“A week is a long time in politics.” It’s a phrase both politicians and journalists like to use when they want to avoid giving a firm answer to a question, but still want to sound smart. But this year there really was a week that fit that description.
On Saturday, July 20, President Joe Biden was running for reelection and had won more than enough delegates in the primaries to be the Democratic Party nominee. Despite growing calls for him to step aside after his June 27 debate with Donald Trump and fundraising for his campaign cratering, Biden had been clear: he was not quitting the race. He was unequivocal and sometimes sounded angry.
On Saturday, July 27, Vice President Kamala Harris was running for president with Biden’s full endorsement, and she had secured enough support from Democratic National Convention delegates to be the party’s nominee. Harris’s campaign had shattered fundraising records. A staggering number of excited Democrats volunteered for the campaign, crowded venues to hear her speak and organized a series of Zoom-busting online meetings to organize for Harris.
The first campaign rally for the new candidate was in the Milwaukee suburb of West Allis on Tuesday, July 23. When the rally was first announced the previous Friday, Harris was still Biden’s running mate and the event was just a speech by the vice president.
“And then the world changed on Sunday,” Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told the New York Times in late July. He was referring to Biden’s surprise announcement that he was stepping aside on Sunday, July 21. Twenty minutes after that announcement, Biden endorsed Harris for president.
“And then the world changed again with a kind of whoosh,” Wikler continued. “It was like the country was making a decision. The Democratic Party coalesced. Our delegates started pledging en masse for Kamala Harris.”
The day after Biden’s announcement, the Wisconsin delegation to the Democratic National Convention (DNC) unanimously endorsed Harris. So did Iowa’s delegation. But Wisconsin Democratic leaders had something else on their minds — they were scrambling to find a big enough venue for Harris’s speech, after the number of RSVPs suddenly skyrocketed.
The cavernous gym at West Allis High School was filled to capacity for the rally with more than 3,000 people.
“And all the way through, through multiple speakers, through music breaks, there was this just sense of joy and hope and optimism that felt so unlike the sense of dread that people have had in the pit of their stomach since 2015,” Wikler reported. “Really, it felt like something new.”
Wikler said that watching the crowd, he could see “they were there for history.”
“They were there for a kind of end to a period in American politics that people want to move past and the beginning of something so much better.”
The excitement generated by the Harris campaign and Donald Trump’s flailing, and often racist, response to it dominated political news throughout early August, overshadowing a milestone in American history. Aug. 9 was the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon resigning as president, with impeachment for his involvement in the crimes of Watergate imminent. Nixon remains the first and only president to resign.
I didn’t need to be reminded of the 50th anniversary of Nixon calling it quits, just as I didn’t need to be reminded of the 30th anniversary of Nixon’s death in April. That’s because, living and dead, Richard Nixon has haunted me my entire life.
Nixon is the first president I can remember. He was a very real, if non-corporeal, presence in my childhood. Like Santa or Ronald McDonald. But disturbing. (Or more disturbing, depending on how you feel about Ronald McDonald.)
At the time, my family lived in the Maryland suburb of Washington D.C. where Air Force One is based. We had two newspapers delivered daily, the Washington Post in the morning and the Washington Star in the afternoon. I wasn’t reading the papers as a kid, but I did like the editorial cartoons, even if I didn’t understand them, and there was plenty of Nixon in them. We watched Walter Cronkite deliver the news on CBS every weeknight, and that also contained a fair amount of Nixon. TV comedians told lots of jokes about Nixon; many did bad impressions of him.
Then, when I was in elementary school, Watergate happened and suddenly everything seemed to be all Nixon all the time. Even the after-school cartoons would get bumped for the Senate Watergate hearings or news conferences in which Nixon or his spokesperson insisted the president was not a crook, and the Watergate break-in on June 17, 1972 was just “a third-rate burglary” that had nothing to do with him.
At some point in the spring of 1973, as the attempt to cover-up the involvement of Nixon and his aides in Watergate was falling apart, I had the first serious political discussion I can remember. It started when I asked my father about a nickname for Nixon that was being widely used: “Tricky Dick.”
“The reason people call the president ‘Tricky Dick’ is because the president is a crook.”
My father said it in the same matter-of-fact tone he used to explain why grass is green or tell me the names of stars in the night sky. That star in the handle of the Little Dipper is the North Star, also known as Polaris. That man in the White House is the president of the United States, also known as Tricky Dick.
“Crook” didn’t necessarily mean a criminal, my father patiently explained. There were plenty of crooked men who weren’t criminals because they were rich and powerful, and rich and powerful people often got away with crimes. This was news to me. This was not what I was being taught at Camp Springs Elementary School.
Nixon, regardless of what happened with Watergate, was a crook, my father felt.
My father first became aware of Nixon in 1952, when Eisenhower chose the then-junior senator from California as his vice presidential running mate. Nixon was selected for the ticket — by senior campaign staff, not Eisenhower — as a goodwill gesture to the McCarthyite wing of the Republican Party. By that time, the nickname Tricky Dick was already two years old. Opponents hung it on Nixon because he had proven himself to be a dirty campaigner during his successful runs for the U.S. House in 1946 and the Senate in 1950.
