In Michigan, Vice President Kamala Harris declared that Americans should be free to make personal decisions — without having “their government telling them what to do.”
In Arizona, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota admonished Republicans: “I don’t need you telling me what books to read. I don’t need you telling me about what religion we worship. And I sure the heck don’t need you to tell me about my family.”
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And in Philadelphia, as the Democratic presidential ticket made its debut, Walz seemed to make common cause with the “old white guys” he saw in the audience, noting, “Some of us are old enough to remember when it was Republicans who were talking about freedom.”
“There’s a golden rule,” he added. “Mind your own damn business!”
Democrats are making an aggressive new effort to challenge Republican claims to the language and symbolism of liberty. Using traditionally right-leaning words and phrasing, they are portraying themselves as the true champions of universal American values and their conservative rivals as proponents of deeply intrusive policies that threaten fundamental freedoms.
For Harris and Walz, those arguments are not quick throwaways — they are central and consistent parts of their pitches and often among their biggest applause lines.
Democrats hope that such messaging can help their party engage independent voters, and the occasional moderate Republican, by establishing common ground on ideals that transcend differences over, say, tax policy.
“Persuasion isn’t getting people to change their values — it’s appealing to values that turn out to spread across party lines,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a Democrat who also campaigned on a message of freedom during his 2020 presidential bid.
“If you want to reach out to independents,” he continued in an interview, “if you want to open the door to what I like to call future former Republicans, part of what you can do — without some inauthentic attempt to seem different than you are on policy — is to tap into those themes.”
The focus on freedom often dovetails with proclamations of patriotism. For Harris, a Black and South Asian Democrat who could become the nation’s first female president, that is also a way to assert and define her own American experience as she runs against a Republican who has a history of exoticizing politicians of color and is already questioning her racial identity.
President Joe Biden has long insisted that “this is not your father’s Republican Party,” the kind of language that amounts to a “permission structure for changing your mind,” said Anat Shenker-Osorio, a Democratic messaging strategist.
“It’s not that you need to admit that you’ve gone from Belief A to Belief B,” she said. “What’s happened is this party, this identity, this group that you affiliated with and were a part of, it has abandoned you. You haven’t abandoned it.”
Democrats say the transformation of the Republican Party has become only more apparent since the 2020 election: Former President Donald Trump tried to overturn his loss. The Supreme Court, propelled by justices he nominated, erased the constitutional right to abortion, leading to far-reaching abortion bans in many states and painful stories of women facing severe health complications. Trump became the first American president to be convicted of a crime and suggested that he had no intention of being a dictator — “except for Day 1.”
“The Republican Party used to embrace ideals of freedom, democracy, rule of law,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Walz’s fellow Minnesotan. “The language, the focus, the party of Donald Trump have turned it upside down.”
On no issue have Democrats seen a clearer opening to push this argument than on abortion rights. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, the party has won elections repeatedly by casting abortion access as a matter of medical privacy and personal freedom. Its power in a presidential election two years later is untested — but Democrats are hopeful.
Harris and Walz are embracing the freedom message at every turn, lashing government encroachment on issues of “heart and home,” as Harris has said. The Minnesota governor’s “mind your own damn business” line often comes after he says that Republicans think “the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office.”
But more broadly, they are also pressing an upbeat, unabashedly patriotic vision for the country, with Harris casting their partnership — forged despite two radically different upbringings in California and Nebraska — as an “only in America” story.
She is hardly the first Democrat to sound these notes, as the party’s last few nominees might point out. And Republicans — who are skeptical of the Democrats’ selective use of anti-big-government language — are also emphasizing love of country, as usual.
Trump has been known to literally embrace the flag, and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, has highlighted his service in the Marine Corps.
“The American people will not be gaslit by the Harris-Walz campaign when it comes to the issue of freedom,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump, suggesting that under Democrats, far-left ideology had “been force-fed into nearly every aspect of life.” He added, “American voters are fed up with their woke intrusions.”
Other Republicans have mocked the Democratic ticket’s message about staying out of others’ business, with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida slamming the COVID-19 restrictions in Minnesota during Walz’s tenure.
Out of power, Republicans are naturally conveying a far grimmer vision of where the nation stands and where it is headed unless they return to the White House.
But Trump has painted an exceptionally dark and grievance-laced picture of the country today, no brighter than that of his 2017 inaugural address, in which he described scenes of “American carnage.” It is a stark contrast from the optimistic ways his Republican predecessors often showcased their patriotism.
Former Rep. Reid J. Ribble, who represented Wisconsin as a Republican but does not plan to support Trump or Harris, said he was unmoved by the Democratic ticket’s nods to the language of limited government. In practice, he said, “the policies of the Biden administration have been to use big government to do things.”
Indeed, the Democratic Party has traditionally embraced the idea that the government has a major role to play in promoting the public good, and that remains the case in many ways — though Trump and Vance are not traditional free-market conservatives.
But on the messaging front in particular, Ribble said he detected a “role reversal” between the two campaigns.
“It’s always been kind of the traditional Republican mantra to lean into the ‘shining city on the hill,’ the patriotic endeavor, the Founding Fathers in the U.S. Constitution, and wrap themselves in the flag,” Ribble said. “Now you see the Democrats doing this. And, interestingly enough, you have the Republicans attacking the VP nominee on the other side because they didn’t like how he ended his 24 years of service in the military.”
Vance has accused Walz of leaving the Army National Guard to avoid being deployed to Iraq and of suggesting he had served in combat when he had not. The Harris campaign has said that Walz misspoke in 2018 when he mentioned “those weapons of war, that I carried in war,” while discussing gun control. Walz vigorously defended his broader military record this week.
Other ugly campaign clashes are underway.
Trump’s questioning of Harris’ racial identity evokes an old political tactic of casting nonwhite candidates as outsiders to be viewed with suspicion.
Shenker-Osorio, the Democratic messaging strategist, said it was vital to offer counterdefinitions of what it means to be an American and to call out opponents for seeking to divide through dog whistles.
“The way that you do it,” she said, is “by creating this much bigger ‘we’ and being hyper-explicit by saying, ‘In America, across races, places, faiths and origins, we believe in our freedoms.’”
Klobuchar suggested that for Harris, a former prosecutor, and Walz, who represented a largely rural, more conservative district in Congress, talking about upholding the rule of law or protecting individual freedoms came naturally — and that the themes were all too relevant in the current election.
“The words are not just words that have been co-opted,” Klobuchar said. “They’re words that actually describe where our party is versus where their party is right now.”
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