The U.S. Democratic National Convention opens Monday night in Chicago. It promises to be a four-day celebration of the party’s presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, and include nonstop attacks on her Republican opponent in the November election, former President Donald Trump.
Democrats have lined up their most prominent elected officials and an array of others to extol Harris, who jumped into the presidential contest less than a month ago after President Joe Biden, under pressure from party stalwarts, withdrew from his reelection bid. Biden badly stumbled in a debate against Trump in late June and falling numbers in voter surveys showed that the president was likely to lose to his predecessor.
Biden, 81, quickly endorsed Harris, his 59-year-old second-in-command. He is set Monday night to tell 4,000 convention delegates and a national television audience why she should succeed him and become the country’s 47th president. She would also be the first U.S. female leader, the country’s second Black president after Barack Obama, and its first leader of Indian descent.
Most importantly to Democrats, an array of national polls shows her currently edging ahead of Trump and leading him in key political battleground states that are likely to decide the national outcome.
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Obama is speaking Tuesday, with former President Bill Clinton addressing the convention Wednesday night, followed by Harris on the final night, Thursday, as she formally accepts the party’s presidential nomination. Harris and her vice-presidential running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, already secured their nominations in an electronic vote earlier this month.
Walz, 60, is a retired high school social studies teacher and served 12 years in the U.S. House of Representatives before twice winning the governorship of the Upper Midwest state.
He has adopted a liberal agenda during his 5½ years leading the state, but he was little known in national political circles until Harris selected him as her running mate, picking him over two better-known Democratic political figures. Aides said Harris found him the most compatible to work with if she wins the November 5 election.
Democrats who had long harbored thoughts that Biden was too old to run for reelection, let alone serve another four years in the White House, quickly coalesced around Harris. Biden is only three years older than Trump.
While Harris has been a U.S. senator from California, the country’s most populous state, and most recently vice president for 3½ years, she, like Walz, is to a degree unknown to the American public.
For many voters, her nomination acceptance speech could be the first time they have heard her speak at length.
Harris, in the month she has been a presidential contender, has only occasionally answered a handful of questions from reporters tracking her campaign. She has declined to hold a mass news conference or sit for a one-on-one interview with a prominent news media figure, such as an anchor from one of the major U.S. television networks. She says she intends to hold such an interview by the end of August.
Harris has attracted thousands of supporters to her rallies in political battleground states, delivering carefully scripted remarks, often reminding voters that she started her political career as a local prosecutor and then attorney general in California.
“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she says. “So, hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
A jury found Trump liable in civil cases for sexually abusing a woman and then defaming her, while another jury in May found him guilty of 34 felony counts linked to a hush money payment to a porn star. Earlier this year, a judge determined he had manipulated business records to get favorable loan terms from banks and insurers and ordered him to pay more than $300 million in damages.
Trump has relentlessly attacked Harris as an intellectual lightweight. He has said Harris is not smart enough to stand up to tough questions from reporters.
Some other Republicans have urged Trump to end his personal attacks on Harris and instead disparage her policy positions, but Trump has refused.
“I’m entitled to personal attacks,” he told reporters on Thursday. “I have to do it my way.”
While the majority of the convention delegates are squarely lined up behind Harris, several dozen are listed as “uncommitted” to her candidacy, all aligned in protest of the Biden administration’s support for Israel in its war against Hamas militants in Gaza.
Harris has broadly supported Israel while also adamantly calling for a cease-fire in the 10-month war. She has declined to support one of the demands of some of the pro-Palestinian delegates, an embargo on shipping more military aid to Israel.
Thousands of street protesters are also expected to show up in Chicago to voice support for the famished and displaced Palestinians in Gaza and against the continuing U.S. support for Israel. Whether Harris will address the issue in her convention speech is not known.
