CHICAGO President Joe Biden is a patriot, in any conventional sense of the word. He ended his valedictory speech at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night with a refrain hes delivered possibly hundreds of times since he began running for president again in 2019: We just have to remember who we are. Were the United States of America. And there is nothing we cannot do when we do it together.

But Bidens rhetoric never made the Democratic Party wave the flag as much as it has in the weeks since Vice President Kamala Harris took over as the partys nominee. And as she prepares to deliver the most important speech of her life on Thursday night, her version of patriotism based more on individuals and possibilities than on the strength of American institutions could help save her partys presidential campaign.

The liberal patriotism wave started at the rally, where she introduced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, when she noted two middle-class kids from the Bay Area and Nebraska could be president and vice president.

Only in America, she said, repeating the phrase three more times.

The story Harris told was not about the strength of American institutions and the need to protect the Constitution, a warning Biden and other Democrats have issued over and over again. It was, as aides previewing Harris convention speech for reporters promised, about her faith in the American people and the promise of America.

This is what seems to separate the patriotism of Harris, and of former President Barack Obama , from the patriotism of Biden. Biden, who has spent more than five decades at the center of the American political establishment and frequently reminisced about the good ol bipartisan U.S. Senate of the 1970s and 1980s, seemed to base his faith in America as much in its unpopular political institutions as in its people.

The Harris-Obama version of patriotism seems to be much more politically effective, at least at this moment. It fits into a long history of arguing that inclusivity, acceptance and helping your neighbor are at the heart of being an American. And its playing a key role in fighting off GOP attacks on Harris, a Black woman and daughter of immigrants, as somehow foreign.

Theres something a little extra about Kamala leaning into it because of the way Republicans try to other her as less than American, and that builds a permission structure for people who might otherwise not be the type of person to chant U-S-A to lean into it, said Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist.

While most Democrats would inherently bristle at the idea that they are less patriotic than the GOP, a YouGov poll from earlier this year found that 53% of Americans thought Republicans were very or somewhat patriotic, while only 45% said the same of the Democrats. And polling has often shown Democrats are less likely, for instance, to say America is the greatest country in the world.

Republicans often try to claim patriotism as exclusive to themselves, with flag-waving bordering on ostentatious even as Trump runs down the country and its citizens more often and with more ferocity than any other political figure in recent memory.

I use the term, oftentimes in closing, We are a nation in decline. We are a failed nation, Trump said last week at a rally in Pennsylvania. And I think its a beautiful phrase, though I dont like the topic very much.

That provides a clear opening for Harris, Longwell noted: Hes saying America is a bad place, a third-world country, and the like. And so it is both strategic and fundamentally true for her to push back and say: No, Americas a great place, let me tell you a quintessentially American story.