In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, the Democratic nominee for president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, adopted the ditty Happy Days Are Here Again as his official campaign song.
With its upbeat lyrics – “The skies above are clear again, So, let us sing a song of cheer again, Happy days are here again” – the tune spoke to the hope that a brighter future lay ahead with a new occupant of the White House.
For years, Happy Days Are Here Again was the Democratic party’s unofficial anthem before eventually fading back into obscurity. Today, Democrats may not have rediscovered the song, but they are certainly embracing its sentiment.
Since Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential campaign three Sundays ago, Democrats have turned their collective frowns upside down and embraced vice-president Kamala Harris’s candidacy with a fervour and enthusiasm that we haven’t seen on this side of the Atlantic since the heady days of Barack Obama’s historic 2008 bid for the White House.
The change in demeanour is not difficult to understand. Democrats went from believing they would surely lose the White House to a growing sense of optimism that American voters may elect its first female president – eight years after it failed to do so.
As terrified as most of the UK, Europe and much of the world is about the prospect of another Trump term in office, the fear among Democrats is far greater.
Biden has long been a beloved figure in the Democratic party – a man whose rectitude and empathy stood out in the cynical world of American politics. However, his victory in the 2020 election owed itself to a simpler explanation – Democrats were desperate to evict Trump from the White House. That Biden rose to the top of the party was a tribute to his political skills, but even more an overriding belief that he was the candidate best positioned to defeat Trump in November. It’s why 2020 saw the highest voter turnout in recent history, with 17 million more Americans voting than had done so four years earlier.
For much of 2024, Democrats have been consumed by the fear that Trump would return to the White House and bring the chaos, dysfunction and authoritarian mindset of his first four years in office. With Biden tied or trailing Trump in the polls for much of the year, Democrats were wringing their hands but not quite panicking.
Then, on 27 June, Trump met Biden on the stage for the earliest presidential debate in American political history – and things did not go well. Biden stumbled his way through the 90-minute debate and looked every day of his 81 years. Fears that the president was too old to win a second term, largely suppressed by Democrats, bubbled to the surface.
For three weeks, the party went into full meltdown mode, with many convinced that Biden was doomed to defeat. By mid-July, it was clear that he had lost the confidence of his party, and he wisely abandoned the race.
The outpouring of emotion that greeted Harris’s ascendancy to the top of the ticket was more than just excitement about her candidacy. In one afternoon, Democrats went from the depths of despair about another Trump term in office to sky-high optimism that the happy days were back. Within a week, Harris had raised an eye-popping $200m, and more than 170,000 people signed up to volunteer for her campaign.
Surely, some of this excitement had something to do with Harris, who is a very different candidate than the one who crashed and burned when she ran for the White House in 2019.
Buoyed by the outpouring of support for her candidacy, she has brought a lightness and joyfulness to the campaign trail that stands in stark contrast to Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance. That she added a dad-joke-cracking midwesterner to her ticket in the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, has only added to her appeal. Her raucous, packed-house rallies have brought excitement to Democratic party politics not seen in years.
If elected, she would be the first female president in American history – and only the second Black person to win the nation’s highest office. So it should hardly come as a surprise that Harris has quickly reversed Biden’s nagging problems with Black voters. But the impact on American women could be one of the most interesting dynamics of the coming campaign.
When Hillary Clinton fell short in the 2016 election, for many women her defeat was a gut-punch result. It’s hardly a surprise that the first major protest of Trump’s victory came the day after his inauguration, at the so-called Women’s March, which attracted nearly 5 million Americans.
In 2018, I spent the weeks before the first midterm after Trump’s victory on a rainy afternoon in the suburbs of Memphis, Tennessee, with women going door to door for Democratic candidates. All of them spoke to me about the biting anger, frustration and helplessness they felt watching their TVs on election night 2016 when they realised that Clinton had lost to a raging misogynist.
Some of these women had voted for Clinton, and others had stayed home, but all were so embittered by her loss that it turned them, practically overnight, into political activists, even in one of the most Republican states in the country. What I witnessed first-hand in Tennessee has been replicated across the country over the past eight years.
Suburban women have been at the vanguard of the Democratic party’s electoral victories in 2018, 2020 and 2022. It’s not hard to imagine that, for many, the opportunity to cast a ballot for Harris would be an opportunity to right the wrong done to Clinton while also offering a fitting death knell to the political career of Donald Trump.
If that happens, Democrats may find themselves once again humming Happy Days Are Here Again… for the next four years.
• Michael Cohen is an Observer columnist. His most recent book, co-authored with Micah Zenko, is Clear & Present Safety
