The end of the lesser evil election?

“Hope is making a comeback!” The words are Michelle Obama’s, from night two of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. At least among US liberals, it seems undeniable. Guardian columnist Emma Brockes, watching from New York, wrote of being taken by “giddiness” and “hysteria”. The convention, she wrote, “unleashed a psychic energy”. “It was emotional! Friends on the east coast stayed up late watching, and cried. I cried!”

It would be easy to dismiss this as the usual fawning of a member of the media class captivated and ultimately overwhelmed by the spell of political power. Yet it is indicative of a broader phenomenon. The Harris effect reaches well beyond the circles inhabited by Guardian columnists; the new presidential nominee has generated an excitement among sections of the Democratic voter base not seen since Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was contesting the primaries, but with a breadth of support not seen since Barack Obama ran in 2008.

Various indicators tell the story—polling, volunteer numbers, donations and crowd sizes.

The Washington Post this week noted an 18-percentage-point shift towards Democrats among people aged under 40 after the party dumped Biden for Harris. An August 8-12 Monmouth University poll found that Democratic enthusiasm about the election jumped from 46 percent in June, before Biden dropped out, to 85 percent after Harris became the presumptive nominee. Enthusiasm among independents increased from 34 percent to 53 percent. The poll also found that 92 percent of Democratic voters are enthusiastic about Harris being their nominee. Pew Research likewise found that nine in ten Democrats say they are happy that Harris is the candidate.

Contrast this with the last two Democratic presidential candidates. Pew polling in 2016 found that only 43 percent of Democratic voters were satisfied with Hillary Clinton being the party’s candidate. In 2020, just 42 percent were happy with the choice of Biden.

Another proxy for gauging “positive enthusiasm” is the proportion of a candidate’s supporters who are voting “for” the candidate as opposed to “against” the other candidate. In 2016, Pew found that less than half of Clinton’s supporters viewed their vote as being “for” her—50 percent said they were voting “against” Trump. In 2020, 56 percent of Biden’s supporters said their main reason for backing him was that he wasn’t Trump. Fox News polling in May found that about half of this year’s Biden supporters were primarily voting “against” Trump.

By contrast, nearly two-thirds of Harris supporters polled by Fox described their vote as being “for” her, with around one-third voting “against” Trump. That puts Harris somewhere in between the paradigmatic lesser evil candidates (Clinton and Biden) and the more popular Obama, only one-quarter of whose 2008 supporters said their vote was more a vote “against” Republican nominee John McCain.

In terms of volunteers, Harris has also seemingly outperformed. Five days after Biden withdrew from the race, her campaign reported that more than 170,000 people signed up to volunteer. There are signs that the surge has continued: reports of 5,000 sign-ups in Nevada in the first week of August, more than 1,000 sign-ups in Detroit on the second weekend of the month, more than 43,000 in Pennsylvania in the last month, and 15,000 in Florida in the three weeks to 15 August, according to two sources. Presumably, there will be an update on national figures at the end of the month or in early September.

Harris’s numbers aren’t as impressive as those of Bernie Sanders’ last campaign, however. In one week, he signed up 1 million volunteers after announcing his presidential bid in early 2019—a year before voting began in the primaries. (By contrast, Hillary Clinton’s 2015-16 primary campaign reported 89,000 volunteers a month before the first ballots were cast in Iowa.)

While volunteer enthusiasm indicates something, it’s important not to read too much into the numbers. The major parties’ political machines will consistently deliver for the confirmed nominees, no matter who they are. For example, despite Democrats’ misgivings about his candidacy, Biden, according to one report, mobilised at least 2.7 million people between April and November in the 2020 campaign.

Nevertheless, from a standing start, the mobilisation for Harris indicates a swell of enthusiasm. Coming out of the national convention, her campaign will likely shift into yet another gear as the entire apparatus of the Democratic machine is turned full tilt to November.

