No, Legacy Media, The Joy Hasn’t Left Kamala Harris’ Campaign—You Just Hope It Did

Special Report: With just 17 days left in the 2024 campaign, the joy has left Kamala Harris’ campaign….

That’s the narrative legacy media hopes will influence voters toward their preferred result in this election: a Trump presidency.

They say the Vice President’s campaign has lost its spark. Let’s be clear: joy hasn’t gone anywhere, and Harris supporters are still as fired up as they were at the start. But legacy media needs you to believe otherwise. They need you to believe the joy has dwindled because happiness doesn’t drive clicks or ratings. Fear, chaos, drama, and spectacle do. And let’s face it, no one delivers on spectacle quite like Donald Trump. He’s a clown, a carnival barker, a train wreck, a tragedy.

Legacy media is playing the same game they’ve been playing since 2016. They can’t resist it. The press doesn’t want to see Kamala Harris’ success because Trump’s chaotic theatrics offer a guaranteed stream of outrageous headlines, viral moments, and pundit panels. Journalists sell books and win awards writing about him. Just ask Maggie Haberman and Bob Woodward. Trump is the show they can’t stop covering because the audience can’t stop watching.

And that’s the real reason they are rooting for the Harris’ campaign to fail. If she succeeds with sanity, grace, and joy, the public narrative shifts toward stability, competence, normalcy, and hope—none of which are good for a business that thrives on disaster.

Kamala Harris is not running on anger, resentment, or fear. She’s running on the audacity to believe in a future where people can actually thrive. Joy, particularly Black joy, doesn’t fit into the fear-based narrative the media prefers. They need Harris to either be on defense 24/7 or in constant crisis mode—because anything less just won’t sell.

Legacy media has never known what to do with a woman like Kamala Harris. They don’t understand her connections to everyday people, her ability to bring humor, heart, and purpose into politics, or the cultural resonance of an HBCU grad standing one heartbeat away from the presidency. They can’t wrap their heads around the idea that her joy is strategy, not distraction.

We’ve seen this story before. When Barack Obama’s message of hope resonated with voters, the press didn’t celebrate it—they spent years waiting for it to collapse. They framed his optimism as naïveté, constantly warning about a disillusioned electorate just waiting to fall out of love with the “hope and change” guy. And now, they’re doing the same thing with Harris, dismissing the excitement and energy the Harris-Walz campaign generates because it doesn’t align with the "struggling campaign" storyline they loved about the Biden-Harris campaign.

Remember how legacy media obliterated Joe Biden after his first debate with Trump? Don’t they realize that their obsession over an “aging” and “stumbling” Joe Biden is how we ended up with Harris, the candidate they’re struggling to define? But what they fail to understand is that Kamala’s joy isn’t performative. It’s real, it’s rooted, and it’s powerful. Harris knows that leading with joy, especially as a Black woman, is itself an act of resistance. The voters she connects with see that. The crowds at her events feel that. Legacy media can’t focus on this thriving campaign because they’re too busy waiting for it to fall apart.

Ultimately, Harris doesn’t need the media’s permission to thrive. She’s bringing joy to the fight—and if that scares them as much as it scares Donald Trump, good! Because the real story isn’t about the chaos from the candidate they were expecting—it’s about the joy from the candidate they never saw coming.