Democrats used Project 2025 to redefine freedom. It works. – Mother Jones

Harris will host a “reproductive freedom event” in Phoenix to mark the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. Kyle Mazza/NurPhoto/ZUMA

A day after President Joe Biden ended his presidential campaign on July 21, Vice President Kamala Harris arrived in Delaware to greet her new campaign staff. She had been on the phone the day before and, with Biden's support, was already the presumptive nominee. The campaign remained the same—there was no time to build one from scratch. But there would be changes. One of them could already be heard as she strode to the podium to Beyoncé's 2016 anthem “Freedom.” The megastar had given Harris the green light to use the song as the campaign's new theme song just hours earlier.

Harris ended her remarks to the staff with a question. “Do we believe in freedom?” she said. “Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America?” The audience clapped and Beyoncé's choir returned. Freedom, freedom, I can't move. Freedom has let me go.

It was the beginning of a rapid reorientation of the Democratic campaign with just three months to go before the November 5 election. That shift in message took center stage in Chicago. While Biden's campaign team had settled on the message of protecting American democracy from the threat posed by Donald Trump's return, Harris' campaign team has chosen to put the word freedom front and center. In some ways they are synonyms, their Venn diagram circles overlapping. But as a campaign slogan, the shift is key to understanding Harris's appeal to voters. Americans will be hearing the word a lot before long. If she wins, it could prove to be a very wise decision.

On Tuesday afternoon, in one of the convention's massive conference rooms, a few dozen delegates attended a training session on how to most effectively engage voters about abortion and reproductive health. “We're reclaiming the word freedom and we're going for freedom,” Gabby Richards, Planned Parenthood's director of national advocacy, told the crowd. A slide shown on two large screens read, “Message No. 1: Focus on freedom.” “This issue is not just about whether someone has the option to have an abortion. It's about whether someone has the option and the freedom to decide when, if and how they become parents.”

The Supreme Court’s decision two years ago in Dobbs v. Jackson – Women’s Health Organization The demand to abolish the right to abortion prepared the ground for a campaign that focused on the idea of ​​liberation. The abortion rights movement increasingly understood its work as a fight for freedom. The term “pro-choice” faded into the background and was replaced by expressions such as “reproductive freedom.” “Pre-Dobbs “Before we made our decision, we tested many approaches around reproductive justice, and while freedom was a strong approach, it wasn't really the strongest,” explains Roshni Nedungadi, founding partner of HIT Strategies, a polling and research firm that focuses on young voters, voters of color and women voters. “But after the electionDobbswe've really seen a rise in people buying into the idea that they should have the freedom to make their own choices and live their lives as fully as they can, and that resonates with a large portion of the public. I think it's really smart of the campaign to use that phrase.” (Nedungadi's partner at HIT Strategies, Terrance Woodbury, joined the Harris campaign earlier this month.)

The concept of freedom is flexible and goes beyond abortion, contraception and artificial insemination. Harris had played with the concept of freedom in her speeches when she was still running for vice president and campaigning for Joe Biden. This is a key difference between her campaign speeches and his. In the first video of the Harris campaign, a few days after her address to staff in Delaware, Harris was already leaning more towards the new message. “We choose freedom,” she says in the video, singing the chorus of Beyonce's song. “The freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body.”

On the third night in Chicago, freedom was the central theme. Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania delivered a version of the 2022 campaign speech He defeated a MAGA Republican: “It is not freedom to tell our children what books they can read,” he said in his rematch on Wednesday evening. “It is certainly not freedom to say he can vote, but he can pick the winner.”

Shapiro’s portrayal of freedom as part of our everyday lives and To understand how this realignment is suddenly paying off for Democrats, it is important to understand that it is an integral part of our election. Biden has warned for years about the threat Trump poses to democracy. “Whether we keep our republic is now in your hands,” Biden said in his Oval Office address at the end of his campaign. All of that is true, but as a campaign message it proved inaccessible to many voters – the same voters whose lack of support dragged down Biden's campaign.

