CHICAGO — A month and a day after Democrats made a change, Kamala Harris has the party faithful believing.
The vice president’s speech on Thursday capped an ebullient four-day convention in Chicago that showcased the party’s reinvigorated chances against Donald Trump in the wake of President Joe Biden’s decision to step aside.
Before a convention hall packed with supporters in symbolic suffragette white, Harris became the second woman to formally accept the Democratic Party’s nomination as she tries to break through as the nation’s first female president.
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Not that she talked about that. Instead, Harris wrapped herself in the language of patriotism and American exceptionalism, unspooling the story of her upbringing by a single mother to present herself as a leader who understands the strains and aspirations of the middle class.
Here are five takeaways from her speech and the convention week that led up to it:
Harris sought out the middle ground — and the middle class.
By the time Harris took the stage Thursday, the convention hall had already been suffused with patriotic pageantry. Flags were waved. Veterans were cheered. USA signs were handed out.
“We are the heirs to the greatest democracy in the history of the world,” she said as she neared the dramatic finish of her speech. She was seeking to occupy some of the most frequently trod ground of winning American campaigns.
She repeatedly tried to find popular proposals. Protecting Social Security. Lowering health care costs. Cutting taxes. And, in a sign of how the politics of abortion have shifted since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, an extended riff on reproductive rights.
She also told stories of her own life that were at once new to the audience and yet familiar to millions of Americans. Of divorce and moving vans. Of living “in the flats” instead of the wealthier hills. Of her mother’s reliance on a “trusted circle” of friends to raise her and her sister.
She outlined a biting critique of Trump that Biden first floated but never successfully prosecuted.
“My entire career, I’ve only had one client: the people,” she said of her career of public service. It set up a searing contrast with Trump, who quickly called into Fox News to give his review of her speech when she was done. “The only client he has ever had,” she said of Trump. “Himself.”
Biden built Trump up. Harris sought to cut him down.
Back when Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee, there was little evidence that he could mobilize voters solely around the idea of voting for him. So his campaign instead put a magnifying glass on Trump, trying to make him a larger-than-life figure with dire warnings of the threat he posed.
The Harris convention set out to diminish him.
Former President Barack Obama mocked Trump’s obsession with crowd sizes with a suggestive hand gesture. When Democrats gave a prime-time speech to a Republican former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, he said of Trump, “He is a small man pretending to be big.”
Harris delivered the final word: She called her rival “an unserious man.”
Yes, there have been nightly warnings about the grave policy implications of “Project 2025.” But those segments have been leavened with humor, including when Kenan Thompson of “Saturday Night Live” fame lugged an oversize book of the 922-page Republican blueprint onstage.
“You ever seen a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time?” he asked.
There was a new lightness to the way Harris and other Democrats tried to frame the potential for Trump to bring darkness.
“Simply put,” she said in one of the evening’s most memorable lines, “they are out of their minds.”
The sitting VP said: I’m the change candidate.
Nearly everything about the convention pitched Harris as a fresh start. No matter that she already holds an office in the West Wing. Or that her party is already in power.
Over and over, convention speakers repeated her new slogan (“A New Way Forward”) and declared that it was Harris who would usher in a new future. They tried to relegate Trump to a figure of the past.
“Let us choose the sweet promise of tomorrow over the bitter return to yesterday,” Oprah Winfrey said.
Republicans cast the effort as an audacious rewriting of the present and predicted that she would be saddled with the record of the current Biden-Harris administration, especially on the economy and immigration. The intensity of her ongoing skirmish with Trump over who is likelier to break the status quo is proof itself of the importance of the fight.
“Something wonderfully magical is in the air,” said Michelle Obama, the former first lady, who made a rhetorical passing of the baton between the Obama era and a potential Harris one. In doing so, she almost seemed to lump the Trump and Biden years together. Now, she said, the contagious power of hope was reemerging, calling it “a familiar feeling that’s been buried too deep for far too long.”
Harris’ candidacy is only weeks old, but some of the loudest interruptions of her speech came when the crowd chanted, “We’re not going back!,” a forward-leaning posture that has become a rallying cry.
Harris hammered home the point herself, describing the election as “a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past.”
Democrats are giving Harris a lot of leeway on policy.
What exactly would a President Harris do?
That question was not on top of the tongues of many delegates this week. The party sounded far more interested in ensuring that Harris can reach the White House in the first place. There were some policies highlighted. The expansion of abortion rights. Restrictions on guns.
But with only 75 days before the election, Democrats sounded more than happy to give Harris room to position herself in whatever way she thinks is needed to defeat Trump. She has backtracked on fracking, flipped on “Medicare for All” and recanted on not considering border crossings criminal — all with little blowback.
In short, the party is embracing practicality over policy particulars.
Harris directly addressed a chief vulnerability — immigration — by vowing to sign border-security legislation that Trump had scuttled.
Outside the convention perimeter, pro-Palestinian protesters voiced their anger with the administration. But inside, Harris faced little pressure on the war in the Gaza Strip — or on almost any other issue. She did, however, speak extensively and confidently on the Israel-Hamas conflict, firmly stating that Israel had a right to defend itself while also calling for self-determination for the Palestinian people.
Harris has rolled out an economic agenda that includes new money for first-time homeowners, the construction of 3 million new homes and measures against price gouging on food. Yet the specifics were not what energized most attendees this week.
It was the possibility of making history with Harris — and, of course, stopping Trump.
Democrats are riding high. The hard part comes next.
Democrats in Chicago relished the good feelings of Harris’ upward trajectory in the polls. She has staked out a lead of 2 percentage points in The New York Times polling average after trailing by 5 points in a then-hypothetical matchup at the start of July.
But party leaders are still warning against complacency.
“Let us not forget what we are up against,” Michelle Obama cautioned Tuesday.
It was, after all, only a month ago that the other party was riding high off its own convention. Then it was Republicans who felt like a party of destiny after Trump had survived an assassination attempt and Biden’s party was still tearing itself apart.
While some Democrats are privately beginning to dream that Harris’ momentum might carry her for another 10-plus weeks, many are bracing for the likelihood of stumbles against the most unpredictable of opponents.
“What we had prior to this point is an enthusiasm problem, quite frankly,” Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia said in a brief interview Thursday. “So we need all of this enthusiasm. But enthusiasm shouldn’t short-circuit discipline.”
Warnock, who is also the lead pastor at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, then reached for a parallel in Scripture. “This is the mountaintop experience,” he said. “Then you’ve got to go into the valley. But the mountaintop gets you ready.”
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