before her, the biggest crowd of her short candidacy, stretching to and spilling out on the National Mall. To the left of the vice president, the U.S. Capitol where, she reminded the assembled audience, Donald Trump, the former president whom she called “a petty tyrant,” had sent “an armed mob” to overturn “the will of the people.” Behind her in the distance, the White House. And an unpopular president.
President Biden did not attend because, as he explained to reporters earlier in the day, “This is her night.” But her big speech was his democracy argument all over again.
Biden had returned to politics with the lofty, and often expressed, goal of saving democracy. When that threat did not recede, as Trump tightened his grip on the GOP from exile, his warnings became more frequent. Ahead of the midterms, Biden warned of “an extreme MAGA ideology” that could end the experiment in self-government all together. He likened Trumpism to “semi-fascism.” He said his past, and future opponent, was an aspiring “dictator.” He described the preservation of democracy in campaign ads as the “central issue of my presidency.” But it did not work. At least not for Biden.
He consistently trailed Trump and never once pulled ahead of him in the RealClearPolitics Average. So when Harris succeeded him as the Democratic nominee earlier this summer, the vice president set aside the boilerplate. Trump had not changed. She just preferred to talk generally about “freedom” and specifically about everyday issues facing American families.
Voters engaged in democracy still report serious concerns about its future, though. A recent New York Times/Ipsos poll found that three quarters of Americans believe it’s under threat. In the final stretch, Harris has returned to the foundation that Biden built.
Back in the Ellipse, she cast the looming election as part of the larger struggle over whether self-government can long survive, calling upon the nation to preserve the freedoms that earlier generations at “Normandy and Selma, Seneca Falls and Stonewall, on farmlands and factory floors” had achieved.
She only said the word “democracy” once on Tuesday night. She argued that the enemy was at the gates.
Harris painted a dark picture of a second Trump presidency where he turns the military against his political opponents whom he calls “the enemy within,” cozies up to autocrats abroad, and curtails freedoms like abortion at home. The Trump campaign disputes each of these characterizations, but the vice president had a ready proof text: Jan. 6.
“Look, we all know who Donald Trump is. He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election that he knew he lost,” she said.
There was a word for this kind of behavior the Democrat said last week. When asked last week at a CNN town hall if Trump was a fascist, the vice president replied, “Yes I do.”
In the face of that kind of threat, and asking to be entrusted with democracy, Harris delivered her most stark call to action yet. Past generations “did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives, only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant,” she said. This country, the vice president said, would not be turned over to “wannabe dictators.”
The left loves this kind of rhetoric, and Democrats saw success with it during the midterms. They now hope it can deliver the White House a second time – hence the reason for a prime-time address from Harris rather than another rally in a swing state. Republicans, meanwhile, argue that Harris is flirting with disaster. Pointing to the first and second assassination attempts, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell demanded that the vice president tone down her rhetoric, accusing her in a letter of fanning “the flames beneath a boiling cauldron of political animus.”
The Democrats who turned out for Harris were in no mood for a lecture from Republicans. Lisa Cohen, a retired congressional staffer, blamed McConnell for not convicting Trump when he had a chance. The return to the Ellipse, where the Harris campaign served cotton candy and handed out American flags, she said was an attempt at catharsis.
“I feel like we are reclaiming this hallowed ground,” Cohen said after she showed friends pictures of the broken glass at the Capitol riot and the barbed wire that followed. “To be here, and be safe, to say this is still America, and we can still come together as a country is very powerful.”
Carrie Zimmerman traveled from Virginia for the rally. She works in higher education and wore a shirt emblazoned with the words, “Understand the Assignment.” After standing in line for hours and before the sun set, she explained that it meant “doing everything possible to get Kamala into the White House and everything possible to keep Donald Trump from setting foot in the Oval Office ever again.”
“One of the reasons I came here – it's like an exorcism – is to take this spot of land back from what happened on Jan. 6,” she explained. The Harris campaign was clearly leaning into the iconography and not just the geography. So yes, Zimmerman said, the symbolism was welcome and evident, “but the actual consequences are 100% real too, and there’s nothing symbolic about them.”
The end of the Republic shouldn’t get in the way of a good time though, and the Harris campaign blasted pop songs over the speakers ahead of the speech. Catherine Buell, a community development executive, bopped along to the music and praised Biden for his work. There ought to be some joy in tackling challenges, she said, and bravado. “Biden was safe and a deal maker,” she said, pointing to his long record in Congress, ‘but we need somebody who will be a little bit more hardcore, a little more direct.”
The Harris campaign rolled out a sort of living platform ahead of the speech: people voting for Harris who had already benefited from her work in the current administration or embodied the challenges she sought to overcome. Among them, a mother whose diabetic children benefited from the cap on the cost of insulin, and entrepreneurs who stood to benefit from her proposal for a small business tax credit.
The task before Harris at the Ellipse was to warn that Trump was an existential threat, but also to introduce herself. Said the vice president, “I know many of you are still getting to know who I am.” To thread that needle, Harris vowed that while Trump would return to the Oval Office with “an enemies list,” she “will walk in with a to-do list.”
But even though Harris largely adopted his democracy argument, and as he tried to avoid the spotlight, Biden seemed to describe half the country about to engage in that democratic process as “garbage.”
“Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage,’” Biden said during a conference call with Latino leaders, referring to Tony Hinchcliffe, an insult comedian whom the Trump campaign invited to speak at his Madison Square Garden rally.
“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” Biden said while speaking in a halting manner. “His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.” The White House insisted that the president was calling the racist joke “garbage,” not Trump supporters.
Hours later Harris was calling for unity in the Ellipse.
“Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other. That’s who he is. But America, I am here tonight to say: That’s not who we are,” she said, attempting to drive the contrast. “You see, what Donald Trump has never understood is that E Pluribus Unum – out of many, one – isn’t just a phrase on a dollar bill. It is a living truth at the heart of our nation.”
