On the second night of the Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, Kamala Harris suddenly appeared on the jumbotron at the United Center. Many in the audience seemed momentarily confused—the candidate, who had already made a surprise appearance the night before, wasn’t due back onstage until later in the week. Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, were being beamed in from the Fiserv Forum, in Milwaukee, where they were holding a rally for more than fifteen thousand supporters. “I’ll see you in two days, Chicago,” Harris said, with a wave. If a nominating Convention is traditionally a pep rally for the superfans, the Democrats were turning it into a popularity contest. Fiserv Forum was the site of the Republican National Convention, where, in July, Donald Trump officially became his party’s nominee. In a single night—four weeks into her Presidential campaign and less than three months before Election Day—Harris was filling two stadiums.
Can the excitement last? Harris, the Vice-President of a historically unpopular incumbent, is an improbable change candidate. And yet in both arenas last week, the sense of relief was as overwhelming as the general euphoria. Barely a month earlier, with President Joe Biden clinging to a failing candidacy, internal polls put the chances of a Democratic victory in the single digits. Now those odds are roughly even. In Chicago, it was both revealing and understandable that the enthusiasm was greatest when Biden stayed out of view. He delivered a knotty, emotional speech on Monday, at once a testament to all he had achieved as President and a reminder that it wasn’t enough. Many of the speakers addressed him graciously; one of the week’s refrains was “Thank you, Joe.” But if the Democrats were proud of Biden for his historic abdication, they were prouder still of themselves for accomplishing what the Republicans, who remained in thrall to their doddering candidate, had failed to do.
Without an octogenarian at the top of the ticket, the Democratic Party could pitch itself, for the first time in years, as being closer in age, spirit, and experience to the national electorate. Trump, whose entire campaign was built around the contrast between his strength and Biden’s weakness, looked angry and old. At the Convention, he was as much the punch line as the foil. He was weird, small, deranged—“a scab,” as Shawn Fain, the head of the United Auto Workers, put it. The uniqueness of Harris’s identity—as a Black woman of South Asian descent, a symbol of a young, diverse, and hopeful country—was perhaps the great subtext of the Convention, celebrated and honored at every turn but rarely put forward as the explicit subject of her story. What made 2024 a historic election was the question of whether American democracy could survive against Trump.
Harris, for the most part, is still campaigning on the agenda of the Administration in which she serves. (Early in the week, the D.N.C. ratified its ninety-four-page platform but failed to delete references to Biden’s “second term.”) Many of those policies—on climate change, health care, public infrastructure, and student debt—are overwhelmingly popular with Democratic voters. Others—on the Middle East and immigration—are more complicated. Democrats assume that Biden’s age, and not his positions, is what has made him so unpopular. Harris and her advisers clearly think that her priority should be to sell herself as a person, rather than to dwell on policy specifics. With so little time before the election, this may be the right move, but it’s also a high-wire act. At a breakout session during the Convention, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, the campaign manager Harris inherited from Biden, was called to a microphone to give a “campaign update.” Hundreds cheered after she spoke; only as she left the stage could someone be overheard saying, in a bemused voice, “Wait, so, what was the update?”
State organizers have told reporters that the volunteers flocking to local campaign offices don’t care about policy questions; the energy is about the candidate and the sense of possibility that she brought to a moribund race. One often overlooked fact of Harris’s campaign is the work that she’s been doing since the Supreme Court overturned a constitutional right to abortion access, in the summer of 2022. This year alone, she made more than eighty trips to talk about reproductive rights in two dozen states. Someone close to the campaign said that Harris’s contacts on the ground were one reason she was able to lock up the nomination so decisively. These efforts may also help with the general election. According to Amy Walter, of the Cook Political Report, in such a tight race the population that could prove decisive is that of young undecided women who are anxious about inflation but also moderate and pro-choice.
By most measures, Harris is polling ahead of Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and may have a slight advantage in Arizona and North Carolina; she has narrowed Trump’s lead in states like Nevada and Georgia. But behind closed doors Democrats in Chicago were urging caution. As the Times pointed out, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden both led Trump by greater margins at this point in their respective races of 2016 and 2020. David Axelrod, the former Obama strategist, said on the eve of the Convention that if the election were held that day Trump may well win.
When Harris finally addressed the Convention, on Thursday night, she acknowledged the dramatic circumstances of her candidacy. “I’m no stranger to unlikely journeys,” she said. Her voice, subdued at first, grew more forceful as she described how the modesty of her upbringing—the daughter of a single immigrant mother, reared by neighbors, “none of them family by blood, and all of them family by love”—hardened into the purpose of a career prosecutor. Her only client, she said, was “the people.” A few minutes later, she reprised the line to attack Trump, who, she said, “would use the immense powers of the Presidency . . . to serve the only client he has ever had—himself.”
No one in the United Center could possibly doubt the righteousness of her cause. And, in a steady, intimate way, Harris seemed to be proving a crucial point. The applause was as fervent when she spoke about abortion rights as it was when she called for an end to the war in Gaza. For now, it was the messenger that mattered most. ♦
