The Harris for President campaign has launched its first official video, less than a week after US President Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the race and his vice-president Kamala Harris said she was running for the nomination.
The ad caps a week during which Harris also broke funding records and quickly clinched enough delegate support to become the presumptive nominee in an election that is now just over 100 days away.
Released on Thursday morning, the ad opens with shots of Harris’s smiling face behind a podium, the word Kamala, the word Harris, and the American flag. The soundtrack is the beginning of Beyoncé’s song Freedom, to which Harris entered and exited her first speech to campaign staffers after gaining lightning speed momentum on the road to becoming the presumptive nominee.
The ad is narrated by Harris, whose first words are, “In this election we each face a question. What kind of country do we want to live in?”
She continues: “There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos. Of fear. Of hate,” she says, over shots of Trump and JD Vance. “But us, we choose something different.”
The voiceover pauses for a crowd chanting, “Kamala! Kamala! Kamala!”
“We choose freedom,” she says. And Beyoncé’s booming chorus starts: “Freedom, freedom, I can’t move. Freedom cut me loose. Freedom, freedom where are you, cause I need freedom too.”
Harris continues: “The freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body. We choose a future where no child lives in poverty. Where we can all afford healthcare. Where no one is above the law”.
The last sentence appears as the screen shows images of front page after front page with headlines containing the words “Guilty”, or “Indicted”, “Convicted”, referring to Trump. There is also an image of Stormy Daniels.
“We believe in the promise of America and we’re ready to fight for it. Because when we fight. We win,” Harris continues.
“So join us. Go to Kamalaharris.com and let’s get to work,” she ends, as Beyoncé sings: “I’ma keep running ’cause a winner don’t quit on themselves.”
The ad goes hard on optimism. Harris does not talk about her record as a prosecutor. The people shown are voters at rallies, at home, at work or at the doctor. There is a closeup of a woman in a lab coat embroidered with the word, “Obstetrics”, a reference to Harris’ strong stance on abortion rights. Almost everyone in the ad is smiling or laughing. They holding up placards saying Kamala and wave the New Progress pride flag.
It ends with Harris walking in a light, bright blue suit and applauding. Absent are the mentions of coconuts falling from trees, the context, Brat and the venn diagram that have done so much to turn Harris from awkward to cool on social media.
The messaging is a sharp departure from the 2020 campaign video that re-circulated online in the hours after Biden’s resignation. Throughout that ad, a Law & Order SVU-like deep male voice directly compares Harris and Trump, beginning, “He’s a world leader in temper tantrums. She never loses her cool. She prosecuted sex predators. He is one.” It ends by calling Harris the “anti-Trump”.
Before the ad aired, Beyoncé was reported to have given Harris permission to use the song. While the singer has not explicitly endorsed Harris, the song permission will be viewed as tacit endorsement. Beyoncé has long lent her support to the Democrats. She performed at Obama’s second inauguration, in support of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and endorsed the 2020 Biden-Harris ticket.
The song features Pulitzer-winning rapper Kendrick Lamar and samples a lining hymn – part of the Black church tradition of unaccompanied call-and response singing – and a song performed by a prisoner at Mississippi State Penitentiary, the notorious prison labor farm famed for its musical history, in 1947.