The Surprising Word Democrats Keep Using to Describe Kamala Harris’ Campaign

CHICAGO — “With this election,” Kamala Harris said Thursday night, “our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past.”

Inside the packed, pumped arena here on the final night of the Democratic National Convention, and right after Harris formally accepted her party’s presidential nomination and thousands of delegates, dignitaries and others thrust in the air all the signs saying her name, she quickly pivoted to an even loftier aim.

“A chance,” as she said, three key letters capitalized in her written remarks, “to chart a New Way Forward.”

This was just the kind of language that had people this week talking not just about an energized campaign but something much more grand. From the United Center to the convention center to the ballrooms and halls of the delegate-housing hotels, from stages to caucus meetings to the roster of wee-hours parties, people were using a word loaded with historical weight. Is Harris already or can she be, people were asking, not only a candidate for president but actually, and rather remarkably, the leader of a political movement ?

The answer, to state the obvious, is to be determined. First and foremost she has to win. She has to beat Donald Trump. Losers of elections aren’t usually leaders of lasting movements — and she could lose, of course, considering the country remains basically evenly and bitterly divided, and this election almost certainly will be closely contested, because the Electoral College gives a disproportionate amount of power to a small number of people in an even smaller number of states. The fullest, most honest answer? Check back in, oh, 30 or more years. Hinges of history, after all, appear by far the clearest with the benefit of hindsight.

Even so, given her boffo fundraising, her surging crowds, her spiking polling and favorability rating and a TikTok and meme game that’s getting Gen Z reengaged, the question’s being asked. Tonally and generationally, along gender and racial lines, is this the precipice of some sort of tectonic shift? Less than two months since Joe Biden’s politically fatal debate, barely more than a month since he decided to drop out and endorse her — after a failed presidential bid of her own in 2020, after an uneven few years as Biden’s vice president — could Harris really be more than an emergency alternative but actually a transformative figure who shifts the political order for more than an election cycle or two?

“I think she already is,” Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland told me Wednesday morning after he spoke to Georgia delegates at their breakfast. “I think what we’re seeing right now is not just about a political campaign. I think what we’re seeing right now is the American people have a choice about what type of country that we want to be. That ,” he said, “is a movement.”

The word is conceptually slippery — easily deployed by fervid supporters and just as easily deflated by skeptics. But it was omnipresent in the buoyant mood of the convention, so improbably on people’s minds it begged to be challenged: Really?

“A big part of it is being able to get into the culture, break into the culture, and you can bridge that gap between cool and consciousness, and those lines are blurred between pop culture and the campaign,” the 27-year-old Maxwell Frost from Florida, the first Gen Z member of Congress, told me when I ran into him at the CNN/POLITICO Grill adjacent to the arena. “Then you have a movement candidate.”

Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, a short-lister for Harris’ running mate, marveled when I spoke to him at the Hyatt Regency at the crowd Harris drew last week in his home state in Glendale. “I’ve never seen energy like that,” Kelly said. “I’ve been doing this a while, and I’ve never seen this kind of energy, and this is August . Think about what October ’s going to be like.”

“I think these people are high on their own supply,” Scott Jennings, the former Mitch McConnell adviser and current on-air analyst for CNN, told me.

“Also, what does she stand for?” Jennings asked. “She’s slightly younger than Joe Biden. That’s what she stands for?” he said. “Come on. You’re going to have to win an election before you’re leading a movement.”

I sent top Trump adviser Chris LaCivita a text asking him what he made of such talk.

“The leader of a movement?” he responded, saying the vice president “broke the economy,” “broke the border” and “broke world stability.”

“Absolutely!” he said. “If you liked Joe Biden, you are going to love Kamala Harris.”

A political movement is something more than a mere political campaign — a kind of inexplicable mixture of man (or woman) and moment that taps into an emerging zeitgeist, that manages to transcend traditional political issues and alliances, that fosters a previously unseen upswell of support and that ultimately engenders some history-shifting consequence. Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt built the legislative legacy that defined the better part of the 20th century. Republican Ronald Reagan harnessed the conservative movement and remade his party in his image. Those weren’t just political campaigns. Those, most would agree, are political movements.

“At times,” the longtime Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik wrote of Harris and her candidacy in a recent memo , “it appears that she is leading more of a movement than a political campaign.” Sosnik is one of the most prominent voices invoking this proto-phenomenon.

Reagan, Trump and Barack Obama, in the estimation of the 67-year-old Sosnik, are the three political movements of his lifetime. “Harris is not the leader of a movement right now. She’s still the leader of a campaign,” he told my colleague Ryan Lizza in the wake of the release of his memo. “But she has been making strides, and she could by the end of the month — particularly if the convention goes well in Chicago — she could be at a point where she’s a head of a movement, which is bigger than a candidate, and that’s pretty much unstoppable. And if you are leading a movement, issues don’t matter, nothing matters. She’s not there, but she’s not far from being there.”

“Timing is everything, and there’s a yearning in America for a turning of the page,” Sosnik told me when we talked on Wednesday. “There’s a yearning in America to move generationally,” he said. “She has the potential of being the right person at the right place at the right time to be able to translate this campaign into something bigger than just the campaign.”

Think bigger, said Hank Sheinkopf, the veteran Democratic strategist who’s worked on campaigns in more than 40 states for going on 40 years. He casted all the way back to 1960, to John F. Kennedy. “She is closer to JFK,” Sheinkopf told me. “New generation. New global order. Changing national economy,” he said. “The political and the social are united in the Harris moment. The reversal of Reaganism in total. A return to a war against poverty. The continuation of the Cold War. A fight for Medicare all over again. Returning respect for labor unions,” he said. “JFK redux.”

