An All-American Showdown

It has been argued that the United States has never seen a presidential candidacy like that of former President Donald Trump, the twice-impeached and 34-times-indicted Republican nominee who has mounted a 2024 campaign framed around speculation that he would govern as a dictator, reorganize the federal government as a personal fiefdom, use the power of the presidency to punish political rivals and critical media outlets, and initiate mass deportations of immigrants — including Haitian-Americans who he falsely claims are eating the cats and dogs of their neighbours in the otherwise forgotten manufacturing town of Springfield, Ohio. All of that is, as Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz suggests, “weird” — and deeply unsettling for tens of millions of Americans.

Yet, Trump remains a serious contender for a second term, not least thanks to a media that lavishes attention on the theatrical billionaire who claims he can better manage the economy — and because his fervent base of right-wing supporters have stuck with him despite scandals, criminal convictions, and concerns about his talk of overturning election results and governing as a dictator. The former president maintains his viability by appealing to naïve nostalgia for a supposedly better era. He relishes his status as the candidate of the past, as do his backers in the Republican-leaning southern and western states that he carried with ease in 2016 and 2020 and is likely to carry this fall. A white male of considerable age, he is a typical major-party presidential candidate in a nation where every one of its 46 presidents have been men, and all but one have been white.

Trump is also a wealthy man, like most of his presidential predecessors, and has a history of maintaining close personal and financial connections to the elites that have dominated the nation’s economic and political life since its founding as a republic that enslaved more than one-fifth of its population, denied voting rights to women and people of colour, and, in many states, denied the franchise to religious dissenters and those who lacked property. Trump is not even the first former president to mount a comeback bid after a controversial election that saw him defeated. Grover Cleveland served a pair of non-consecutive presidential terms in the nineteenth century, former President Theodore Roosevelt tried without success to get his old job back in 1912, and a narrowly defeated candidate in the 1960 presidential race, former Vice President Richard Nixon, came back to win two presidential terms in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The Past or the Future?

While Trump’s legal troubles and the bombastic nature of his campaign may grab the spotlight on any given day, the truth is that the genuinely distinctive candidate in the 2024 US presidential race is Kamala Devi Harris, the first Black women to be nominated by a major party for what is broadly understood as the most powerful position in the world. The child of immigrants from India and Jamaica who graduated from a historically Black university before beginning a two-decade political journey that has seen her serve as an elected prosecutor, state attorney general, US Senator, and vice president, Harris is the embodiment of the often-stated but seldom-kept promise that any American child can grow up to be president.

Yet what may distinguish Harris more than anything else is her status as one of the most culturally and intellectually engaged figures ever to seek the presidency of a country that has often — although not always — filled its positions of power with uninspired mandarins who mouth political platitudes rather than challenge the American people to think in bolder and more dynamic ways. Her election, even as the candidate of a Democratic Party that has often compromised on the lofty visions outlined in its platforms, would represent a break from tradition that is difficult to overestimate. It would also represent an aspirational grasp for the future by a multiracial, multi-ethnic nation that is still, at its best, an exploration of what democracy might deliver for humanity. Harris, says former First Lady Michelle Obama, is, “The embodiment of the stories we tell ourselves about this country.”

Since launching his first presidential bid in 2015, Trump has written his own narrative and presumed that the media would allow him to spin it — and for the most part, it has.

The vice president, who I have had the opportunity to interview a number of times over the past several years, recognizes that the 2024 campaign is a critical juncture for the United States — a point at which voters will literally choose between the past and the future. Trump is blatant in his determination to lurch backwards, running on what has become his permanent slogan to “Make America Great Again!” Conscious of everything that is stake, Harris counters with the promise that, “We are not going back!”

The slogans highlight a profound political divide in a country with a tortured heritage of beautiful promises unmet, and periods of cruelty so horrific that — even now — there are intense conflicts about how American history should be taught in public schools.

