The campaign for the presidency overflowed for months with dark ruminations about the furies to be unleashed should the other side win: World War III, another Great Depression and even the possible ascent of a dictator.
Into this season of gloom enters a onetime high school teacher and football coach and a corn dog lover, who has introduced a revolutionary alternative — joy.
“Thank you for bringing back the joy,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said to Vice President Kamala Harris, as the two made their first appearance this week as the new Democratic ticket for the White House.
If he won his role as Harris’ No. 2 in part because of his framing of former President Trump and Ohio Sen. JD Vance as “weird,” Walz extended his meme-making role by bringing a decidedly lighter tone to the presidential race.
“All the things that make me mad about those other guys and all the things they do wrong, the one thing I will not forgive them for is they tried to steal the joy from this country,” said Walz, 60, at a Detroit rally Wednesday. “But you know what? … Our next president brings the joy! She emanates the joy!”
The unexpected turn has delighted Democrats and infuriated Republicans. Democrats have seen fundraising surge and poll results tick upward since July 21, when President Biden gave up his bid for a second term and Harris stepped forward. The trend has continued since Tuesday, when she named Walz as her vice presidential pick.
Republicans complain about what they see as irrational exuberance among their opponents and fawning coverage in the media. In myriad interviews and social media posts they have depicted Walz as a Harris clone — two ultra-liberals driving policies that would exacerbate illegal immigration, drive up deficits and prolong crippling inflation.
That’s just another serving of baseless fearmongering, say the Democrats and their supporters, who appear giddy at the prospect of Walz keeping them on the offensive, after months in which much of the media focused on Biden’s age and inability to make a forceful case for a second term.
“Here’s this big, burly guy with a big smile on his face, who’s got this willingness to engage and to fight and to be the happy warrior,” said Reed Galen, a onetime Republican who co-founded the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “I think we have been in a pretty dark place in this country for a number of years, so I think the joy does matter. Happy Democrats vote. Unhappy Democrats don’t. So it matters.”
Other Harris supporters sounded similar optimism.
“I just realized that the Olympics are still going! I totally forgot them. It’s like we all got swept up in the Joy Olympics instead, where @Tim_Walz is medaling [in] everything,” writer Laurel Snyder of Atlanta offered on the social media platform X.
Doran Schwartz of Minnesota chimed in: “Trump’s political persona feeds off the fear he provokes. He must indeed be very strong if we are all so afraid. … But Ridicule? Joy? Humor? It deflates him and robs him of his fuel.”
A survey of America’s political mood over the last eight years has exposed much darker sentiments. Somewhere close to half of those questioned in the McCourtney Institute for Democracy’s Mood of the Nation Poll have deemed themselves “extremely angry” about something in the nation’s politics in each of the last eight years.
In July, conservative country music star Aaron Lewis released a song speaking to his anger about living in a country that he believes is going to pot — where the American flag is burned and “another statue [is] coming down in a town near you.” The latter lyric refers to Confederate war monuments removed in recent years, in condemnation of their racist underpinnings.
“Am I the only one, willin’ to bleed or take a bullet for bein’ free,” Lewis sings in “Am I the Only One.”
Politicians of both parties stoke anger because it works, argues Steven Webster, an Indiana University political scientist and author of “American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics.”
“Voter anger leads to voter loyalty,” Webster said. “Research shows that, even if voters don’t like a candidate in their own party, anger can be forceful enough that they will keep voting against the other side.”
Many Democrats have expressed fury at Trump, whom they describe as a sociopath and a would-be autocrat. Republicans suggest a country controlled by Democrats will be turned into a welfare state, handed over to migrants who broke the law to come to the U.S.
Picking up on Walz’s theme, Harris told a Wisconsin crowd that she and her running mate “are joyful warriors.” But Walz has also made clear he didn’t join the Democratic ticket just to play nice.
In his debut performance at the Philadelphia rally he made a thinly veiled reference to a prurient and debunked rumor involving his opponent, Vance, and certain living room furniture. He added “creepy” to his initial description of the Republicans as “weird” and he questioned Vance’s credibility as a son of Appalachia, because he went on to Yale Law School and work for Silicon Valley tech magnate Peter Thiel.
Vance, in turn, has pilloried the Minnesota governor for purportedly not doing enough to quell rioting in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. The Republican No. 2 has also accused Walz of mischaracterizing his service in the Army National Guard.
During a discussion of gun control, Walz once said: “We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.”
Walz never served in a war zone, though those who served most closely with him over 20 years have praised him as a good soldier.
The Democrats have gained enough traction with their depiction of themselves as a happy force against negative Republicans that Vance faced a question Wednesday from a Fox News reporter about the topic.
The reporter wondered if Vance appeared “a little too serious, too angry sometimes,” asking: “What makes you smile? What makes you happy?”
“I smile at a lot of things, including bogus questions from the media, man,” Vance said. The vice presidential contender insisted he was “having a good time out here and I’m enjoying this.”
Andy Borowitz, a comedian whose “Borowitz Report” newsletter has 390,000 subscribers, found Vance’s response a bit incredible.
“What I’m seeing is a guy who’s miserable because he’s failing and no one’s laughing at his terrible jokes,” said Borowitz, who lives in New Hampshire. “So he insists, ‘I’m having a really good time.’ That sounds very much to me like a fake orgasm.”
Borowitz, a former New Yorker writer and faithful Democrat, accused the Republicans of running on “an anti-joy platform,” as evidenced, he said, partly by their extreme disdain for Harris’ laughter.
Said Borowitz: “We’re going to see whether the human desire to laugh and be happy, which I think is pretty baked in, is going to win.”