“Protecting democracy doesn't work as well with young people and communities of color who feel like democracy has never done anything for them,” Nedungadi says. “Every time we're in focus groups with these folks and we try to talk about defending democracy and restoring democracy, we hear from them, without prompting, But what has democracy done for me? This system doesn't work for me. They point to the Electoral College and the idea that Hillary Clinton can win a majority of the vote but not become president of the United States. And they say, What do you mean by 'defend democracy'? It's clearly broken.”

Biden's focus on democracy was also difficult to grasp. Connecting democracy to abortion was like writing a term paper, while freedom effortlessly connects the two issues. Nor was it inspiring. As voters in Nedungadi's focus groups pointed out, it was a message of backwardness rather than progress. “I was excited about giving people something to hope for,” says Nourbese Flint, president of the All* Above All Action Fund, which advocates for both abortion rights and political power for communities of color. “The discussion about freedom, the discussion about our future, is something I welcome because it gives people something to fight for instead of against.”

Polls now show that the Harris campaign is enjoying a rebound, largely because it is getting those same voters to support the Democratic candidate again. The campaign is also hoping that the word freedom will gain more cross-party traction. It is language associated with Republicans, most recently during the George W. Bush administration. After 9/11, Bush described Freedom was seen as under attack, and it became both a rallying cry and an expression of partisan support for Bush. Anyone who called them freedom fries was clearly a Republican.

In a recent New York Times Democratic officials stressed that the campaign was reclaiming appeals to freedom. And there is a hint of that in the campaign’s rhetoric, reflected especially in the mantras that are now associated with vice presidential candidate Tim Walz. “There is a golden rule,” he says during the election campaign: “Mind your own shit!” He accuses the Republicans of sending the government into private spaces like the bedroom and the doctor's office. This is what political theorists call negative freedom, the idea that freedom also exists without restrictions.

But Walz is actually an ambassador for a much broader notion of freedom, or positive independence. The idea that freedom lies in the conditions for opportunity. In his speech to Congress on Wednesday night, Walz not only told the government to leave people alone, but also praised a vision of America in which neighbors look out for each other and housing and health care are rights – that's not absence the government, but a large role for it. It is a political tradition with a long history. In 1941, Roosevelt combined these two sides of the coin of freedom when he called for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

The Harris-Walz campaign is demanding many more freedoms. So many that the word may lose all meaning in the final months of the campaign. In a video that aired on the third night, voters spoke directly to the camera about what freedom means to them, from “choice” to “the ability to laugh with friends.” By the end of the video, the narrative about freedom had become mired in platitudes. The final freedom was “the freedom to work together.”

There are also some freedoms that are conspicuously missing. The unaffiliated delegates who are calling for an end to the war in Gaza and much of the Democratic base would like to see freedom from bombs, war and genocide on the list.

The freedom argument is “a way for Americans to identify with the scope of things the Harris campaign is trying to accomplish” and “a larger context for us to think about what's really at stake in the election,” says Guy Cecil, a Democratic strategist. “So freedom means saving democracy. Freedom means protecting reproductive rights. Freedom means making sure that Project 2025's anti-LGBTQ agenda is not implemented.”

In a list of phrases uttered in Chicago this week, Project 2025 is at the top of the list. There have been several roundtables explaining it, training people on how to talk about it, and speeches warning against it. On Wednesday Saturday Night Live Star Kenan Thompson essentially performed a skit outlining how everything from abortion rights to the Department of Education should be abolished. With Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation and Trump's allies have given Democrats the perfect template. Instead of almost abstract concepts about a descent into authoritarianism or fascism, as a discussion of democracy requires, the Harris campaign can simply compare the freedoms it wants to expand with those Project 2025 wants to reclaim.

“They've given us a gift, frankly,” Cecil says. “They should give Project 2025 as a campaign contribution, because I think it's the starkest contrast you can make between the vision of America we want and the vision of America they're trying to force on us.”

The mood in Chicago is confident, even electrifying. It is a mood that comes from a party that has not only found a better candidate, but also a better message. What comes next will put both to the test.