Raised by Activists

Despite the fact it began with a revolution against colonialism and the imperial impulse of eighteenth-century Europe, as a new nation that embraced enlightenment ideals and rejected “the divine right of kings” in the days of monarchical overreach, the United States has through much of its history as an independent nation been unresponsive, if not openly hostile when confronted with cries for economic, social, racial justice. This is a country that has maintained bulwarks of domestic oppression — the enslavement of African workers in the decades after its founding, an apartheid system of segregation in the aftermath of a Civil War that was supposed to wipe away the vestiges of human bondage, the genocidal displacement and murder of indigenous peoples, brutal anti-immigrant policies that included deportations and the detention of Asian-American citizens in concentration camps, and discrimination against women so persistent that the issue of whether they should have control over their bodies remains a live issue in the 2024 campaign.

Harris knows all this. She is multi-generationally political. The child of progressive political activists who were deeply engaged in the civil rights and peace movements of the 1960s, the vice president recalls that, “they were pushing me in a stroller in those marches”. Born in Oakland, California in 1964, Harris spent her first years in the San Francisco Bay Area, a hotbed of political activism around the University of California at Berkeley, known as the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement and the countercultural revolt against the complacency of the post-World War II decades. Berkeley was also the scene of some of the most intense protests against not just the war in Vietnam but against broader US foreign policies in an era when struggles against colonialism and imperialism were playing out from Latin America to Africa and Asia.

Harris’s parents understood those struggles first-hand. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was born in what was then called Madras (now Chennai), India, a decade before Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rukmini Lakshmipathi, and other leaders of the Indian independence movement succeeded in seeing off British colonial rule. The daughter of a women’s rights advocate and a prominent civil servant from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Gopalan arrived on campus in 1958 at age 19 to pursue doctoral studies in nutrition and endocrinology. She eventually met Donald Harris, born and raised under British colonial rule in Jamaica, who came to Berkeley in the early 1960s to pursue a doctorate in economics. Kamala Harris say they “fell in love in that most American way — while marching together for justice in the civil rights movement of the 1960s”.

The couple began dating and eventually married after first meeting one another at a gathering of the campus Afro-American Association, where students celebrated decolonization less than 15 years after India became independent from the UK and literally at the same time that Jamaica was doing so. Harris said her father recalled years later that, “We talked then, continued to talk at a subsequent meeting, and at another, and another.”

“They believed in the importance of voice”, Harris said of her parents, and how her childhood shaped her understanding of citizenship and political activism. “I believe it is an expression of patriotism to fight for the ideals of our country, because I think about all those movements. Undercurrent to it all was a belief in the promise… promise of America. Otherwise, you would just say, ‘Eh, look, this is what it is’, and you’d be cynical — you’d just do what you do and don’t think that anything can change. But when you believe in the promise of America, that’s when I think we see the kind of activism that you see: people holding us as a nation, and each other, accountable to those ideals.”

Harris grew up in centres of activism and protest — first in and around Berkeley, and later near the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, where her parents taught and did research. In Madison, her father would hold five-year-old Kamala in her lap while spinning Blue Note records on the family’s stereo. “We would go to sleep hearing jazz, all day, all night”, the vice president told me. “Mingus, Coltrane, Miles — and Alice Coltrane, nobody should ever forget about her.” When he spoke about the music she was exposed to as a child, Harris even remembered favourite tracks from Miles Davis. But when I suggested that, perhaps, she learned about jazz even before politics, she stopped me. “I think I knew them at the same time”, said Harris.

“Was that because politics was a big thing for your parents?” I asked. “A very big thing”, she replied. So big that it would influence the rest of her life.

Why Harris Is Different

Harris is certainly not the first presidential candidate to have grown up in a highly political family. Two American presidents, John Quincy Adams and George W. Bush, were the sons of former presidents. Another, Benjamin Harrison, was the grandson of a former president. Many more, such as John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, came from long lines of elected officials and diplomats. But those presidents’ families were all political insiders.

