(CHICAGO) — When Kentucky state Rep. Rachel Roberts was first running for her seat, she was advised to not use a word common in political campaigns: “values.”
Roberts, now the only Democrat representing northern Kentucky in the state legislature, was running in a 2020 special election in competitive region of the state just outside of Cincinnati at a time when Republicans had a stranglehold on rhetoric on “freedom,” “patriotism” and the American flag.
“I’d get hammered,” Roberts said she was told. “The Republicans would say Democrats aren’t the party of values.”
Walking around the Democratic National Committee this week, things couldn’t be more different.
The word “freedom” is on seemingly on the lips of every attendee and speaker — and the name of Beyonce’s hit song and now-campaign anthem. Audience chants of “USA!” puncture speakers’ remarks as they wave signs saying the same. Camo hats bearing the names of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pockmark the crowd. And musician Jason Isbell performed the country hit song “Something More Than Free.”
The convention marks a culmination of decades of Democratic efforts to take back patriotism after years of Republicans owning messaging around “freedom” and the American flag.
For years, the party lamented the domination Republicans held on symbols of patriotism, a monopoly that started in during the Reagan presidency and that Democrats couldn’t break.
“You had a Republican Party that in the 80s and 90s, seized the freedom mantle using guns. The Second Amendment was America’s first freedom,” said Jim Kessler, the co-founder of Third Way, a center-left think tank. “Right to life was a version of freedom, too.” Where Democrats supported freedom was a license to behave poorly, like burning a flag.”
Now, after having been ceded to Republicans for decades “freedom” is the word bouncing off the walls of Chicago’s United Center. And Democrats are reveling in the reversal of their messaging fortunes.
“Reclaiming the flag and reclaiming freedom and democracy, I think that was a feeling broadly. But I think within the last several cycles, it became clearer how to do that in a way that had broad appeal and resonated with people,” said one Democratic strategist with ties to Harris’ team.
After decades being shut out from leaning into patriotism, Democrats said they were handed an opening by their sworn enemy — former President Donald Trump.
The Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, spurred by Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election results and led by his supporters, jolted the transfer of power from the former president to his successor. And the Supreme Court decision scrapping constitutional abortion protections allowed Democrats to go on offense on a culture war in which they’d long been in a defensive crouch.
All the sudden, Democrats said, democracy was teetering. Women’s bodily autonomy was at risk. And the battle for “freedom” was on.
“The Dobbs decision all of a sudden gave Democrats the opportunity for a reset button on that issue, on patriotism. And I think Donald Trump gave us the opportunity on Jan. 6 to start retaking those themes,” former Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, D, said, referencing the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“The combination of Trump and January 6 and the Dobbs decision gave Democrats an opportunity to reset and say, ‘this is really what freedom means. That is not freedom, folks, that is oppression, that is autocracy. Freedom means liberty, and this is what we stand for.'”
Democrats didn’t storm the gates right away.
With President Joe Biden still as the party’s standard bearer, he and his campaign focused on a fight for democracy, while also pushing for codification of abortion protections — two issues that weren’t consistently and explicitly linked in campaign messaging.
But after the president ended his campaign and Harris rose as his replacement atop Democrats’ tickets, the messaging changed.
“Freedom” became her rallying cry — the climax of a push by Harris and the party at large.
“Democrats had been concerned about Republicans taking over these quintessentially American words for a while, ‘freedom,’ ‘liberty,'” said Jamal Simmons, Harris’ former communications director in the vice president’s office. “The Democrats were trying to figure it out. The vice president was very focused on how Democrats can recast this word.”
Now, “freedom” is being used as a catchall.
Beyond freedom to access reproductive health care and a democratic process, the message is being used by Harris to push for everything from freedom for students to go to school without being shot to freedom to “get ahead” economically and more.
“Are we fighting for freedom? That’s what I thought,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said at a meeting of the Democratic National Committee’s women’s caucus. “Freedom is not drowning in medical debt. Freedom is earning the same salary as a man does for doing the same job…Freedom is about making our own decisions about our own bodies.”
To be certain, Democrats aren’t dominating the war over “freedom.”
Republicans still lean hard on patriotism, adorning their rallies and suit jacket lapels with American flags and turning Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American” into a conservative hymn. And the party still is able to say it wants more funding for the military than its Democratic foes in Congress, who insist on matching boosts in Pentagon spending with rises in funds for other domestic priorities.
But for Democrats, just being in the fight for one of the most potent symbols in electoral politics is a breath of fresh air.
“I think the narrative has taken some of those words and said that they belong to Republicans, just like, apparently, red trucker hats only belong to Republicans,” Roberts, a delegate to the Democratic National Committee and now a Democratic leader in the Kentucky state House, told ABC News. “And we are demanding, no, these are universal words.”
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