Dirty, but effective.
“Richard Nixon is a no-good lying bastard,” Harry Truman said when Nixon was the Republican candidate for president in 1960. Truman had been president when Nixon was in the House and Senate. “He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.”
Truman was still disgusted by Nixon’s reckless red-baiting as a congressman and senator, and his support for his fellow Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy. But after the political collapse of McCarthy in 1954, the sort of campaigning that Nixon excelled at early in his career was no longer possible as Republicans sought to distance themselves from McCarthyism.
As the Republican presidential nominee in 1960, Nixon presented himself as a moderately conservative statesman. He lost. He ran a similar campaign for governor of California in 1962. He lost.
My father didn’t talk about red-baiting or Nixon’s earlier career that night in 1973, and he certainly didn’t use a word like “bastard” (my parents never said anything stronger than “damn” in front of us kids), but he did explain what I now know is “dog-whistle politics” to me, albeit in very general, simple terms.
Of course, it’s not illegal to prey on people’s fears and prejudices to gain their votes and then deny you were doing it. But it’s crooked.
In the 2024 election, there’s no question about whether the Republican nominee is a crook.
Shortly after winning the 2016 election, Donald Trump paid $25 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by people he defrauded with his phony Trump University. While he was president, courts found enough fraud in Trump’s self-named charity to order it dissolved and fine him $2 million. Since leaving office, a judge in a civil case found Trump had routinely committed frauds that “shock the conscience” as part of his real estate business and fined him $325 million. In a different civil case, a jury found Trump had sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll and later defamed her. Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $83 million. Earlier this year, Trump was convicted on 34 felony charges related to business fraud.
All of that is in addition to Trump attempting to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 election, which climaxed with a violent mob of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol (resulting in his second — second! — impeachment), as well as his violating provisions of the Espionage Act by hiding top-secret documents in unsecured rooms at his home/country club in Florida after leaving office. Those cases are still before the courts, so feel free to add “allegedly” where you like.
The details of the cases may be surprising, but all of this is in keeping with the criminal tendencies and dishonesty Donald Trump has publicly displayed over the last five decades.
If there is an afterlife, Nixon’s ghost must be stunned by the toadying loyalty almost all Republican politicians show Trump, a relative newcomer to the party. Nixon had been an important leader in the GOP for over a quarter of a century when the House of Representatives voted in February 1974 to launch a formal impeachment inquiry. Only four Republicans voted no.
The period in American politics the people who gathered in the West Allis gym wanted to see end largely took shape in the Nixon years, starting with his successful campaign for president in 1968.
While reporting on Nixon’s 1968 run, journalist and historian Garry Wills met “a brilliant young lawyer named Kevin Phillips” who was the Nixon campaign’s “house expert on ethnic voting patterns.”
In his book Nixon Agonistes — published in 1970, halfway through Nixon’s first term in office — Wills recounts Phillips telling him “the whole secret of politics” is “knowing who hates who.” It wasn’t an original idea, but Phillips developed a careful, clinical approach to political campaigning as a managed system of hatreds and fears.
Phillips was one of the fathers of “the Southern Strategy,” an effort by the Nixon campaign to woo Southern whites angry over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and fearful of the growing political strength of Black voters after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and do so in a way that wouldn’t alienate the Northern moderates and liberal Republicans Nixon also needed. He discussed the balancing act in his 1970 book, The Emerging Republican Majority.
But Phillips’ work in 1968 went well beyond Black and white. He was interested in all sorts of ethnic animosities that could be exploited for political gain. He showed Wills maps of major cities with ethnic and racial divisions broken down to a block-by-block level. Playing to those divisions was an effective way to harness the fear and anxiety the rapid social and political change of the ’60s, and the widespread unrest (both real and imagined), was causing.
Or rather, it was as long as the campaign could plausibly deny it was appealing to fear and animosity. This approach was also a comfortable fit for Nixon, harkening back to the days when he earned the nickname Tricky Dick.
Nixon’s win in 1968 and his landslide reelection victory in 1972 set a pattern for later Republicans to follow.
Nixon must have understood why Ronald Reagan gave his first speech after becoming the 1980 Republican nominee for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi. It’s a small town, but was nationally famous as the place where three young civil rights workers were murdered by the Klan in 1964. Nixon would have also understood when Reagan spoke out in favor of “states rights” at the Philadelphia rally. “States rights” had been a rallying cry since the ’40s for segregationists opposed to civil rights. Nixon would have also understood the necessity of Reagan and his supporters to deny that he was referring to anything but federalism, or that the choice of town was at all significant.
Nixon had been dead for 10 years when George W. Bush ran for reelection in 2004, but he would have understood why Karl Rove — often called “Bush’s Brain,” although Bush called him “Turdblossom” — pushed Republican state parties to get anti-same-sex marriage constitutional amendments on the ballot in that year’s election. Nixon was a rabid homophobe, but even he might have raised an eyebrow over the fact that Rove’s father was gay and living openly with a partner while Rove was stoking homophobia in hopes of increasing evangelical voter turnout. (It worked.)
