In 1932, on the peak of the Nice Despair, the Democratic nominee for president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, adopted the ditty Comfortable Days Are Right here Once more as his official marketing campaign tune.
With its upbeat lyrics – “The skies above are clear once more, So, allow us to sing a tune of cheer once more, Comfortable days are right here once more” – the tune spoke to the hope {that a} brighter future lay forward with a brand new occupant of the White Home.
For years, Comfortable Days Are Right here Once more was the Democratic social gathering’s unofficial anthem earlier than ultimately fading again into obscurity. In the present day, Democrats might not have rediscovered the tune, however they’re definitely embracing its sentiment.
Since Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential marketing campaign three Sundays in the past, Democrats have turned their collective frowns upside down and embraced vice-president Kamala Harris’s candidacy with an eagerness and enthusiasm that we haven’t seen on this facet of the Atlantic because the heady days of Barack Obama’s historic 2008 bid for the White Home.
The change in manner will not be obscure. Democrats went from believing they’d absolutely lose the White Home to a rising sense of optimism that American voters might elect its first feminine president – eight years after it failed to take action.
As terrified as many of the UK, Europe and far of the world is in regards to the prospect of one other Trump time period in workplace, the concern amongst Democrats is much higher.
Biden has lengthy been a beloved determine within the Democratic social gathering – a person whose rectitude and empathy stood out within the cynical world of American politics. Nonetheless, his victory within the 2020 election owed itself to a less complicated clarification – Democrats have been determined to evict Trump from the White Home. That Biden rose to the highest of the social gathering was a tribute to his political abilities, however much more an overriding perception that he was the candidate finest positioned to defeat Trump in November. It’s why 2020 noticed the highest voter turnout in current historical past, with 17 million extra People voting than had finished so 4 years earlier.
For a lot of 2024, Democrats have been consumed by the concern that Trump would return to the White Home and produce the chaos, dysfunction and authoritarian mindset of his first 4 years in workplace. With Biden tied or trailing Trump within the polls for a lot of the yr, Democrats have been wringing their fingers however not fairly panicking.
Then, on 27 June, Trump met Biden on the stage for the earliest presidential debate in American political historical past – and issues didn’t go properly. Biden stumbled his approach by the 90-minute debate and appeared every single day of his 81 years. Fears that the president was too outdated to win a second time period, largely suppressed by Democrats, bubbled to the floor.
For 3 weeks, the social gathering went into full meltdown mode, with many satisfied that Biden was doomed to defeat. By mid-July, it was clear that he had misplaced the arrogance of his social gathering, and he properly deserted the race.
The outpouring of emotion that greeted Harris’s ascendancy to the highest of the ticket was extra than simply pleasure about her candidacy. In a single afternoon, Democrats went from the depths of despair about one other Trump time period in workplace to sky-high optimism that the blissful days have been again. Inside every week, Harris had raised an eye-popping $200m, and greater than 170,000 individuals signed as much as volunteer for her marketing campaign.
Certainly, a few of this pleasure had one thing to do with Harris, who’s a really completely different candidate than the one who crashed and burned when she ran for the White Home in 2019.
Buoyed by the outpouring of assist for her candidacy, she has introduced a lightness and joyfulness to the marketing campaign path that stands in stark distinction to Donald Trump and his operating mate, JD Vance. That she added a dad-joke-cracking midwesterner to her ticket within the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, has solely added to her enchantment. Her raucous, packed-house rallies have introduced pleasure to Democratic social gathering politics not seen in years.
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If elected, she can be the primary feminine president in American historical past – and solely the second Black individual to win the nation’s highest workplace. So it ought to hardly come as a shock that Harris has shortly reversed Biden’s nagging issues with Black voters. However the influence on American girls may very well be some of the fascinating dynamics of the approaching marketing campaign.
When Hillary Clinton fell quick within the 2016 election, for a lot of girls her defeat was a gut-punch outcome. It’s hardly a shock that the primary main protest of Trump’s victory got here the day after his inauguration, on the so-called Ladies’s March, which attracted almost 5 million People.
In 2018, I spent the weeks earlier than the primary midterm after Trump’s victory on a wet afternoon within the suburbs of Memphis, Tennessee, with girls going door to door for Democratic candidates. All of them spoke to me in regards to the biting anger, frustration and helplessness they felt watching their TVs on election evening 2016 once they realised that Clinton had misplaced to a raging misogynist.
A few of these girls had voted for Clinton, and others had stayed house, however all have been so embittered by her loss that it turned them, virtually in a single day, into political activists, even in some of the Republican states within the nation. What I witnessed first-hand in Tennessee has been replicated throughout the nation over the previous eight years.
Suburban girls have been on the vanguard of the Democratic social gathering’s electoral victories in 2018, 2020 and 2022. It’s not arduous to think about that, for a lot of, the chance to solid a poll for Harris can be a possibility to proper the improper finished to Clinton whereas additionally providing a becoming dying knell to the political profession of Donald Trump.
If that occurs, Democrats might discover themselves as soon as once more buzzing Comfortable Days Are Right here Once more… for the following 4 years.
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