Harris is different. While she would ultimately climb the political ladder to hold elected offices (like many major-party nominees in the past), Harris’s roots are outside of the process — with people who protested federal policies on the basis of their experiences and their morality. In her youth, long before she considered a political career, she was politically aware and engaged as a supporter of organized labour and civil rights, and a critic of US support for the apartheid regime in South Africa.  Moreover, she was given an opportunity to see the world, not as tourist, nor as a business or political “partner” of foreign governments, but as the daughter of émigrés who made frequent visits to the southern Asian, African, and Caribbean countries where her grandparents lived and worked and to which her father, a radical economist who taught at the University of Wisconsin and Stanford, returned after his academic career.

“One of the things that I can tell you that I think has had a very profound influence on the way I think about the world [is the fact that she was] exposed to so many cultures”, Harris explained when we discussed her global upbringing. “When I say — and I say it often — that the vast majority of us have more in common than what separates us, it’s a lived experience for me. I know that to be true. There are certain just universal traits that exist regardless of culture, language, religion, geographic location, age, and I know that to be true.”

Since Joe Biden ended his own re-election bid, polls have pointed to rapidly increasing support among core Democratic constituencies that have tended to lean towards liberal contenders for decades.

This is the worldview that Harris seeks to communicate in the 2024 campaign, in an effort to mobilize a broad coalition of women, people of colour, and the young voters who have become critical to Democratic prospects in recent elections. As Nancy Pelosi, emeritus speaker of the US House of Representatives, recently explained to me, “She’s politically astute. If she were not that, she would not be where she is today.”

Harris’s political understanding developed over time, but the development began long before she arrived as a student at Howard University in the 1980s. She once told me that she did not eat a grape until she was in her twenties because she had, since her childhood, supported the boycott organized by United Farm Workers union leaders Cesar Chavez and Delores Huerta on behalf of migrant farm labourers in California. When Harris ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, Huerta was one of her first endorsers — along with Barbara Lee, the California Democrat who cast the sole vote against authorizing President George W. Bush to use military force in response to the 11 September 2001 attacks. Both Huerta and Lee are enthusiastic supporters this year, as well.

Harris chose to attend Howard, a historically Black university in Washington, DC, because of its associations with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Recalling that former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the lead lawyer on the breakthrough anti-discrimination cases of the era, had graduated from Howard, the aspiring lawyer and political leader explained that she wanted to “get off on the right foot. And what better place to do that than at Thurgood Marshall’s alma mater?”

This background distinguishes Harris from every major-party presidential candidate who came before her — even Barack Obama, to whom she has frequently been compared by politicians and pundits. The child of an American mother and a Kenyan father, Obama was raised by an academic and travelled extensively as a child, but he did not come of age in am anywhere near so politically focused — and engaged — environment as Harris. It is for this reason that Harris stands out as a unique figure in American electoral history, and why she has charted a distinctive course in her unexpected bid as the Democratic Party’s nominee against Trump.

A New Path?

Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose 2008 and 2016 presidential campaigns put a good deal of emphasis on the fact that she would have been the first woman president, Harris has downplayed such talk, along with the notion that she would be only the second Black commander-in-chief. Conscious that Clinton lost twice, and that racial divisions have been inflamed by Trump and his Republican allies, who spent much of the month of September peddling a false story that Haitian immigrants were, as the former president claimed in his one debate with Harris, “eating the cats… eating the dogs… eating the pets of the people that live there”, Harris has responded to pressures to focus her rhetoric on the historic nature of her own candidacy with a campaign that reflects an observation she made during her 2020 presidential bid: “There are certain self-evident truths.”

Voters know Harris is Black (even if Trump has tried to suggest otherwise in one of his many bizarre attacks on her candidacy), and they know she is a woman. She enjoys enthusiastic support from Black voters and young women of all backgrounds. With an eye towards expanding her coalition, Harris has focused on universal appeals that cross lines of race and gender. She speaks often of growing up middle-class in a household where, after her parents divorced, her mother struggled to buy a home. She even reminds voters that she once worked at McDonald’s, an experience that, while common for working-class Americans, stands her in stark contrast to Trump’s privileged upbringing.

Harris’s approach appears to be working. Since Joe Biden ended his own re-election bid following a disastrous debate with Trump and cleared the way for Harris to become the Democratic nominee, polls have pointed to rapidly increasing support among core Democratic constituencies that have tended to lean towards liberal contenders for decades.

