The refrain has been splashed across T-shirts and bumper stickers and beer koozies. It has thundered through arenas in Milwaukee and Indianapolis and Chicago and Glendale and Savannah. Crowds wait for Kamala Harris to say it like they might anticipate joining Taylor Swift on the bridge of “Cruel Summer.”
“We are not going back!” they roar. “We are not going back!”
Here’s the thing, though: The line wasn’t designed to be a catchphrase. President Joe Biden had notified Harris on a Sunday morning that he was quitting the presidential race. Harris wanted to move fast to cement her status as the new presumptive nominee, which involved flying to campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, the next day and addressing the stunned staff. Harris and her team knew they had to put forward a crucial speech that didn’t just simply reassure the frazzled 200 or so people in the campaign office, but that also rallied millions more voters watching around the country. All in about 24 frantic hours.
In pretty much every other modern presidential election cycle, by late July, the nominee has spent months, if not years, testing and refining messaging, which could involve crisscrossing snowy Iowa in the run-up to the caucuses, assembling focus groups, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on polling, and even debating rivals onstage. “We had nothing,” a Harris adviser says. “No research.” The team that hammered out Harris’s Wilmington remarks relied instead on experience and instinct and crafted, on the fly, not simply a 19-minute speech but what turned out to be a wildly successful messaging template for the first six weeks of an unprecedented campaign.
Biden’s campaign team had long emphasized drawing a sharp contrast between him and Donald Trump. Harris’s crew—a mix of holdovers and new kids including vice presidential director of communications Kirsten Allen, senior adviser Stephanie Cutter, senior communications adviser Brian Fallon, speechwriter Adam Frankel, campaign chief of staff Sheila Nix, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, and vice presidential chief of staff Lorraine Voles, as well as Harris herself—believed that comparison was equally important for the new candidate, but that she possessed a potent biographical weapon Biden lacked. Harris had spent more than 20 years working as a prosecutor. Trump had been found liable for sexual abuse and convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Setting up that comparison, more than anything, was the intended focus of Harris’s introductory speech. “I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she said. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type. And in this campaign, I will proudly put my record against his.”
That was supposed to be the money quote. The “we are not going back” line? It came about four minutes later and was just a good turn of phrase. It went over well in the Wilmington room, drawing 13 seconds of whoops and applause—but that was a hometown crowd. The next day, when Harris used the line again and thousands of people inside a Milwaukee high school gym chanted it back at her, the campaign knew it was onto something. The line has resonated especially with women and people of color, whose rights will be most at risk should Trump be reelected and turn back the clock.