Donations, like volunteers, have also flooded in. According to a New York Times analysis of Federal Election Commission data, more than 1.5 million new donors gave a collective US$183 million to the Harris campaign in the last 11 days of July. “Just 10 percent of Mr. Biden’s donors in July were under 45 years old, compared with 28 percent of Ms. Harris’s donors”, the Times noted. According to the Harris campaign, two-thirds of the donations came from first-time donors and 94 percent were for $200 or less.

This month, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, which can hardly be accused of liberal bias, related anecdotes capturing the mood of Democrats nationwide. They are only sketches, but are suggestive of a broader shift:

“Heather Ahern Huish was so elated when she read online that President Biden was endorsing Kamala Harris for the White House that the English teacher in rural Maine did something she hadn’t done in years. She made a political contribution, clicking on a Harris Facebook ad and donating $100—about the same amount she spends on groceries each week. ‘I was just so swept up in the moment’, said Ahern Huish, who is 56 and lives with her husband. ‘There was, like, zero hesitation.’ ...

“More than 6,000 people have handed over a $10 donation for an abstract ‘Kamala’ quilting pattern made by a couple in Illinois. The haul from a ‘White Dudes for Harris’ call left its organizers dumbstruck. ‘If you had asked me if I would be someone who raised $4.5 million for a presidential campaign before this, I would have told you, “There is no chance in hell”,’ said one of them ...

“In late July, political strategist-turned-businesswoman Jotaka Eaddy set up one of the regular Zoom calls she hosts for Black women in business, called Win With Black Women. Usually the calls attracted a few hundred people. But this time, Eaddy’s Sunday gathering became a vehicle for Harris fans looking for a way to show their support: More than 44,000 people joined the event with tens of thousands others listening in, according to Eaddy. She raised $1.6 million in roughly two hours.”

Finally, Harris’s crowds indicate a campaign galvanising the Democratic base. Harvard Kennedy School’s Crowd Counting Consortium, which tracks public mobilisations across the United States, estimates that the vice president, before this week’s convention, averaged 13,400 attendees at her campaign rallies (of which there had been only six, however)—more than double Donald Trump’s 2024 average of 5,600 attendees.

By contrast, lesser evil candidates are renowned floppers when it comes to pulling a crowd. Biden’s average this year was 1,300 people. In her time, Clinton wasn’t much better.

“The pictures have told the story over the past six months. Republican Donald Trump is filling convention centres, airport hangars and parks. Clinton, on the other hand, is filling community centres and small colleges, but just barely”, noted a 2016 Al Jazeera report. Clinton did pull some larger audiences, but reports indicate that they generally, or only, materialised when she double-billed with celebrities or more popular figures—such as an election-eve rally of 40,000, which was also a concert featuring Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen, with a guest appearance by Barack Obama.

It’s too early, however, to make meaningful crowd comparisons between Harris and the last two Democrats to have generated significant enthusiasm. Obama at least twice drew more than 100,000 in his first presidential race and drew many “smaller” attendances of 20-40,000. Bernie Sanders’ biggest rallies were in the order of 30,000. But it’s difficult to ascertain the average crowd size for either of those candidates—they both held hundreds of rallies, displaying an endurance that Harris need not match, seeing as there are only a couple of months until polling day.

At any rate, objective indicators point to a groundswell within the Democratic base; it is overwhelmingly pro-Harris rather than simply anti-Trump. Whether it will last is another question—but there’s no point in making predictions about the outcome of the November poll. As Sanders showed, motivating and captivating a base is not the same as carrying a majority. As well, US politics can turn on a dime. It was just six weeks ago, for example, that Republican candidate Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt. In its aftermath, a chorus of commentators predicted with certainty that the billionaire now had a lock on the election. That the shooting is now almost forgotten is illustrative of how quickly the media cycle and the political narrative can turn.

It should also be noted that Hillary Clinton, at the same point in the 2016 race, held a larger average polling lead that Harris currently enjoys—6 percentage points compared to less than 4 percentage points (though this could bounce after the convention). Clinton’s lead blew out to almost 7 percent just three weeks from election day after an Access Hollywood tape, recorded a decade earlier, exposed Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women. One NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll put the former secretary of state ahead by 14 points soon after. At the time, even Republican leaders described Trump as unelectable and were calling on him to withdraw from the race. Yet he still threaded a victory through the Electoral College.