Nixon, however, would probably be baffled by Trump’s success with his cartoonish, unsubtle version of “who hates who” politics. It’s no longer a dog-whistle when a candidate loudly proclaims “They’re eating the dogs” during a presidential debate. Trump’s racist lies about Haitian immigrants would be laughable if they didn’t have real-world consequences, not just for the innocent communities Trump is slandering, but for the city in which they live.
Springfield, Ohio experienced a deluge of bomb threats — targeting city government buildings, schools, hospitals, colleges — after Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, started peddling a debunked rumor that had recently gotten popular in far-right message boards. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, and Springfield Mayor Rob Rue, also a Republican, have pushed back against the lies, but national Republican leaders have remained quiet, apart from those attempting to justify, or are themselves, perpetuating the racist meme.
Nine days after the longest week in politics ended, Iowans took their place among Harris supporters testing the limits of Zoom. By the time the Iowans for Kamala meeting started, more than 700 people were on the call, more than three times the number organizers originally anticipated. But the lead organizer always believed the turnout was going to be much bigger than the original estimate of 200 participants.
“There is a great deal of energy that’s out there, and it is incredibly moving,” Deidre DeJear told me in a phone interview before the Zoom meeting.
DeJear, the Iowa Democratic Party’s nominee for governor in 2022, was Harris’s Iowa campaign chair during the 2020 Iowa Caucus. As soon as Biden withdrew and endorsed Harris, DeJear started getting calls and texts from Iowans eager to support Harris, which was why she took the lead in organizing the Iowans for Kamala Zoom.
No one expected then, or expects now, Harris to actually campaign in Iowa. Trump carried the state with 51 percent of the vote in 2016, and increased his winning margin to 53 percent in 2020. Even opening an official campaign office in Iowa would likely be a waste of resources. But none of that diminished the enthusiasm of Iowans who gathered on Zoom.
It produced tangible results. The Zoom started with a fundraising goal of $10,000, but ended up raising more than $24,000. Half the money went to the Harris campaign, the other half to the Iowa Democratic Party. But DeJear told me she hopes that Iowans for Kamala will be able to do more for the state party than donate money.
She believes that some of the energy created by Harris’s run for president could be channeled into not just supporting Democratic candidates in the state, but rebuilding the Iowa Democratic Party at the county and state levels.
“This is going to be an effort to lift up the work that’s happening, and to help those volunteers who hop on this call to get involved right in their communities,” DeJear said. “Kamala supporters are really, really excited about helping Democrats across this state. The big question I’ve been hearing is, ‘What can we do and how can we get involved?’”
There’s a lot of work to do.
When I moved to Iowa at the end of June 2017 to work at Little Village, one of the first news stories I read was about the Iowa Democratic Party rebuilding after Republicans won control of both chambers of the legislature in the 2016 election. Seven years later, the party-rebuilding is still ongoing, but this party is in even worse shape.
Republicans have increased their majorities in both the Iowa House and Senate. There’s only one Democrat left in statewide office. There are no Democrats left in Iowa’s congressional delegation. There are now almost 100,000 more registered Republicans in Iowa than there were in 2016, and about 85,000 fewer active Democratic voters, according to Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate.
Voter registration totals published at the start of September show Republicans constitute 40.3 percent of active voters, Democrats make up 29.6 percent and voters registered as No Party Preference account for 29.1 percent of the 1,573,754 Iowan voters listed as active.
Excitement and passion are a good beginning but they are only a beginning. Still, the excitement for Harris in Iowa is as real as the September Iowa Poll published by the Des Moines Register showed.
Trump had been leading Biden by 18 percentage points in the Iowa Poll conducted in June. In the new poll, Trump is only ahead of Harris by 4 points. The poll doesn’t even really reflect whatever impact was made by Trump’s unhinged performance in the Sept. 10 debate with Harris, because only the final day of the poll’s three-day survey of voters took place after the debate.
Equally heartening for Democrats is the poll’s finding that 80 percent of Harris supporters said they are extremely or very enthusiastic, while only 74 percent of Trump supporters used those terms.
It’s still likely that Trump will carry Iowa, but as September draws to a close and this magazine goes to print, it appears that nationally Harris is on track to win the popular vote in the election. Of course, that may not be enough to put her in the White House, thanks to the Electoral College. But Harris is performing well enough in swing states that she may be able to overcome that 18th century anti-democratic trap buried in the Constitution.
A Harris win in November would be a major moment in American history, just as Harris’s whole whirlwind campaign has been history-making. A Harris win might also finish the historic moment that began on Aug. 9, 1974 with Nixon’s resignation, and finally exorcize the ghost of Nixon from America’s politics.
Of course, it wouldn’t happen overnight. Political changes take time. But it’s been 50 years since people thought we were putting Nixon’s politics behind us, and 50 years is a long time in politics.
Paul Brennan is Little Village’s news director. This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2024 issue.
