When the gavel sounded Monday night to signal the start of the Democratic National Convention, many of the buses picking up delegates from their downtown Chicago hotels had been stuck in traffic for hours. Anxious delegates waited in long lines outside the United Center arena. Rumor had it that the delay was related to a group of demonstrators protesting the war in Gaza who had breached the building’s outer fence the night before. But by the time the evening’s main attractions began their speeches at 8 p.m., the protests had died down and the arena was finally filling up. After a month of unrest, the Democratic Party was ready to unveil a new identity under its new candidate, Kamala Harris.
“This bright mohawk is called the Harris Mohawk Special,” Danny T. Stone, a goateed delegate from Georgia, told me when I asked him about the bright headband he was wearing. Most of the outfits on the first night of the convention were understated – delegates were saving their looks for the next night’s roll calls – but Stone had decided to make a small statement. “I say I light up the joy you see here.”
Stone, a retiree and 34-year veteran of the Georgia National Guard, had been a staunch supporter of Joe Biden. The change of plans was initially difficult to accept. “I was so damn angry and upset that I was going to nominate myself for President of the United States at that convention if he hadn’t come out thirty minutes later and endorsed her,” he said. “I agreed.” Like many others at the convention, he spoke of the old energy of Barack Obama from 2008: “But this is something different. This isn’t just a honeymoon – this is something permanent.”
Monday’s program seemed designed to convince everyone watching that this was the truth — that the last-minute change of candidate was not a sloppiness, but that now was the moment when all the party’s missteps and fractures since the Obama era revealed their historic purpose. The progressive wing of the party would no longer leave in protest, as they did in 2016, but would be welcomed into the party as part of the party. Hillary Clinton would no longer be the Democrat who failed to defeat Donald Trump, but would take her place after Shirley Chisholm and Geraldine Ferraro in the lineage of women who had led us to this moment, the finally very real possibility of America’s first woman becoming president. Biden would not be remembered as a wind-cursing figure from King Lear, but as a self-sacrificing hero. It was as if the various factions of the party had been quickly rearranged like stage furniture to provide the best and most redeeming backdrop for the newly crowned star.
Kamala Harris had made her first significant break in the Biden campaign’s messaging the week before, in a speech on economic policy to a small audience at a community college in Raleigh, North Carolina. For months, the Biden campaign had tried to strike a balance: on the one hand, encouraging voters to appreciate positive macroeconomic indicators such as a strong financial market, low unemployment and easing inflation, while on the other hand acknowledging their frustration that, for example, the average rent in the United States has increased by 47 percent since 2019. Given Biden’s lag in the polls, this was clearly a message that had not resonated. In North Carolina, Harris presented a more comprehensive approach, addressing middle-class fears with a series of policy proposals.
“So, listen,” Harris said at the start of her speech, laying the casual rhetorical groundwork for her policy shift. Like Biden, she praised the U.S. economy as “the strongest in the world.” But, she added, “we know that many Americans are not yet feeling that progress in their daily lives.” Her proposed solutions included building three million new homes by the end of her first term (as opposed to Biden’s proposed two million); regulating corporate landlords; $25,000 down payments for first-time homebuyers (a similar Biden proposal was limited to first-time homebuyers); canceling medical debt; banning price gouging by grocery stores; and a $6,000 tax cut for families with newborns. Whether these measures come to fruition or are just Band-Aids on the country’s wealth gap, they are clear attempts to signal to voters that Harris has noticed their financial worries.
But how much voters will be motivated by concrete policy proposals is an open question. In a campaign that forever changed the word “weird,” thanks in no small part to Harris’s vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, the sudden optimism surrounding the Harris-Walz contingent was one of the strangest phenomena. “I have that 2008 feeling,” Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, had said in his community college speech. (Recent polls have shown that the state, which last had a Democratic presidential candidate this year, has recently moved into the race.) Cooper, who was on the shortlist for Harris’s running mate, is scheduled to be one of the convention’s final speakers before Harris formally accepts the nomination on Thursday.