At the same time, Harris has made inroads among more conservative voters, including many Republicans. The candidate who has the endorsement of progressives such as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the nation’s most prominent socialist, as well as Sanders’s young left-leaning allies such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, is also backed by former Republican Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney. In fact, dozens of prominent Republicans have endorsed the Democratic nominee this year. Harris, who for decades has been a stark critic of conservative social and economic policies, now finds herself sharing stages with Republicans like Mesa, Arizona Mayor John Giles.

Republicans for Harris

Everyone recognizes that, for the most part, these Republican endorsements have less to do with Harris than with Trump. Giles has gained a national profile as a Republican who tells his fellow partisans they must abandon their party’s former president because “you owe no displaced loyalty to a candidate that is morally and ethically bankrupt”. Most of the “Republicans for Harris” cast their activism on behalf of the Democratic nominee as a necessary response to the chaos associated with Trump. They talk about the former president’s 91 indictments he has faced on criminal charges since leaving the White House, his 34 convictions in a New York trial on charges stemming from a scheme to pay hush money to a pornographic film star, and jury decisions to award 88.3 million dollars in damages to a New York writer who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her.

They also talk about the need to reject him because he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election and because he seems to suggest that he might do the same in 2024. For instance, Geoff Duncan, a Republican who served as lieutenant governor of Georgia, a state that will be critical to deciding the results of the 2024 election, tells GOP partisans, “If you vote for Kamala Harris in 2024, you’re not a Democrat. You’re a patriot.”

Even when Trump goes to extremes, Republicans who once would have understood such statements as disqualifying now cheer the former president on.

None of this bothers Trump. He delights in pushing old-school Republicans out of the GOP. A former Democrat who donated campaign money to Democrats — including Harris — as recently as 2013, Trump has turned his new party into a cult of personality that centres on himself and leaves no room for dissent. More so than any American political leader in modern history, Trump has placed his imprint on his party, installing his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, demanding absolute loyalty from party leaders in the House and Senate, and personally campaigning against Republicans who refuse to follow his dictates.

During Trump’s first term, mainstream Republicans tended to go along with their president: making excuses for his racist and xenophobic outbursts or simply ignoring them, while focusing on areas of agreement such as cutting taxes for the wealthy and appointing Supreme Court justices who would overturn protections for abortion rights. Yet after Trump rejected the results of the 2020 presidential election — which he lost by a popular vote margin of roughly seven million ballots — and then urged his supporters to storm the US Capitol, Liz Cheney and a handful of other congressional Republicans supported his impeachment on charges of fomenting insurrection. Most Republicans refused to make the break, however, setting up a situation in which he avoided conviction for high crimes and misdemeanours in the US Senate and then began to stake a bolder claim on the loyalty of remaining Republicans.

Even when Trump goes to extremes, as when he threatens to use the power of government to punish political rivals and critics, Republicans who once would have understood such statements as disqualifying now cheer the former president on. It’s gotten so bad that last year, after Trump promised to use a second term as president to go after “Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream”, Liz Cheney accused Republican Party leaders of “collaborating” with their party’s nominee use of “the same Nazi propaganda that mobilized 1930s–40s Germany to evil.”

Electoral Idiosyncrasies

Harris is less blunt, but it’s clear that the Democratic nominee is determined to build the broadest possible anti-Trump coalition. Although her policies are generally progressive on domestic issues — strongly supportive of funding social programmes, expanding access to health care and education, tackling the climate crisis, and taxing the rich in order to obtain the resources that are required to meet human needs — Harris wants and needs votes from more moderate and conservative voters at a point when polls suggest that the electorate remains deeply divided. Thus, while Democrats are pouring resources into mobilizing liberal voters who have supported the party since the day of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency in the 1930s and 1940s, the Harris campaign is mounting an unprecedented effort to break apart Trump’s base by convincing significant numbers of conservatives to support a candidate who Trump attacks as “dangerously liberal”.

