Five weeks ago, Democrats were preparing to hold their national convention in Chicago under a pall, weighed down by fears of defeat and what Michelle Obama called a “palpable sense of dread about the future”. An 81-year-old president, trailing badly in the polls, would face his people as they cowered before the prospect of four more years of Donald Trump and his bloodlust for retribution.
What we got at the DNC in Chicago was a week-long celebration that went well beyond the relief that the party evidently feels now that it is back in the game. There was rejoicing in the energy and confidence that has been unleashed by the unexpected metamorphosis from Joe Biden to the “joyful warrior”, Kamala Harris.
Relief and rejoicing were written on Harris’s face as she took the stage in Biden’s place on Thursday night. She was met by a roar from delegates, many dressed in blazing white in homage to the suffragette movement without which they would not have been marking the nomination of the first Black and Asian American woman on a major party ticket.
Harris came across as unleashed herself, emboldened even, as though she had been lifted up by the trust her party has placed in her. A woman who has spent the past four years herself in the shadows, cooped up in the notoriously unsung role of vice-president, was now beaming under the spotlight.
As she introduced herself to a country that is still rawly new to the Kamala Harris phenomenon, she talked about her struggles in her earlier career taking on big banks and sexual predators as a prosecutor. “We were underestimated at practically every turn, but we never gave up, because the future is worth fighting for,” she said.
Nobody is underestimating Harris now. Not even Trump.
She diligently performed on Thursday one of the main tasks of any nominating convention – to sell her life story. But the convention was so much more than a crash course in Kamala Harris.
There was a sense of the party reaching for a new definition of itself, one fit for a new generation. “We are charting a new way forward,” Harris said, one where Americans will make “their own decisions about their own lives, especially about their heart and home”.
Such striving for a new direction ran throughout the week. It started with “joy”, the concept embraced by Harris and her running mate, “Coach” Tim Walz, as a forward-looking, optimistic way to detach their campaign from Trump and his dystopian “darkness”, as Pete Buttigieg put it. (Funny how long two weeks can be in politics. “Joy”, which Walz unleashed on the world on 6 August in his first campaign rally with Harris, is already starting to sound tired.)
As the week progressed the party could be seen hewing towards a new catchphrase and ambition: to reclaim from Trump and the Maga movement that most American of political mantras – freedom. The official theme of Wednesday night’s DNC was a “Fight For Our Freedoms”, and the word was peppered through all four days in videos of ordinary voters describing what it means to them and in keynote speeches.
Harris rattled off the kinds of freedoms she believes in: freedom from gun violence in schools; freedom to love who you love with pride; freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water; “and the freedom that unlocks all the other freedoms, the freedom to vote”.
Harris and Walz were redefining what it is to be a patriotic, flag-flying, camo hat-wearing, football-loving citizen.
Or as Harris put it: “The pride and privilege of being an American.”
On the convention floor, delegates did their own reclaiming. They repeatedly chanted: “USA! USA! USA!” with all the gusto of red-hatted Maga supporters at a Trump rally.
There was another potent area in which the party was stretching towards the new: how to combat Trump. That’s the conundrum that has troubled Democrats – and millions of Americans – ever since the real estate developer swanned down the golden staircase in Trump Tower in June 2015.
It was Walz again who had opened the billing with his viral offering, “weird”. But like “joy”, the value of “weird” as an attack line has had diminishing returns in the past two short weeks.
On Tuesday, the Obamas added their own ideas on how to tackle Trump. Focus by all means on fears of a possible second Trump presidency – “the deep pit in my stomach”, as Michelle put it – but also bring him down to size, make him look as small as he is.
Who would have thought that Barack Obama, the man who turned the professorial into the presidential, would tell a dick joke – however subtle – on primetime TV? This was not the Obamas as we know them. It was Obamas 2.0.
Oprah Winfrey, smuggled into the arena on Wednesday wearing sunglasses and a face mask to retain an element of surprise, had her own spin on the “bring him down to size” approach. “Let us choose commonsense over nonsense,” she said.
It was fitting that the most forceful put down of Trump during the week came from Harris herself. “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man,” she said. “But the consequences of putting him back in the White House are extremely serious.”
She invited her audience to contemplate what Trump would do if he were returned to power, fortified by the recent US supreme court ruling that makes him largely immune from criminal prosecution.
“Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Harris said, “and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency.”
A party leader unleashed. A new mood of positivity and optimism. Fresh ways to hit Trump. The Democratic party emerges from the convention in much more robust health than it entered it.
In other ways, too, the DNC went off without a hitch. Downtown Chicago was at its sparkling best, speakers behaved, the made-for-camera moments worked, the stars were impressive, from Stevie Wonder, Pink, John Legend, Lil Jon, Steph Curry, Oprah and more (though spare a thought for poor James Taylor, bumped from the program for lack of time).
Messages were pumped out designed to soothe the doubts of wavering voters. A Harris presidency would be tough on crime, good for your family’s budget, lower your middle-class taxes, secure the border – and do all this with compassion and kindness, not the other side’s disparagement and hate.
The convention repeatedly bashed Trump for overturning abortion rights, driving the point home with heart-wrenching accounts from women denied health care in states with abortion bans, including a woman raped by her stepfather aged 12 and a second woman who miscarried in her bathroom having been turned away from hospital.
“This is what’s happening in our country because of Donald Trump, and he is not done,” Harris said.
Project 2025, the voluminous guide to a Trump second term, was also pounded relentlessly through the week. In the words of the Saturday Night Live star Kenan Thompson: “Have you ever seen a document that can kill a small animal and democracy at the same time?”
Then there were the subjects that the DNC studiously avoided, notably Israel’s retaliatory Gaza war. Large anti-war demonstrations attracted more than 10,000 protesters, but they were kept well away from the DNC arena.
The party declined to offer Uncommitted, the movement pressing for a ceasefire, a speaking slot on the main stage despite a two-day sit-in. It infuriated many progressives, but succeeded in keeping flashbacks to the devastating 1968 Chicago DNC at bay.
So what did it all amount to in the end? After the raucous chanting had died down, the balloons burst, the delegates dispersed, what was left?
LaTosha Brown, founder of the southern based Black Voters Matter, said she hadn’t come away feeling as thrilled about a convention since Obama’s first in 2008. But Chicago was different.
“The Obama convention was great, but it was really all about him. Here, I felt something else – like this time we did it for ourselves.”
And yet. The palpable energy of the week, the seemingly irrepressible hope of a party that only five weeks ago had been in the grip of trepidation and fear, means nothing if it ends there.
Latest polls put Harris just a few points up over Trump in battleground states like Wisconsin without which Harris will have difficulty prevailing. That’s a dramatic improvement on Biden, but it is still well within the margin of error.
Meanwhile, Trump is not letting up on his pursuit of darkness. As Harris was preparing to address delegates on Thursday, he was down at the US border with Mexico scaremongering about “hardened criminals pouring into our country”.
Will it work? Nobody knows.
What Democratic strategists do know is this. If they let their party faithful leave Chicago, turn off the TV, sit back and relax as they bask in the glow of so much talk of joy and freedom and a new beginning, then they lose.
Which is why Bill Clinton reminded the party that it had seen “more than one election slip away from us”. Or why Walz stressed that with only 73 days to go to election day the clock is ticking.
“There’ll be time to sleep when we’re dead,” he said.
And that’s why Michelle Obama scolded the DNC with her mantra: “Do something! If we see a bad poll – and we will – we’ve got to put down that phone and do something!”
That wasn’t an appeal from the former first lady. It was an order.
