Democrats hope echoes of Obama at Harris rally mean history could repeat in 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris is once again being compared to former President Barack Obama.

Harris’s rally in Atlanta, which she headlined along with rappers Megan Thee Stallion and Quavo, drew a crowd of 10,000 people at Georgia State University’s Convocation Center on Tuesday night for the best-attended Democratic event of the 2024 election cycle.

But it was not only the crowd size and celebrity appearances that inspired the Obama comparisons. It was also the audience’s receptiveness to Harris, engaging in multiple call and responses with her.

Harris yelled one of her rallying cries, “We are not going back!”, before the crowd joined in chanting.

The crowd did the same when Harris criticized former President Donald Trump for trying to back out of the September debate he agreed to with President Joe Biden before Biden was pressured into stepping aside as the Democratic presidential nominee last week over concerns regarding his age, mental acuity, and electoral prospects.

“Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage because, as the saying goes, if you’ve got something to say, say it to my face,” Harris said.

Harris did discourage a “Lock him up!” chant, which echoes the “Lock her up!” counterpart for 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

In the post-rally “Cat and Dog Ladies (and Allies!)” Zoom call, playing off of Sen. J.D. Vance‘s (R-OH), Republican vice presidential nominee, claim the Democratic Party is dominated by “childless cat ladies,” Will Rollins, a California Democratic candidate for Congress challenging Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA) for his Palm Springs-anchored House district, told other Harris supporters he was “feeling so, so fired up.”

“I don’t know if any of you on this Zoom tonight watched the vice president in Atlanta, but it reminded me of my first year out of college with a very famous phrase from Barack Obama: ‘Fired up, ready to go.’ The new phrase: ‘When we fight, we win.’ And the energy in that crowd tonight was unlike anything I’ve seen since 2008,” Rollins said.

Donna Brazile, a former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, appeared to become almost overcome with emotion when she spoke about how Democrats keep attempting to dismantle diversity barriers, including with Obama’s election in 2008.

“The next 98 days will be a fight for freedom,” Brazile said. “This is our torch … This is our moment, and we’re never gonna go back. We’re not gonna go back.”

The Obama comparisons were also amplified on social media Tuesday night by Star Wars actor and Harris supporter Mark Hamill and then again Wednesday morning on television by Rev. Al Sharpton.

“The energy level is clearly way beyond what it was, and I can say it is similar, if not equal, to what I saw happening around then Sen. Barack Obama [in 2008],” Sharpton said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

“Haven’t seen this kind of enthusiasm since Obama’s first run in ’08,” Hamill added in a post on social media. “We won’t go back … & we’re just getting started.”

The Obama-Harris comparisons started in earnest in 2019 when Harris, then a California senator after serving as the Golden State’s attorney general, embarked on her Democratic presidential primary campaign. Although Harris knocked on doors for Obama in Iowa in 2007 when she was San Francisco’s district attorney, she suspended her own bid before the state’s caucuses.

Harris’s biography as the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian-Hindu mother, who took responsibility for raising her after her parents separated when she was seven, spending some of her childhood in Canada, was contrasted with that of Obama. Obama’s father was Kenyan and from a Muslim background, while his mother was white from Kansas, and he spent some of his childhood in Indonesia.

Democrats are hoping Harris can mobilize parts of Obama’s 2008 coalition, which won the former president North Carolina, though he did not hold on to the Tar Heel State in 2012. Demographic changes in other Obama states, such as Florida, Iowa, Ohio, and Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, have put those Electoral College votes out of reach but have put states, including Arizona and Georgia, more into play. Biden won those latter states in 2020.

One senior Democratic Party source told the Washington Examiner Harris’s challenge will be that she needs to reach out and connect with white voters, particularly those in the blue wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, since being the first woman or first black woman for president could risk putting them off with identity politics.

“Obama ran as a unifying candidate,” the source said. “He didn’t only court the African American vote. He actively pursued the support of white voters, which is what you have to do as a non-white candidate. You can’t win without them.” 

A longtime California Republican strategist, who will likely vote for Harris over Trump, cautioned Democrats against too much optimism.

“Don’t get me wrong,” the strategist told the Washington Examiner. “No one has worked harder or sacrificed more to get to this point … Early on, when she was VP, they would have mock dinner parties so she would be ready for the Georgetown set. That is the extent to which she prepares.”

Harris has the drive and has done the preparation on policy matters considering “variables” she knows she could encounter, but she does not have the “horsepower” to come up with a solution when those variables “overlap, conflict, or there is a gap,” according to the strategist.

“It is then she turns to her staff, and if her staff does not deliver a home run, she will turn on them, they will lose their courage, and will stop telling her the truth,” the source said. “The above applies to both her campaign and her possible presidency. If she wins the presidency, I hope I am wrong.”