Most progressives will view the Harris surge—and with it, a shift in the national polling—as a positive development. After all, who wants Trump to be again installed in the White House, from where he would resume his attacks on women, trans people, the environment, immigrants, workers and unions? Who wants fascist activists to be emboldened by Trump emerging victorious in November after a campaign of far-right invective and promises to deport millions, crush the left and further enrich billionaires? No-one with a left-wing bone in their body views a potential Trump second term with anything other than horror.

Yet there is something profoundly disturbing about a vice president up to her eyeballs in the Palestinian genocide managing to inspire legions of progressives. There is something unsettling about a Democratic National Convention that refused even to allow a Palestinian speaker to address delegates about the horror of Gaza, funded by a Democratic government. There is something bizarre about a party run by billionaires parading itself as the hope of the American working class. And there is something just flat-out dishonest about the party of the CIA talking about international “security”.

The Sanders campaign, whatever its limitations, injected the language of class and socialism into the US national debate. It got millions of people talking about how socialism, however broadly defined, sounds like a good thing. At the Democratic National Convention this week, party representatives got everyone talking about how prosecutors are heroes for middle America.

“I’ll tell you what …”, Joe Biden started on the first night. The applause erupted before he could even begin waffling; before he could elaborate on what the “what” was. It went on. The delegates cheered in unison at whatever demented babble emanated from the stage, like a parody of the Hunger Games opening ceremony scene, when the gathered audience deliriously cheered contestants about to maul each other for the citizens’ amusement.

Just an hour before Harris’s closing address, the enthusiasm was for a Michigan sheriff thundering about how police funding has increased in his county, and that’s why you should vote for Kamala. Then came former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta talking about how Harris would keep the US military the strongest in the world. Under her, he said, the US would remain interventionist. That is, it would continue invading countries and overthrowing governments that the State Department declares enemies of US imperialism.

For all the danger of Trump, here’s the Democratic rub: this is a party that can get away with anything precisely because its base will allow it. As long as the party comes with a scent of hopium and is decorated with a liberal dose of diversity, there is no left-wing challenge that it cannot overcome. That’s partly why it is the governing party of choice for big business in the US—an insurgent Democratic Party generating enthusiasm is the greatest safeguard to the establishment’s status quo.

In the past twelve months, in the face of the horrors of Palestine, a new student movement began to emerge, the likes of which had not been seen in generations. A mass anti-war movement developed across the country, bringing together anti-Zionist Jews and Muslims, activists with generations of organising experience and young people moved to resist oppression and injustice for the first time. There was, arguably, even an emerging rupture in the ideological core of US liberalism as young people broke to the left.

These green shoots of an entirely different way of doing politics—one that put humanity first and was led by people on the ground rather than pro-imperialists in comfortable offices—have been poisoned by the DDT of the DNC.

Outside the convention, a resilient minority continued to raise their voices for Palestine. But a combination of intimidation and co-option—along with an understandably sapped momentum after ten months of resistance to genocide—have taken their toll. In a city of nearly 10 million people, just 5-7,000 could be mobilised. Democratic-run Chicago might have mobilised more police than that.

Inside the convention, the renewed energy of the party of war was palpable. Republicans were warmly welcomed, but Palestinians were personas non grata. “Stray dis­sent­ers have had Palestinian flags taken away; a hijab-wear­ing pro­tester was drowned out by chants of ‘We love Joe’ and hit with a Biden plac­ard after inter­rupt­ing the pres­id­ent’s speech”, observed Eduard Luce in the Financial Times.

Imagine a Black woman being treated like that at a Republican convention. Now you know what the Democrats are capable of. They can do this and still hypnotise Guardian columnists.

Like the first Obama campaign, the momentum of Harris portends a domestic rehabilitation of US liberalism and the Democratic Party’s credentials, which will only help them sell the next war. That’s just as frightening as the prospect of another four years of Trump.