The US political system leaves Harris few other options for coalition building. Designed to favour the two major parties, the election process leaves little space for the sort of multi-party democracy seen in European countries. It is exceptionally difficult for alternative parties to gain a place on the ballot in many American states. The Electoral College, which decides the final result of US presidential elections through a convoluted process that has states cast electoral votes based on the results of the popular vote within each jurisdiction, effectively undermines multi-party democracy. It also places the emphasis of the presidential campaign on a handful of closely contested “battleground” states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina, which have tended to tip the balance in recent presidential election years. In 2016, when Trump won most of those states by narrow margins, he became president. In 2020, when Biden won them, he entered the Oval Office.

The Harris campaign’s heavy emphasis on running against Trump, as opposed to running a more traditional campaign that focuses on the Democratic agenda, worries some of her more progressive supporters.

Unlike Europe, where multi-party governing coalitions are built after an election, in the US coalitions must be built before elections — in races for the presidency and for control of Congress, where no candidate elected on a third-party ballot line has served in the House or Senate since the 1970s. Harris’s strategy for building that coalition rests on positioning herself as the only option for keeping Trump out of office. To do this, she leans heavily on her record as a prosecutor. “Before I was elected as vice president, before I was elected as United States senator, I was elected attorney general, as I’ve mentioned, to California. Before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters, who broke the rules for their own gain”, says Harris. “So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type. And in this campaign, I will proudly put my record against his.”

The Spectre of Project 2025

While Harris is quick to recount Trump’s criminal record and his record of assaulting democracy, she also offers a forward-looking warning with regard to Project 2025, a plan developed by Trump’s corporate allies and leading social conservatives to use the vast power of the presidency to remake the federal government. The Project 2025 scheme would have a President Trump remake federal departments and reclassify thousands of federal employees so that they could implement right-wing policies without congressional approval and without oversight by the courts.

“Donald Trump’s plans for total control over our daily lives have been exposed”, warns the Harris campaign. “His Project 2025 agenda would strip away our freedoms — by forcing states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions, cutting Social Security and Medicare, and eliminating the Department of Education.” Harris’s allies in the labour movement, which has given her campaign overwhelming support, place a particular emphasis on the aspect of Project 2025 that would advance the neoliberal agenda by weakening the ability of trade unions to organize workers and bargain on their behalf. The environmental movement, another source of significant support for Harris, has highlighted the portions of Project 2025 that propose abandoning efforts to fight climate change in order to preserve the profits of fossil fuel companies.

Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025. Nevertheless, in debates, rally speeches, and television advertisements, Harris has developed a relentless critique of the initiative as “a detailed and dangerous plan called Project 2025 that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected to again”.

Criticisms from the Left

The Harris campaign’s heavy emphasis on running against Trump, as opposed to running a more traditional campaign that focuses on the Democratic agenda, worries some of her more progressive supporters. Bernie Sanders, the independent progressive who built a powerful movement when he mounted 2016 and 2020 campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination, has pressed Harris to speak in more detail and with more populist fervour about taxing the rich and expanding social welfare programs. Sanders is not alone in arguing that Harris needs to expand the electorate by attracting frustrated working-class voters and young people whose support could not only help the Democratic presidential nominee win but also help Democrats win control of the US Senate and the House — both of which are up for grabs in 2024. They know that simply beating Trump is not sufficient to assure than a new Democratic president will be able to govern.

There are also many Democrats who would like to see Harris abandon the Biden administration’s approach to the Middle East. Israel’s assault on Gaza, which has left more than 40,000 Palestinians dead, has stirred widespread opposition among Arab-Americans, Muslim-Americans, students, and others who object to the support Biden has continued to give to the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In Democratic presidential primary states such as Michigan and Minnesota, which have large Muslim-American populations and are home to campuses that saw substantial protests in support of Palestinian rights, more than 700,000 voters rejected Biden and cast ballots for an “uncommitted” option as a protest against the Biden administration’s policy of providing weapons to Israel.

