Tens of thousands of Democrats are expected to descend on Chicago this week for their party’s convention, bubbling with a feeling few had anticipated: pure, unconfined joy.
At the end of their four-day fete, when the red, white and blue balloons tumble from the rafters of the United Center, Kamala Harris will have become the first woman of color to accept a major party’s presidential nomination in American history. The moment will cap a frenzied few weeks for Democrats, following the vice-president’s sudden ascent to the top of the ticket in a development that has transformed the race for the White House and galvanized a party once resigned to a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
“It’s a remarkable turn of events,” said Howard Dean, a former Democratic National Committee chairman and former Vermont governor. “The Democrats have now been resurrected.”
In less than a month since Biden’s monumental decision to abandon his re-election bid, Harris has united most Democrats and restored the party’s dominance among young voters and people of color. While the race remains nail-bitingly close, analysts recently adjusted their outlook in a trio of Sun belt states that had appeared to be slipping away from Democrats, possibly opening an alternative path to victory.
Harris’s crowds have been large and electric – a development that appears to irk her rival, still struggling to find a mocking nickname. Fundraising has poured in at a record clip. Celebrities, artists and fashion designers are eager to help. Online, young people continue to churn out memes and flattering content.
Party officials say the Harris-inspired vibe shift is trickling down ballot and translating into on-the-ground organizing.
“You can see the giant crowd packing the rallies,” said Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic party. “But what you can’t see in those images is the fact that thousands of the people who go to those rallies are signing up for volunteer shifts and then going out and knocking on the doors of potential swing voters who may not know much about Vice-President Harris or Governor Walz.”
Harris officially secured the party’s nomination, in a virtual roll-call vote held earlier this month, instead of in-person at the convention. Then she chose Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, as her running mate, drawing plaudits from both poles of the party – an occurrence so rare the progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quipped that Democrats were showing “disconcerting levels of array”.
That period of harmony will be tested inside and outside of the convention hall, where a significant presence of pro-Palestinian protestors and “uncommitted” anti-war delegates plan to make their voices heard.
Still, Democrats hope to project a message of unity, as Harris and Walz, self-described “joyful warriors”, ride a wave of momentum into Chicago. Enthusiasm among Democrats surged from 46% in February, when the 81-year-old president was cruising essentially unchallenged toward his party’s nomination, to 85% in August, according to a survey by Monmouth University. Even among independents, enthusiasm has spread, from 34% to 53% over the same period.
“What you’re seeing is gen X rising,” said Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic party. “As gen Xers in the party, we’ve had to take the back seat in respect of our elders and now we’re finally claiming that mantle and running with it.” Harris is technically a boomer, missing the gen X cut off by a couple of months, but supporters say she embodies the cultural ethos of the generation.
“We always incorporate kind of pop culture and fun, because that’s who we are,” Kleeb continued. “And now we are going to implement policies that we’ve been screaming from the sidelines on.”
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At the United Center, home of the NBA’s Chicago Bulls, Democrats will hear speeches from party luminaries, leaders and rising stars. Biden will deliver a pass-the-torch style speech on Monday, making the case that Harris is the best person to finish a campaign he started. By tradition, Walz will accept the vice presidential nomination on Wednesday night, and Vice President Kamala Harris will deliver her acceptance speech the following evening, on Thursday.
“The story here is simple and it’s one that will resonate with Americans across the country: Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are fighting for the American people and America’s future — Donald Trump is only fighting for himself,” said Minyon Moore, chair of the convention.
Convention organizers had precious little time to revamp the 50,000-person spectacle initially envisioned for a president who has spent a half-century in national politics for a vice-president many Americans are still getting to know. In addition to the slickly-made biographical videos and Harris-Walz swag, convention-goers can make friendship bracelets or get a “Kamala Harris” manicure.
They also signaled a desire to one-up Republicans, whose convention in Milwaukee featured a performance by Kid Rock, but who will provide their entertainment remains shrouded in mystery. MoveOn, a liberal organizing group, has started an online petition asking Taylor Swift and Beyoncé to perform together.
To amplify their message online, and reach Americans glued to their phones, not the TV, Democrats are rolling out a “blue carpet” for nearly 200 social media influencers, all of whom have been credentialed to cover the event like members of the traditional press.
“Young people hold a lot of power at the ballot box, we know that,” said Deja Foxx, a 24-year-old content creator and reproductive rights activist in Tucson, Arizona, who worked on Harris’s 2020 campaign. “But they also hold an outsized influence on the narrative because of social media and platforms like TikTok, where they hold the lion’s share of narrative power.”
Right now Harris has captured the country’s attention, sparing it from a presidential contest the overwhelming majority of Americans dreaded. But voters need to know more about her and her ambitions, said Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee turned anti-Trump political analyst.
“From the first night through the last night and every speech in between you have to make clear the value of having this person as president,” he said. “When you walk away from this convention, you need to feel good about what you just saw.”
Amid the star-spangled pomp and pageantry in Chicago, allies, colleagues and family will testify to Harris’s strength and her story. But it is the grand finale, her historic acceptance speech on Thursday night, that provides the best opportunity for Harris to lay out the choice before voters this November.
