With the presidential tickets now set for 2024, Americans can expect to spend the next three months until Election Day hearing the repeated slogans and messaging that former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris hope will resonate with voters.
For Trump, “Make America great again,” the message that spawned a movement and propelled him to victory in 2016 but proved less potent in 2020, remains in place. Inherent in that phrase that adorns red ball caps, bumper stickers and T-shirts is the nostalgic belief that America has fallen from the heights of a bygone era (if only three and a half years ago) and that only Trump can restore it to its rightful condition.
“Our Country is failing, but we will turn it around, quickly, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Trump wrote in an Aug. 1 post on Truth Social.
For Harris, “Not going back” has been the most repeated tagline at campaign rallies since President Biden exited the race on July 21. At Tuesday’s rally in Philadelphia, where Harris introduced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, she used it to highlight Republican efforts to ban abortion.
“Tim and I have a message for Trump and others who want to turn back the clock on our fundamental freedoms: We’re not going back. We’re not going back,” a line that sparked the crowd to chant “Not going back.”
The politics of change
While nearly every presidential election is in some way about change, especially if a president or a vice president is running to continue governing, the 2024 contest is unusual in two big ways. First, a former president is looking to return to the White House after being defeated in the previous contest. Second, a sitting vice president has assumed the top of a ticket after a late withdrawal from a reelection campaign by the president.
For Trump, the case for change is motivated by all that he considers wrong with the way Biden and Harris have governed.
“It’s time for a change. This administration can’t come close to solving the problems,” Trump said in his speech at the Republican National Convention last month, which focused largely on the surge of immigration during the Biden administration.
For Harris, change is making sure that the country doesn’t backslide to the policies Trump enacted during his time in office.
“This campaign is not just about us versus Donald Trump. Truly, this campaign is about two very different visions for our nation: one focused on the future, the other focused on the past,” she said at her rally in Atlanta on July 31.
Running mates contrast anger and joy
While campaigning in Wisconsin on Wednesday, local Fox News reporter Charlie Langton noted that Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, has been criticized for coming off as “too serious, too angry” as he stumps for votes.
“What makes you smile? What makes you happy?” Langton asked Vance.
“Well, I smile at a lot of things, including bogus questions from the media, man,” Vance replied with a hearty laugh. “I mean look, I think if you watch a full speech that I give, I actually am having a good time out here. … But look, sometimes you got to take the good with the bad, and right now I am angry about what Kamala Harris has done to this country and done to the American Southern border. And I think that most people in our country, they can be happy-go-lucky sometimes, 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.”
On Tuesday night, by contrast, Walz sought to infuse optimism into his speech in Philadelphia.
“Thank you, Madam Vice President, for the trust you put in me, but, maybe more so, thank you for bringing back the joy,” he said of Harris.
Later in his speech, Walz, who is credited with coining the “weird” attack on Trump and his allies, reiterated that the vice president approached her job “with a sense of joy.”
Biden’s exit scrambles messaging
Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race presented a dramatic reset of a contest that polls showed Trump was poised to win. Now, Harris has surged and holds a slim lead over Trump nationally, according to polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight.
With Harris as his opponent, Trump has had to recalibrate his pitch to voters, ditching the strategy of going after Biden as too old and “incompetent” to elect to a second term. Now, Trump holds the distinction of being the oldest candidate in the race, and, if he wins, he could become the oldest president in U.S. history.
While sticking with the MAGA acronym that has become synonymous with his political brand, Trump has looked to substitute Harris for Biden as the cause of all that ails the country — while testing out a variety of new derisive nicknames.
“Crazy Kamabla cast the tie-breaking vote on MASSIVE SPENDING BILLS that caused the INFLATION CRISIS!” Trump wrote Tuesday on Truth Social.
He has also gone after Harris’s multiracial identity, telling a forum of Black journalists that she had only recently started self-identifying as Black.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black.
“Is she Indian or is she Black?” he asked, while it is common knowledge that Harris’s mother was Indian and her father was Jamaican.
For Harris, her moment in the spotlight has given her the opportunity to reintroduce herself to voters as a prosecutor who knows “Donald Trump’s type.”
But having hired Barack Obama campaign veterans David Plouffe and David Axelrod, she has also kept her message focused on the country’s future.
“In this moment, we face a choice between two very different visions for our nation: one focused on the future, the other focused on the past,” Harris said in a speech on July 31 to the Sigma Gamma Rho sorority’s gathering in Houston.
