What Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s Music Choices Reveal About Each Campaign
Two days after Kamala Harris launched her presidential campaign — before the smoke cleared from the sitting U.S. president’s re-election bid and Democrats nationwide had wrapped their heads around the party’s new trajectory — the headlines surrounding the party’s fledgling candidate were less about policy and platform and more about Beyoncé. The pop superstar had relaxed her strict clearance guidelines and granted Team Harris use of her song “Freedom” for her historic White House run.
Queen Bey’s blessing was granted so fast that Harris was able to walk into her Wilmington, Delaware, campaign headquarters for the first time to the track, a rousing anthem featuring Kendrick Lamar from the back half of her 2016 Lemonade visual album that had a second life when it was used in demonstrations nationwide after the murder by police of George Floyd in 2020. The song is now the definitive track in a campaign designed to reinvent Harris for a younger electorate as she takes on Republican nominee Donald Trump in November.
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The song was then used in a new Harris-Walz ad that helped kick off the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Monday night’s primetime event opened with a two-minute-plus spot narrated by actor Jeffrey Wright. As the Beyoncé anthem blazes in the background, Wright asks, “What kind of America do we want? One where we’re divided, angry, depressed? C’mon! We’re Americans! Fascism? We conquered it. The moon? Landed on it. The future? Building it. Freedom? Nobody loves it more. And we fight for it.” The campaign shared the ad on its official social channels, where it’s racking up millions of views.
DNC airs new “Freedom” ad to kick off the Democratic Convention pic.twitter.com/lXLqKi2rAN
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 20, 2024
It’s easy to look at the campaign soundtracks heard at Harris and Trump rallies and see a contrast (as well as the curated innovative set of songs played during the delegate roll call on the second night of the DNC). On one side, voters are presented with classic American music, with tracks from past decades that are battle-tested to evoke strong emotions and harness nostalgia’s hopeful sense of a return to when listeners were younger and happier. On the other, voters are hearing some of today’s popular artists come together in a multicultural mix that at times veers into lyrical and thematic content that might have made Tipper Gore blush, but is reflective of America in 2024.
After Team Harris was reintroduced with Beyoncé’s blessing (though, not yet her actual endorsement), the campaign has become deeply enmeshed with the pop music of right now. Days after the campaign launched, Charli XCX’s tweet, a simple, “Kamala IS Brat” — connecting the candidate with the British pop star’s hot album Brat — garnered roughly 9 million views in four hours. The campaign wisely embraced this pop culture nod, tweaking campaign logos to the Brat cover’s lime green background.
And, what better way to define Harris than to harness some of that #BratEnergy and electrify the increasingly crucial youth vote, the anyone-but-him contingent and those disillusioned by the advanced ages and retro-mindsets of the prior two top party candidates than with some hip-hop and R&B?
“I’m more of a hip-hop girl,” Harris told her running mate Tim Walz, while comparing her music and her husband’s in a getting-to-know-you sit-down conversation video posted around the time of his attachment to the ticket. “He’s more Depeche Mode. But in the Venn diagram of things, Prince — he and I love the same because … talk about how Prince was with that guitar, man. I almost know by heart every one of those songs.”
Prince, a Midwestern mega-talent who became a massive success, despite the odds, is probably the perfect answer Harris could give to a question of a favorite artist. Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, is an underdog given her short campaign window. At her rallies, both during her primary run for the Democratic nomination in 2020 and today, Harris’ inner hip-hop girl would be dancing or singing along to the carefully curated music blasting from the speakers. Migos, Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” Nicki Minaj and Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” emerge amid funk, classic soul and modern gospel-pop tracks, creating a mix that nods to music Harris says she grew up hearing (mom, she says, got Aretha’s latest record every Christmas) and grabs the ears of younger members of the electorate.
Walz’s taste for Steely Dan and Bruce Springsteen is more in line with the performers that were announced for the opening night of the DNC. Announced on Monday afternoon were singer-songwriter James Taylor, country singer Mickey Guyton and folk/Americana star Jason Isbell as the performers for night one of the convention. (Taylor’s performance, however, was scrapped as organizers grappled with scheduling problems that also pushed President Biden’s speech outside primetime; The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to the campaign to see if he will be rescheduled, as the rest of the week’s performers have yet to be announced.)
The DNC night one acts are out of step with Harris’ playlists, but are likely more reflective of the party overall than its new candidate. Or maybe it’s telling they were slotted for the day both Joe and Jill Biden were scheduled to speak.
This month, the Minnesota Star Tribune published an analysis of a sample of songs collected from recent campaign stops Harris and Trump made in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The results suggest the Harris campaign favors Black, female artists and pop music, and the Trump campaign favors white, male artists and rock music. It’s not surprising. But drilling down into the numbers seems to up the daylight between these two camps and the Americas they represent: The music of Team Harris is ethnically diverse and of the moment, and Team Trump’s picks are white and what one might call “oldies.”
At the Harris campaign’s Eau Claire, Wisconsin, rally, where global indie darling and hometown hero Bon Iver performed, 13 of the 32 songs played were by solo female artists and nine of the tracks were by male solo artists. The campaign played 17 songs by Black musicians or all-Black groups, 10 by white artists or all-white groups and four by mixed-race artists or groups. And the team played Jennifer Lopez’s “Let’s Get Loud,” making her the one Latin artist whose music was performed at the event.
Meanwhile, according to the Star Tribune, 27 of 35 songs Trump’s campaign played at a rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, were by white musicians or all-white groups, and 25 were by male musicians or all-male groups. Trump, meanwhile, has been on the receiving end of several cease and desist statements that appear when a song by an artist with divergent politics is heard at a MAGA event. A former member of R.E.M. said they were exploring legal action when their hit “Losing My Religion” was played at a Trump rally; then came a direct legal threat from Isaac Hayes III after Trump used a track penned by his father, Sam & Dave’s hit “Hold on, I’m Comin’” at no less than 135 of his rallies, as he told The Hollywood Reporter this week. The list of artists who oppose their work being used by Trump’s campaign or administration even has a Wikipedia page.
Other than the Sam & Dave classic, Trump has leaned into the warmth of nostalgia and patriotism with “God Bless the USA” by Lee Greenwood, with its repetition of the rousing phrase, “proud to be an American.” Before Trump began to play it around his stump speeches, the song was already a staple of the presidential campaign cycle, with the 1984 track having been played at times by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and later by then-Vice President George H.W. Bush as he campaigned in 1988; it also topped the charts during the Gulf War and after 9/11.
The past, and all of its glory, is germane to MAGA land, where the economy once provided both meaning and health care and a culture where a woman of mixed race becoming vice president didn’t seem fathomable. Playing to this sentiment worked out for Trump in 2016. But a study released in October by the Center for Information and Information on Civic Learning at Tufts University indicated 8 million American youths are aging into the electorate in 2024. “This is a politically active generation that can have a major impact on elections,” read a release about the study, which also shows that “about 45 percent of the Gen Z electorate in 2024, including 47 percent of newly eligible voters who have aged in are youth of color.”
Perhaps, then, the songs permeating the campaigns are telegraphing less about how the candidates see themselves but more about who they believe will show up and vote for them.
Aug 21, 7 a.m. Updated with a note about the DNC 2024 roll call song list.
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