Actually, said Stefan Smith, maybe think even bigger . Smith was the online engagement director for Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign in 2020 and is now the head of digital engagement for the ACLU and has a bachelor’s degree in history from Brown and a master’s degree in American history from the University of Southern California. He rewound the clock another 30 years back before Kennedy — to FDR.

Obama, of course, was a historic candidate and president, but he wasn’t in the end the leader of a movement, I suggested to people I talked to this week. The reaction to Obama was Trump. Bill Clinton definitely was generationally new, but his presidency was a reaction to Reagan, a function of the necessity of Democrats having to find a way to bend to Reagan to win, and it didn’t lead to durable Democratic control. If anything, it was the runway to the last quarter-century and then some of ever-increasing partisanship and polarization. And JFK? He and Lyndon B. Johnson in the most immediate sense led to Richard Nixon, to the Southern strategy, to the regional and ideological resorting of America’s two major political parties. Is it, then, possible that Kamala Devi Harris (KDH?) could be more of a leader of a political movement than any of them ?

“FDR didn’t know what was going to happen in 1932. All he knew was it’s a crisis, the country’s in danger, and people have given me what seems like an improbable-for-the-time landslide victory, and now I have to use this power to do the right thing,” Smith told me. “So we don’t know,” he said. “We are birthing something new. No matter what, that is what is happening, period. My bet is that on the other side we are looking at Kamala wins and a 1932 situation.”

Sosnik didn’t outright dismiss this.

“Roosevelt was the dominant figure in American politics until Reagan,” he said, “and then Reagan was the dominant figure in American politics, I think, until about now.”

Now? What is the evidence for Harris’ movement in the making? There’s this:

She is raising hundreds of millions of dollars in record-breaking hauls — more people donated to her campaign in its first 10 days than the number of people who donated to Biden’s reelection bid in the entirety of its 15 months . She’s attracting so many volunteers in so many places that various levels of party infrastructure almost can’t handle the surge. And she’s packing arenas in one swing state after the next the way Trump does or at least has — including the Trump-tweaking ploy of drawing some 18,000 people the other night in Milwaukee in the very same venue in which the Republicans held their convention last month. For most of the last 10 years the fun place in politics was on the right. That’s where the buzz was. The energy at a Trump rally can feel dark, and not so civically healthy — but it’s nothing if not energy. The left in that time had nothing like it. Until now.

“Something is happening,” Hillary Clinton said in her speech on Monday on the first night of the convention. “You can feel it.” Joe Biden followed his farewell of sorts with a fundraising pitch. “We face an inflection point,” it said. “One of those rare moments in history when the decisions we make now will determine the fate of our nation and the world for decades to come.” On Tuesday it was the Obamas’ turn. “Something wonderfully magical is in the air,” said Michelle Obama. “Now the torch has been passed,” said Barack Obama. Wednesday’s best moment was a tearful, chest-thumpingly proud Gus Walz, obviously , but another way to see it was a transition from the Democrats’ old explainer in chief (Bill Clinton) to their new explainer in chief (Pete Buttigieg). “I just don’t think,” Buttigieg said, “America is in the market for more darkness right now.”

“We’re coming here, I think, with an attitude we really haven’t had in a while,” Rep. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey said to a tired but still energetic crowd as Wednesday night bled into the wee hours of Thursday at an after-party on the 94th floor of a skyscraper downtown.

“Movement!” hollered somebody in the throng.

Sherrill heard the word and said it back. “We are coming here because we know — the movement — that if we all work together, if we continue to fight hard, we are going to see real change.”

“Politics have shifted from that Reagan era. I think people are ready for that,” Sherrill told me when I caught up with her Thursday afternoon back by the arena. “There’s a big shift going on,” she said, “and I think there’s an opportunity for Kamala Harris to define it.”

“We need a little more time to see how this sets up, but it feels like it’s getting enough fuel to tip over into something more like a movement than a campaign,” Jim Margolis, the longtime strategist who was a senior adviser to Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, told me in a text.

“Kamala represents a shift, a change, the torch being passed — it’s a new generation of leadership that she is ushering in,” Bakari Sellers, the former South Carolina state legislator and friend of and campaign co-chair for Harris in 2020, told me.

“The big crowds at these rallies,” Frost, the young congressman from Florida, told me, “people want to go and be a part of something bigger than themselves. They want to see her speak, but they also want to be surrounded with people who also want to see her speak. And so all these things show,” he said, “what a movement candidate is.”

A movement that does what a movement must: meaningfully enlarge its winning coalition, and in a way allows for down-ballot candidates to leverage that legislatively and long-term. Can Harris do that?

“Hope and optimism for winning is a real human emotion, but it doesn’t make it a movement,” Jennings of CNN said.

“Not sure what the movement is she’s leading other than anti-Trump,” said California-based GOP consultant Mike Madrid, himself very anti-Trump.

“TBD,” South Carolina-based GOP consultant Chip Felkel told me. “But she’s tapped into the country’s desire for civility. A lot of voters are tired of the vitriol, the name-calling and the polarization,” he said. “Her movement, if you call it that, is not about policy as much as it is about just human decency.” Is that enough?

“I see a nation ready to move forward,” Harris said as she approached the end of her speech Thursday night. “Ready for the next step.” And she invoked specifically generational talk. “On behalf of our children and grandchildren,” she said, “we must be worthy of this moment.”

Red, white and blue balloons fell from the ceiling and just kept coming, “Freedom” by Beyonce blared, the jubilant crowd here engaged in a movement considerably more prosaic. The people took their signs saying KAMALA and filed out of the arena and into the dark. It’s 74 days until Election Day.