“I campaign for her here in Raleigh regularly, and the enthusiasm is amazing,” Ellen Powers, a 77-year-old Harris supporter who has vowed to knock on doors or otherwise campaign every Saturday until Election Day, told me before Harris’ speech in North Carolina. “People didn’t come to the door when it was just Biden—I just had to leave the pamphlet on the doorknob. Now they’re not just coming to the door, they’re storming out.” Biden lost the state in the 2020 election by about 75,000 votes, but only 75 percent of Democrats turned out to vote. So, she told me, Democrats are obsessed with turnout right now. I asked her what specific policy concerns the people she was addressing were raising. “Literally none,” she said, among avowed party members. “Literally none. They’re just excited about the possibility of change.”
With the Democrats already in the presidency, the candidate in this election must convey the impression of change without denigrating her predecessor: Harris represents the new because of her age (59), her black and South Asian identity and her gender. Whether her program will differ significantly from Biden’s remains to be seen; it was less the president’s record that seemed to turn voters off than the feeling that he could no longer do the job. Her slogan, “We’re not going back,” is a sufficiently vague umbrella term that could refer to a second Trump administration as well as to a more patriarchal or racist past. Obama’s emphasis on change has been replaced by Harris’s invocation of forward momentum.
The crowd at the DNC seemed relieved to have a personality to rally around. On Monday night, the arena erupted into a frenzy as Harris took the convention stage to say hello, wearing a smart tan suit that the Washington post Fashion journalist Rachel Tashjian soon identified herself as Chloé in “coconut brown.” (Was that a reference to the viral clip in which Harris quotes her mother as saying, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” That’s possible—Harris is happy to be in on the joke.) A Florida delegate named Kelly McBride told me she had watched Harris’s evolution during several visits to Florida over the past year. “I saw her in July 2023 and I saw her on May 1,” she said, “and I noticed the change in her manner, in her body language, in pretty much everything.” She added, “When I first saw her, I thought her style was more like a prosecutor’s.”
But the party itself also seemed ready to show that it had changed, and had embraced populism more than it ever had in the days of Hillary Clinton. There was Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers union, who wished “good evening to the people who make this world go round, the working class,” and in the middle of the speech unbuttoned his jacket to reveal a socialist-red T-shirt that read “Trump is a scab.” (“To borrow the words of the great American poet Nelly,” he said, “it’s getting hot in here.”) There was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who claimed she would like to go back to working as a bartender “because there’s nothing wrong with working for a living,” and who said Trump would “leave this country for a living.” dollar if it means lining his own pockets and bribing his Wall Street friends.” On the floor, photographers lined up to photograph Ilhan Omar, the progressive congresswoman from Minnesota who had just won her primary and was sitting in the front row of the Minnesota delegation. Some critics online accused Ocasio-Cortez of selling out to the party’s mainstream; another possibility is that the party has shifted its messaging in her direction.
For many Democrats inside and outside the United Center, the litmus test of the party’s moral integrity has been its failure to seriously challenge Israel over its deadly invasion of Gaza. At the United Center, some delegates wore kaffiyehs emblazoned with the words “Democrats for Palestinian Rights.” After a closed-door meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu in late July, Harris expressed her “grave concern about the dire humanitarian situation” in Gaza and said, “I will not be silent.” Yet despite Ocasio-Cortez’s assertion on Monday that Harris is “working tirelessly to achieve a ceasefire,” Harris has said little since that meeting. On Monday night, Georgia senator Raphael Warnock implored “the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza,” and on Tuesday Bernie Sanders said, “We must end this horrific war in Gaza. Bring the hostages home and demand an immediate ceasefire.” But party delegates, who had not made any commitments in protest over the summer, wanted more concrete commitments. “After a mass murder or a school shooting, Democrats are the first to say: Thoughts and prayers are not enough,” June Rose, a 29-year-old delegate from Rhode Island, told me on Tuesday. “And in a room like the one last night, filled with the most powerful Democrats and some of the most powerful politicians in the world, I say to them: Thoughts and prayers are not enough.”
