Like 20 million others each night last week, I watched this year’s high-energy, celeb-packed Democratic National Convention with plenty of interest.
While true policy proposals came at a trickle over the course of four nights, what flowed plentifully were vibes — a palpable exhilaration about the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, that had largely evaded the party and voters in the months (and maybe years) before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
Michelle Obama described the Democrats’ vibe shift best when she noted: “Something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn’t it? … We’re feeling it here in this arena, but it’s spreading all across this country we love. A familiar feeling that’s been buried too deep for far too long.”
But what role does this kind of magic have to play in a highly consequential US election? Vibes, after all, are not votes.
Can Harris turn the current burst of excitement into a persuasive argument for undecided and swing-state voters to cast their ballots for her?
Today, Vox’s senior political reporter Christian Paz, who covers the Democratic Party, joins me to help make sense of the vibes candidacy, how it could translate at the polls, and what we might be missing in the haze of the excitement. Our interview has been condensed and lightly edited.
So, is there really a vibe shift happening among Democrats right now? It sure seems like it.
Yeah, and there are a few ways to quantify that. The first is approval ratings or favorability ratings for Kamala Harris. One of the key things we’ve seen is a pretty sharp reversal in her favorability ratings.
They’ve pretty much shot up as people have gotten to know her, as they figure out who she is and what she did as vice president, and just see more of her, because we really did not see a lot of her through her vice presidency.
In Gallup’s recent polling, she has a 93 percent favorable opinion rating from Democrats, up from 77 percent in June. That’s a pretty definable vibe shift in her favor.
The other way to measure vibe is motivation to vote, and that has also changed. Now it’s Democrats who are outpacing Republicans in terms of motivation to vote. In the past, Republicans had a pretty significant lead.
Another factor is anecdotal evidence — the fact that there’s such a saturation of coverage of her, whether that’s a lot of positive coverage in media, the memes, the jokes about brat summer, coconut trees, or coconut-pilling, all of which has generated excitement among younger people.
Why are people feeling this in such a pronounced way now? We had Michelle Obama hinting that the last time we saw this energy was for Barack Obama.
Part of the reason people are so optimistic about Harris is that they see her as a change candidate, even though she’s technically an incumbent. She’s part of the administration. People are willing to forgive some of her association with Biden and look past some of the more unpopular parts of the Biden presidency and not blame her for that and give her credit for the more popular aspects.
People do want to feel that there’s a difference in the air, and that’s why they’re harking back to the closest thing to that: 2008. There are similarities there. It’s another Black candidate; it’s a female presidential candidate, which reminds us of 2016. So what we’ve got brewing together, I think of it almost like a tea, with notes you remember from the past, repackaged for the post-Trump era.
Even if you’re looking beyond the vibes, Harris is up in a few polls in North Carolina, looking to expand the map to Florida, and being serious about Arizona, which are some of the same things we were hearing during the Obama campaign, so it’s a fair comparison to make.
One comparison we cannot make to Obama is that he had months longer to campaign. People quit their jobs to join the campaign and knock on doors. There weren’t just vibes, there was on-the-ground work. I don’t know that Harris has that time to reach out to voters on that level.
What should people understand about whether vibes will be enough to translate to votes?
Yeah, just like we’re cautious of polls, we should be cautious of vibes. They’re vibes. They’re amorphous. They’re temporary. I think that’s why it’s important to remember we are in a bit of a bubble.
It’s an excellent point how compacted and compressed this timeline is. We haven’t had a negative Harris news cycle. The last month has been nonstop positive coverage of Harris, and we should be ready to see a change in that.
There’s also been a lot of noise from the polls, but I’ve heard from a lot of pollsters that there is now a reversal of what we saw with Trump voters. They call it a response bias, where you have a specific kind of voter who wants to be heard and is more likely to be represented in the polling and paint a misleading picture. That used to boost Trump.
As far as how this translates into votes and reality, after we have those caveats, it’s important to remember that Harris is inheriting a lot of the Biden campaign infrastructure. They have a bunch of money. And honestly, there’s been some political science research that shows that the most effective way to reach out to a traditional voter is TV advertising and online advertising, which is why it’s so important that they have so much money to spend.
The next best way is to get out and talk to people, and luckily, again, the Biden team has a pretty good infrastructure in place already. They have a bunch more campaign offices than the Trump campaign does, they have them set up in various states, and they have been hiring.
We’ll see how much door-knocking we see.
In the past, there were some questions about whether there would be enough Biden volunteers who wanted to campaign for him. In that sense, the vibes do matter: We’ve seen a rush of volunteers sign up to help Democrats recently.
That’s another way to measure vibe shift: In a qualitative sense, Harris is making it easier for your volunteers to make the pitch for the candidate.
I’m really curious. What does all this discussion of positive energy and vibes obscure about this election?
There was a lot of behind-the-scenes tension and dissension over the uncommitted delegates, over protests regarding Gaza. We didn’t see a lot of that being discussed at the convention. [Harris ultimately addressed the conflict and her position in her closing remarks.]
The other thing is there’s still a lot of dissatisfaction on the economy and inflation. We didn’t hear a lot about that at the DNC. Harris is trying to be proactive on these issues but doesn’t necessarily know the best way to speak about them. How much do you want to speak about inflation and remind people you’re part of this administration?
There’s also still a chance for the economy to take a negative turn in the coming months, and that would be bad for Harris.
The third thing the vibes are obscuring right now is, yes, it’s still a really close race. People are pointing out that Trump is still an average polling error away from winning, and winning pretty big.
There’s a lot that can still affect how the party’s liberals are thinking and turning out, a lot that can affect how more moderate and swing-state voters are really thinking.
It’s still really, really close, and that’s something folks have to remember.
This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.
If you’re interested in more election news — and more than just vibes — check out Vox’s guides to the actual policy positions held by Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
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