Since the DNC, the vibes are excellent. But can they translate to votes?
Like 20 million others each night last week, I watched this year’s high-energy, celeb-packed Democratic National Convention with plenty of interest.
While true policy proposals came at a trickle over the course of four nights, what flowed plentifully were vibes — a palpable exhilaration about the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, that had largely evaded the party and voters in the months (and maybe years) before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
Michelle Obama described the Democrats’ vibe shift best when she noted: “Something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn’t it? … We’re feeling it here in this arena, but it’s spreading all across this country we love. A familiar feeling that’s been buried too deep for far too long.”
But what role does this kind of magic have to play in a highly consequential US election? Vibes, after all, are not votes.
Can Harris turn the current burst of excitement into a persuasive argument for undecided and swing-state voters to cast their ballots for her?
Today, Vox’s senior political reporter Christian Paz, who covers the Democratic Party, joins me to help make sense of the vibes candidacy, how it could translate at the polls, and what we might be missing in the haze of the excitement. Our interview has been condensed and lightly edited.
So, is there really a vibe shift happening among Democrats right now? It sure seems like it.
Yeah, and there are a few ways to quantify that. The first is approval ratings or favorability ratings for Kamala Harris. One of the key things we’ve seen is a pretty sharp reversal in her favorability ratings.
They’ve pretty much shot up as people have gotten to know her, as they figure out who she is and what she did as vice president, and just see more of her, because we really did not see a lot of her through her vice presidency.
In Gallup’s recent polling, she has a 93 percent favorable opinion rating from Democrats, up from 77 percent in June. That’s a pretty definable vibe shift in her favor.
The other way to measure vibe is motivation to vote, and that has also changed. Now it’s Democrats who are outpacing Republicans in terms of motivation to vote. In the past, Republicans had a pretty significant lead.
Another factor is anecdotal evidence — the fact that there’s such a saturation of coverage of her, whether that’s a lot of positive coverage in media, the memes, the jokes about brat summer, coconut trees, or coconut-pilling, all of which has generated excitement among younger people.
Why are people feeling this in such a pronounced way now? We had Michelle Obama hinting that the last time we saw this energy was for Barack Obama.
