From hope to fear: how the Democrats changed their message

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” said Franklin D. Roosevelt, famously. The Democrats of 2024 have a rather different message for the world: Be Very Afraid!

“I’m scared as heck,” said the vice-president, Kamala Harris, yesterday, as she discussed the “crazies” who might put Donald Trump back in the Oval Office. Not for the first time, Harris was echoing the sentiments of Michelle Obama, the former first lady: “I am terrified,” Michelle told a podcast last week. “We cannot take this democracy for granted.”

We’re a long way from 2008, when Michelle’s husband won the White House by appealing to the opposite emotion. “We choose hope over fear,” said Barack Obama, back then. Today, his party opts for anxiety over optimism.

Biden’s latest speeches have been full of dire prophecies about what four more years of Trump might bring

In the summer, Obama reportedly told Joe Biden over lunch that the White House was not nearly anxious enough about the very real possibility that Trump might win again. Biden appears to have taken the point on board. Rather than trying to convince Americans that, despite the rising cost of everything, they were all much better off, he went back to his 2020 modus operandi: warning the public that Trump is a wannabe dictator who wants to kill democracy. His latest speeches have been full of dire prophecies about what four more years of Trump might bring. The Donald “will fundamentally alter the character of our nation,” he says.

Trump dabbles in dread, too, of course. In fact, as the increasingly inevitable Biden vs Trump 2024 rematch shapes up, both campaigns are essentially making the same pitch: vote for me or the country and the world are finished.

“I don’t know if you feel it,” said Trump in December. “But we’re very close to World War Three.” He raises the specter of nuclear “obliteration” and reiterates the line he used to launch his 2016 campaign: “The American dream is dead.”

Fear is a powerful emotion, no doubt. Trump and Biden have, in 2016 and 2020 respectively, both proved that, in a time when Americans are fed up with Washington, a challenger can use negative rhetoric effectively. Biden’s problem is that, unlike 2020, he is the incumbent. The polls suggest Americans are now more pessimistic about the direction of their country under Biden than they were under Trump. And now Trump is the challenger again, the agent of change.

Psychology matters in elections. Hillary Clinton discovered the hard way that insulting voters is a risky business. She called Trump supporters “a basket of deplorables” — and the deplorables duly rose up from their basket and destroyed her ambition to become the first female commander-in-chief.

Kamala Harris, who stands to replace the frail Biden at some point in his second term and thus achieve what Hillary could not, may have to learn the same lesson — and maybe’s that’s the real reason she’s running scared for reelection. More thoughtful Democrats, meanwhile, will soon start asking how their party turned from hope to fear — and why, if their leaders cherish democracy so much, they are quite so scared of elections.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.