WASHINGTON — There was a time, early in her vice presidency, when Kamala Harris, aware of reams of conservative news coverage criticizing her laughter, privately wondered to confidants whether she should laugh, or show a sense of humor, at all.
They reassured her that she should, according to two people familiar with the discussions at the time. Still, Harris proceeded gingerly, embarking on a run of tightly controlled appearances. She focused on issues like abortion rights and worked to bolster her foreign policy chops. She took emotionally resonant trips during which she carefully honed her image. Along the way, laughter never really left her.
So it is no accident that joy — a battle-tested version of it — has become the backbone of Harris’ campaign in recent days.
“The thing we like about hard work is we have fun doing hard work,” she said at a campaign event with autoworkers Thursday in Wayne, Michigan. “Because we know what we stand for. When you know what you stand for, you know what you fight for.”
Her running mate of three days, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, is ad-libbing many of the compliments he gives Harris on the campaign trail as he tries to strike a contrast with what he casts as the gloomy vision of former President Donald Trump and other Republicans.
“The one thing I will not forgive them for is they try to steal the joy from this country,” Walz, who has presented himself as something of a walking bear hug, said Wednesday in Detroit. “But you know what? Our next president brings the joy. She emanates the joy.”
Not that anyone should think for a second that this campaign will be about fun and games: Adopting joy as a political shield has also allowed Harris and Walz to throw some bare-knuckled punches at Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.
Harris, a former prosecutor, has targeted Trump for his many legal problems — “I know Donald Trump’s type,” she now likes to say, to uproarious applause and chants of “Lock him up” that she only recently began to discourage. Walz has castigated Trump for “servicing himself” instead of helping others, and made an off-color reference to a debunked rumor about Vance and furniture. Both Democrats do it with a smile, and the crowd eats it up.
Down at Trump’s seaside fortress, Mar-a-Lago, he and his advisers are, of course, decidedly unjoyful about the attention. Tony Fabrizio, the former president’s top pollster, told reporters assembled in Florida on Thursday that the excitement for the Harris-Walz ticket constituted “a kind of out-of-body experience where we have suspended reality for a couple of weeks.”
But at Harris’ revamped, overflowing rallies, being optimistic is practically a prerequisite for attendance. Supporters are soldiering through the August heat, shrugging off long lines and traffic jams. Newly recruited volunteers are digging through large cardboard boxes filled with “Kamala for Everybody” T-shirts and handing out water. The music is loud, and there is a lot of dancing, to Beyoncé and Cher and Whitney.
Online, there are memes. There are coconut trees. But there is also, as Harris might say, the context of all that came before: This period of almost feverish enthusiasm for her campaign is reliant on the comparable lack of excitement for President Joe Biden, an unpopular leader who left the race only after an uprising within his own party.
“If you hit one hand with a hammer, the other hand feels great,” said Donald Green, a professor of political science at Columbia University. “I think that the issue here was the kind of mounting sense of doom that Democrats felt when they contemplated the downward spiral of Biden’s candidacy and, in particular, the fact that young people who are going to be the backbone of any turnout effort were completely nonplused by him.”
Harris, who has had low approval ratings during much of her time in office, is also benefiting from what Green said was her energetic — and, yes, smiling — reintroduction to voters: “She’s everywhere, organized,” he said. “I think the fact that she’s exceeding expectations has really helped her.”
Recent polls show that Harris is gaining ground with young voters and closing gaps in the battleground states she needs to win. About 370,000 volunteers signed up in the first 12 days of her candidacy, according to a campaign official.
Still, the reality of the race is not far away.
At Mar-a-Lago, Trump seemed visibly annoyed at Harris’ crowd sizes and zeroed in on her lack of interviews and other engagement with the press since beginning her campaign.
“She’s not smart enough to do a news conference,” Trump crowed to a group of reporters assembled before him Thursday.
Vance joined his Democratic opponents in campaigning Wednesday in Detroit and Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He accused Walz of embellishing his military record — a claim the Harris campaign denied — and seemed to scoff at the idea that happiness could be enough to win a presidential election.
“Most people in our country, they can be happy-go-lucky sometimes,” Vance said. “They can enjoy things sometimes, and they can turn on the news and recognize that what’s going on in this country is a disgrace.”
Trump has suggested that he will use a second term to exact retribution against his political enemies: “Sometimes revenge can be justified,” he said in an interview in June with television personality Dr. Phil McGraw. At their rallies, Harris and Walz have warned of Project 2025, the far-reaching conservative proposals pushed by Trump allies, and pointed to broader dangers if the former president wins back power.
Of course, Harris’ joyful-warrior approach has not been substantive from a policy perspective, said John G. Geer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University. At her rallies, Harris does not speak at length about immigration, the economy or wars abroad — in fact, she shut down protesters in Detroit with a sharp look and a tight phrase: “I am speaking.” (She did not smile.)
But Geer said elections were often decided on valence issues that could generate broad voter consensus. The ideas are not complicated: then and now, better or worse, happy or sad.
In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted the song “Happy Days Are Here Again” to offer a promise of a bright future to Americans stricken by the Great Depression.
In the final week of the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan posed a now famously effective question to President Jimmy Carter, and the rest of America, during a presidential debate: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
In a time of war and economic recession, Barack Obama’s likeness was plastered on a poster that appeared everywhere from social media to the sides of buildings. In 2008, the message was simple, too: “Hope.”
With 88 days to go until Election Day, Harris is refining her message and herself in real time. She is positioning herself as the smiling trooper who is asking voters to choose between the future and the past. “We are not going back,” she tells her large crowds, and they respond with raucous chants, repeating it back.
“We are doing this,” she told supporters in Detroit.
The laughter came to her easily.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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