Harris has made statements that some read as distancing herself, at least marginally, from Biden’s position. She told the Democratic National Convention that, while she will always support Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks like the 7 October 2023 Hamas assault on Israeli kibbutzim and a music festival, she added that she believed that “what has happened in Gaza over the past ten months is devastating” and spoke of “so many innocent lives lost, desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety over and over again”. “The scale of suffering is heartbreaking”, added Harris, who promised to work to end the violence, secure the release of Israeli hostages, and assure that “the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination”.

To win a victory that would allow Democrats to govern decisively in a post-Trump era, Harris also needs to lean into the past-versus-future argument that so defines the 2024 competition.

That was a popular line at the convention, but Democrats who were active in the Uncommitted National Movement complained about the vagueness of the vice president’s commitment and about ongoing US arms shipments to Israel. Ultimately, they refused to endorse her. At the same time, they warned against voting for third-party candidates such as the Green Party’s Jill Stein or author and academic Cornel West, who have made opposition to the war central to their campaigns but have struggled to gain traction as national contenders. Warning casting any sort of vote that would help Trump gain a second term, the movement explained that “[Trump’s] agenda includes plans to accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the suppression of anti-war organizing.” That could prove to be a politically potent message in Michigan, a battleground state with a large Arab-American population that Harris needs to win.

In late September, after she was broadly seen as having won her one debate with Trump, and as endorsements of her candidacy from across the political spectrum continued to roll in, Harris maintained leads in many of the polls from Michigan, and from other battleground states. That said, they are too small for the candidate or her supporters to rest comfortably. That surprises many Harris backers, along with many international observers, who struggle to understand why Trump, with all his scandals and convictions, remains viable. But the fact is that, because of the switch from Biden to Harris in July, the Democratic nominee remains, even now, at least somewhat less known and less understood as a presidential contender than the headline-grabbing Republican.

Making a Progressive Vision Practical

The US media, greatly diminished by the collapse of local journalism and its replacement with increasingly nationalized and partisan cable media along with often blatantly propagandistic social media, tends to deal largely in stereotypes. As such, both Trump and Harris have been less seriously examined than should be the case in so critical a campaign.

The media caricatures tend to benefit Trump, who, since his arrival on the national political scene, has exploited the vulnerabilities of a decaying media system led by the likes of former CBS CEO Les Moonves, who described the 2016 campaign as a “circus full of bomb-throwing” and then declared, “It may not be good for America, but’s it damn good for CBS.” Delighting in the chaos the former reality-TV star created and the boosted advertising revenues that were associated with it, Moonves announced, “Donald’s place in this election is a good thing … I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”

Trump accepted the invitation and never looked back. Since launching his first presidential bid in 2015, he has written his own narrative and presumed that the media would allow him to spin it — and for the most part, it has. Even now, almost a decade into an endless campaign characterized by so many lies that fact-checkers have given up on trying to count them, Trump persists. This year, he is running a campaign replete with baseless attacks on Harris and a fantastical argument that the country thrived during his first term and would do so again were he to be re-elected. Even though racial tensions soared during his tenure and political divisions deepened to such an extent that his refusal to accept defeat led to a violent assault on the Capitol by his supporters, even though he continues to threaten to upend American democracy, Trump is still betting that he can prevail by claiming that, under him, the United States enjoyed “the best economy in the history of our country”.

Harris can counter that claim with the truth, emphasizing that when Trump bumbled the response to the coronavirus pandemic, unemployment soared, the economy stalled, and hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their lives. That’s a specific argument of the sort that the former prosecutor is well prepared to make. But to win a victory that would allow Democrats to govern decisively in a post-Trump era, Harris also needs to lean into the past-versus-future argument that so defines the 2024 competition.

Part of the equation does, indeed, involve a critique of Trump’s record and the threat that his bid for a second term poses. But another, equally critical, part of that equation involves offering a vision of the nation’s forward trajectory that is sufficiently hopeful, while at the same time sufficiently practical, to convince the great mass of America voters to put the past behind them and embraced the future — just like they did in 1860 by electing the progressive Republican Abraham Lincoln, and in the equally critical juncture of 1932, when they elected the progressive Democrat Franklin Roosevelt.