Every four years, I’m freshly amazed at how long the campaign trail is in America—and grateful that, over here in the UK, we only have to put up with a few weeks of it ahead of a general election. In the US, they’re at it for months. This one has felt especially lengthy, marked as it has been by history-making events such as Joe Biden stepping aside and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
The lengthy timespan means that there are a lot of campaign videos. I’ve been watching some of them over the past few weeks with a question in mind: what portrait of American politics, and the American people, is painted by this year’s crop?
Let’s start with the Republicans. Doubtless, Trump’s staff will not be feeling a huge amount of pressure to introduce their candidate via campaign videos. The American voter knows him all too well. So, for their video output, they’ve stuck to Trump playing the hits. There are knowingly lo-fi to-camera bits of Trump in front of American flags talking about things like “the three-year anniversary of the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country”—Biden’s “catastrophic withdrawal” from Afghanistan. There are straight-down-the-line “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” hype videos, where Trump walks in the rain in slow motion while wearing a red hat, a bolt of lightning flashing above him. There are also plenty of videos mocking his opponent, something that was unfortunately very easy to do to Biden; the serving president’s rapidly increasing senility was an easy target. Once Biden stood down, then came the attack videos against Harris, featuring casual hate-mongering phrase constructions such as, “Rachel Morin was a mother of five. A Kamala Harris illegal migrant murdered her.”
Now to the Democrats. When Harris stepped up to replace Biden in July, her campaign released a sub-90-second video officially announcing her presidential run. Harris is glossy and friendly looking, laughing at rallies and taking photographs with supporters. In voiceover, as Beyoncé’s “Freedom” plays in the background, Harris issues a call to arms: “Let’s get to work.” She says that, unlike “some people”—at which point, a clip of Trump in full Maga regalia appears—she doesn’t want to build a “country of chaos, of fear, of hate”. Gun violence is mentioned, as are abortion rights. It’s a slick, inspirational video that establishes Harris as a powerful political juggernaut and touches on the hottest-button issues of the election. In another video released a few days later, the Obamas call her while she is backstage at some political event, lapel mic still pinned to her pristine beige trouser suit, to endorse her run. She thanks them, adding, “And we’re gonna have some fun with this too, aren’t we?”
Harris issues a call to arms: ‘Let’s get to work’
The Democrats have, inevitably, also been putting out classic, po-faced videos attacking Trump and Republican policies. They’re not reinventing the election-cycle wheel here. But appearing to be fun—or at least not a self-serious, two-dimensional wonk—has been a hallmark of Harris’s campaign.
After Harris tapped Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate, the campaign released a video called “Meet Tim Walz”. Walz opens in voiceover: “Sometimes, life is as much about the lessons you learn as the lessons you teach”, as light butt rock plays in the background. When he appears, he’s wearing a red-and-black lumberjack shirt, talking about his small-town upbringing and time in the armed forces. The tone of the video is just like a commercial for a product called, say, Grill Master Smokin’ Maple Wood Chips. Walz is just a regular, easy-breezy guy, sharing some homespun wisdom.
But watching all these different campaign videos as a group, I felt a sort of déjà vu. I was in America on a reporting trip for a few weeks over the summer and whiled away several evenings rotting in motel rooms watching whatever was on cable TV. This meant I watched a lot of commercials and couldn’t help but notice their uneasy mix of fear and freedom. It’s a whiplash experience. One moment it’s adverts for apps, services and products that claim to let you do things your way; the next, infomercials about terrible afflictions or exhortations to buy various kinds of insurance against accident and emergency.
It’s this same tension that plays out in the campaign. The freedom-fear dichotomy is written all over the videos for both parties, a dual suggestion that being an American means the ability to do whatever you can dream, but it also means living under threat. Hard-working families can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but their children are in danger of being shot at school.
So while slightly different tactics are being pursued by the reds and the blues—with the Democrats going more personal and personable—what this year’s campaign videos suggest to me, really, is that the American psyche is the same as it’s ever been. Land of the free, home of the afraid.
