Less than 72 hours after Kamala Harris took control of the President Joe Biden’s struggling re-election campaign, Harris for President has debuted its official campaign launch video — a vision, one might say, of what a Democratic campaign for president can be, unburdened by what has been.
The one minute, 19 second-spot soundtracked by Beyonce’s 2016 single “Freedom,” lays out the candidate’s commitment to addressing economic opportunity, gun violence, reproductive rights, childhood poverty, and health care costs.
I’m Kamala Harris, and I’m running for President of the United States. pic.twitter.com/6qAM32btjj
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) July 25, 2024
“In this election, we each face a question: What kind of country do we want to live in? There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos, of fear, of hate. But us? We choose something different. We choose freedom,” Harris says in the ad, which features footage from her first rally as a 2024 candidate in Milwaukee on Tuesday, where a crowd, estimated at 3,500, chanted “Ka-Ma-La! Ka-Ma-La!”
In the ad, she goes on: “The freedom not just to get by, but 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 health care, where no one is above the law. We believe in the promise of America and we are ready to fight for it. Because when we fight, we win.”
According to a campaign press release, the ad is designed to underscore “the core issue at stake this November: Americans’ rights and freedoms… Vice President Harris invites Americans to join her in the fight to protect those freedoms and to come together to defeat Donald Trump and his Project 2025 agenda once again.”
The campaign said the spot will be “airing across all campaign social media platforms” — i.e. not on TV, radio, or other paid-media channels. But that’s likely to change in the coming weeks, as the campaign seeks to answer Trump ads that are already — and will continue — blanketing the airwaves.
According to the Associated Press, in the four days since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee, the Trump campaign has been “outspending Harris’ team 25-to-1 on television and radio advertising — more than $68 million for Republicans compared to just $2.6 million for Democrats — in the period that began on Monday.” That figure includes purchases and reservations for airtime through the end of August.
From Rolling Stone US