Born in Oakland, California, in 1964, Harris is the daughter of a breast cancer scientist from India and an economist from Jamaica. Her parents’ activism in the civil rights movement gave the country’s future vice-president a “stroller’s-eye view” of history. She attended Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington and worked a summer job at McDonald’s after her freshman year.
After law school, she worked as prosecutor in the Bay Area before a barrier-breaking ascent through California’s political ranks. In 2010, she was elected the state’s attorney general, overseeing the second-largest criminal justice system in the US, and then to the US Senate in 2016. After a short-lived run for president in 2019, Biden selected her as his running mate, making good on a promise to elevate a Black woman.
As a candidate, Harris has leaned into her work as a “courtroom prosecutor” – once seen as a liability – to draw a sharp contrast with Trump, who, she reminds voters, is a convicted felon. On the campaign trail, she boasts about her record targeting “predators”, “cheaters” and “fraudsters”, concluding with the applause line: “Hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
For many Democrats, Harris’s sharp attacks on Trump, the jokes, the snark, even the insults – all as she and Walz preach positivity – are a welcome change in tone. After the unease of watching Biden flail during a June debate, they are now waiting in baited anticipation for Harris to confront Trump onstage.
“One of the things that makes Vice-President Harris’s candidacy so exciting is that it feels like we are approaching the urgency of this election with a candidate and with a campaign that can take on the fight,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of the group Run for Something, which recruits young people to run for office.
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However the convention unfolds over a four day arc in Chicago, it will not be the one Democrats initially expected to hold.
Democrats had been accused of resignation, even defeatism, in the tumultuous days after an assassination attempt on Trump’s life, captured indelibly by the image of him being pulled from the stage with blood on his face and a fist raised in defiance. The former president arrived at his party’s convention in Milwaukee, with a bandaged ear, elevated by his followers to the status of living martyr. A confident Trump chose JD Vance, the Ohio senator and flag-bearer of an angry, hard-right movement.
Then 81-year-old Biden did the remarkable: he stepped aside and endorsed his vice-president.
“I think we’re still all trying to find words for it because what’s happened is so extraordinary,” said Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist who has spent the last several years defying conventional political wisdom with a relentless belief in his party’s electoral strength.
In Rosenberg’s view, the contest was reshaped by three key moments. The first was Trump’s choice of Vance as a running mate. As the senator attracts renewed scrutiny over his suggestion that women without children lack a “direct stake” in the country’s future, polls have found that he is one of the most unpopular vice-presidential picks in recent history. His staunch opposition to abortion, including his past support for a nationwide ban, are especially unpopular views among women.
The next was what Rosenberg calls Biden’s “American Cincinnatus” moment, choosing to voluntarily bow out and effectively anoint Harris as his successor. Third was Harris’s ability to come “roaring out of the gate ready to go”, thrilling a party that had never fully accepted her as the heir-apparent. In their first appearance together as the Democratic ticket, Walz thanked Harris for “bringing back the joy.”
Harris is not the first presidential candidate to embrace a sunnier message. Ronald Reagan promised “morning in America” and Barack Obama offered “Hope” and “Change”. But Hubert Humphrey’s “politics of joy” didn’t win the Democrat the presidency.
Rosenberg argues that Harris’s optimistic, forward-looking vision is key to defeating a man Democrats view as a grievous threat to democracy.
“This is the central project of the west right now,” Rosenberg said, “to prevent the far-right parties from gaining power. Europe and the UK were just very successful in that and we’re going to be very successful in that in November.”
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Excitement among the party faithful will converge in Chicago with the frustration many left-leaning activists feel over the president’s handling of Israel’s war on Gaza, which has now killed more than 40,000 Palestinians.
As fragile ceasefire negotiations continue, large gatherings of anti-war protesters are expected just outside the official perimeter, in an effort to pressure the administration – and party’s new standard-bearer – for an end to the war in Gaza and to shipments of American military aid to Israel.
Inside the convention hall, the 30 uncommitted delegates who mostly represent the Democratic primary voters opposed to Biden’s handling of the war, will have the access and ability to address attendees directly.
Some Democrats fear clashes between police and protesters, in an echo of the party’s 1968 convention in Chicago, will distract from the event and broadcast disunity that could hurt them in November. Republicans will eagerly capitalize on any signs of division as Trump searches for ways to wrest the spotlight from his new rival.
Trump has doubled down on the populist anger he rode to victory in 2016, conjuring an apocalyptic vision of the country under Democratic governance. He has accused Biden and Harris of turning the US into a “third-world nation” and predicted a “bloodbath” if he loses.
The approach failed in 2020, when Americans, reeling from the coronavirus pandemic and Trump’s chaotic presidency, chose Biden’s offer to restore normality. But Biden is unpopular, so far unable to persuade Americans that his economic policies have improved their lives. Just 18% of Americans say they are satisfied with the direction of the country, according to Gallup’s tracking poll.
Yet the ebullient response to Harris’s ascent over the last four weeks suggests that she has tapped into deep desire to move away from the doom and gloom that has gripped American politics for nearly a decade, said Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of communication at Texas A&M University and author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.
“All of the doomscrolling, the fear mongering, all of the stress and the trauma that we have been through over the last eight years has really worn us out,” she said. “We don’t want to be afraid all the time.”
“The same way that doom is contagious,” she said, “hope is contagious.”
Joan E Greve contributed reporting
