Kamala Harris is running on vibes

If you like sex, make some noise,” bellowed the DJ, who stood in front of a gigantic screen that displayed images of Vice-President Kamala Harris dancing. “Because in this election we are not going to lose the right to have an abortion...and to have sex with whoever we want.” As the pictures of Harris were replaced by a flurry of giant Doritos, a favoured Harris snack, the crowd of revellers bellowed its approval.

Just an hour before, they had been listening to a sober speech from Barack Obama, which concluded the second session of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Obama had played his greatest hits and ended his remarks urging Americans to listen to “the better angels of our nature”. The crowd on the dance floor had decided to ignore the former president, at least for a few hours. They were at a raunchy after-party called “Hotties for Harris”. The vice-president has proved to be a surprise sensation. Charli XCX, the singer of the summer’s hit album, dubbed her “brat”, which was intended as praise. At the party, Harris memes that have mushroomed across the internet were brought to life: influencers sipped from coconuts and jeered at a “Wall of Weirdos”, which included pictures of Donald Trump and his pick for vice-president, J.D. Vance.

The definition of “hottie” was expansive, encompassing a number of middle-aged schlubs. Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband, is a hottie, because “He supports his wife in her career and took a step back from his own as Harris rose through the ranks.” Tim Walz, Harris’s running-mate, qualifies too, since “He signed up to be the founding faculty adviser for his school’s gay/straight alliance in 1999, knowing that as the school’s straight, white, male football coach, stepping into the role would have an impact. That’s hot.”

Neither Emhoff nor Walz managed to make the event. But I found Nadya Okamoto, one of the co-hosts, sitting cross-legged on the pavement outside the club. A 26-year-old influencer wearing shimmery ochre eyeshadow, she makes content about “reproductive health and periods”. Harris has in the past appeared awkward in public appearances. But since her elevation to the top of the ticket, her occasional goofiness has endeared her to her supporters. “Brat is very much about paving your own path, being unapologetically you,” Okamoto said. She hoped the party would confer hotness on the act of voting and the Democratic Party. “But I think brat summer, hotties for Harris is like, we’re different, being a baddie, being a hottie, being for Kamala, like, it’s all cool.”

The idea of a bunch of Gen Z influencers throwing a party for Harris would have seemed preposterous just a couple of months ago. Her career couldn’t be more conventional, starting out in the district attorney’s office – a well-trodden path for aspirant politicians. She has held elected office since 2003. As vice-president, Harris was decidedly not hot. Her tenure was bedevilled by criticism. Bruising articles (“The Kamala Harris Problem”; “Where Did It Go Wrong for Her?”) noted her rhetorical blunders, her inability to retain staff and the perception that she lacked authenticity. Last year nearly half of voters held an unfavourable view of her, according to NBC News, the highest disapproval rating of any veep since the poll began in 1989. A week before Joe Biden dropped out of the race on July 21st 2024 and anointed Harris as his successor, Trump was on course to beat Harris in a hypothetical match-up by a bigger margin (five points) than Biden (two points), according to a poll conducted by YouGov for The Economist.

Yet since Harris has replaced Biden as the party’s nominee, she has become a sensation. Tens of thousands of supporters are attending her rallies and she is crushing fund-raising records. “At times...she appears to be leading more of a movement than a political campaign,” observed a Democratic strategist recently. A party that had nearly resigned itself to defeat now talks of victory, winning control not just of the White House but both chambers of Congress too. I went to Chicago to find out from the assembled faithful: what exactly did the Democratic Party see in Harris that had been overlooked before?

The convention, staged at the United Centre, home of the Chicago Bulls basketball team, frequently resembled a music festival more than a political gathering. Speeches were broken up with performances from Stevie Wonder and the rappers Common and Lil Jon (“To the windows, to the Walz” was how the latter pumped up the crowd). There were celebrity cameo appearances from Oprah Winfrey and Eva Longoria. America’s two biggest singers have yet to make endorsements in the election but those gathered seemed to suspect where their sympathies lie. The delegation from Washington state wore silver cowboy hats with flashing lights round the brim – a nod to Beyoncé’s most recent album. (The singer has also supplied the Harris campaign’s anthem.) A delegate from Mississippi handed out Taylor Swift friendship bracelets to passers-by.

Party poohbahs were equally buoyant. Veterans assured me they had known all along about Harris’s gifts. Her “passion, that insatiable thirst for justice, has always been there”, Miguel Cardona, the secretary of education, told me. (He knew this because he’d “had the privilege and the honour of a lifetime to be in meetings” with her.) “People hadn’t really been watching her,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, a union – the plight of all vice-presidents.

In the spotlight, she appears attractive as much for the contrast she cuts as her own political powers. She may be pushing 60, but she is sprightly in comparison with Biden and Trump. She is a woman of colour, though doesn’t have to lean too heavily into her identity, since her opponent seems compelled to ineptly make such a deal of it.

The vibe shift is clearly working its magic. Her smile is “contagious”, said Emily Kostielney, a DNC volunteer in charge of compost education. “She’s somebody that you’d love to grab lunch with, right? And have a great conversation about whatever, and you’re not going to leave feeling defeated and doom and gloom.” Dawn Huckelbridge, a campaigner for paid family leave, describes her “laughter and joy and celebration”. The news of her candidacy “thrilled” her in the way that the release of a new Beyoncé album does.

Out in the hall, by the “selfie zone”, Blair Imani Ali was recording a video for her social-media series Smarter in Seconds. She was one of 200 creators the DNC had invited to the convention. (When I asked if I could take her picture, she politely declined. Let me send you a “cute one”, she said.) Imani Ali wouldn’t have come to the convention if Biden had remained on the ticket. “He was not connecting with young people.” With Harris, “We have somebody in there who looks like me, looks like my family and has shown that she listens.”

What exactly the attendees were hearing depended on whom you asked. Imani Ali believed that Harris was “overwhelmingly progressive”. Okamoto, the organiser of “Hotties for Harris”, thought she was a moderate. Kevin Jacobson, a member of the Wisconsin delegation who wore a hat shaped like a wedge of cheddar cheese, believed she held some ineffable Goldilocks position. “She’s not too progressive, she’s not too moderate…She’s somewhere in between.”

Even on the divisive question of support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza – which has convulsed the left of the party – Harris seems to be winning hearts and minds with the most homoeopathic of gestures. Rami al-Kabra, a delegate from Washington state who wore a keffiyeh draped round his neck, told me he was “very excited” about a woman of colour “making history”. He believed he could detect “the rhetoric slightly change”. Al-Kabra admitted that at the moment there was “no action, it’s just words” but felt he could divine what Harris really wanted. However, as a member of the administration, he told me, she “can’t speak of that change publicly”.

Being all things to all people is not a bad quality in a politician. The more votes you get, the more likely you are to win. But it does leave one open to accusations of opportunism. Harris has no clear foreign policy and has only just begun to sketch, in the broadest strokes, her approach to the economy. Vance has called her “a fundamentally fake person” because she has disavowed positions she took on fracking and immigration during the Democratic primary in 2020. (His own well-publicised volte-faces may have undermined his credibility as a messenger.)

For the moment, Harris fans aren’t bothered by the vagueness of her agenda. Okamoto, turning to her 21-year-old sister Issa, asked, “Does it matter to her what the specifics of the policies are, or that it’s just her or Trump?”

“Her or Trump,” said Issa.

This was the argument Biden used to make. And look where that got him. ■

Charlie McCann is a staff writer for 1843 magazine