CNN
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Democrats are preparing to celebrate their Kamala Harris-inspired renaissance in Chicago next week, less than a month after the vice president’s rise lifted the party’s election hopes and injected new, happy emotions into a campaign previously beset by fears over President Joe Biden’s bleak prospects.
When Republicans gathered in Milwaukee for their convention last month, many supporters of former President Donald Trump predicted a landslide victory in November. But Biden’s decision to “step aside” just days after the GOP convention ended has upended the race. Harris, along with her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have pushed the race to a near-deadlock, with no clear leader in the latest CNN poll — and that’s before an expected post-convention surge.
An enthusiasm bordering on ecstasy gripped Democrats as the party’s leading lights entered the windy city, where Biden, suddenly beloved — at least among liberal partisans grateful for his decision — is set to start the buzz by passing the torch to Harris, the first black woman to become a major party’s nominee, who has emerged from the gates with a populist economic message and a renewed commitment to protecting reproductive rights.
But despite all the excitement, campaign and conference organizers still face a number of complex questions.
Israel’s war in Gaza, even as ceasefire talks continue, has entered its tenth month since Hamas launched its attacks on October 7. The civilian death toll has reached staggering levels, angering anti-war activists. Tens of thousands of protesters are expected to gather in the streets outside the conference’s security perimeter — a potentially bizarre split if party leaders ignore the issue on stage.
But Trump is also hesitant. He seemed deeply unnerved by the late-election swap of Harris for Biden, and has so far largely failed to mount an effective attack on the new Democratic ticket. Democrats, especially Harris, have helped him by remaining relatively silent and letting the increasingly frustrated former president write the bad headlines himself.
But this week at least, the spotlight is on Democrats. The party and its candidates must make their case to the country and, as Harris and Walz put it, sell their new “cheerful” policies to the undecided or disengaged voters who are expected to decide the election this fall.
Hillary Clinton, the 2016 presidential candidate and former secretary of state, is also scheduled to attend opening night. Former President Barack Obama will headline Tuesday's festivities, and Walz will be the main attraction Wednesday. Harris will close Thursday night.
Also, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift – if the speculation is correct – might be there too.
Here are six things to watch and listen for this week during the Democratic National Convention:
In the month since Harris became her party’s standard-bearer, she has effectively erased Biden’s polling and fundraising gaps — a fact that reflects voters’ desire for a different choice than the one they faced in 2020, but also underscores how quickly Harris has achieved her goals.
She delivered a more articulate, forward-looking message than Biden has been able to articulate—one that highlighted her history as a prosecutor, reframed Biden’s economic agenda and framed battles over abortion rights and more as a fight for freedom, all in a relatively brief campaign speech. She also broadly satisfied most Democrats by choosing Walz as his running mate, avoiding the kind of progressive backlash that other contenders might have provoked.
But the Democratic National Convention will be Harris’ biggest stage yet. She will wrap up the four-night event on Thursday with a prime-time speech accepting the party’s presidential nomination and setting the stage for the race against Trump as the two move toward at least one debate in September and early voting begins in some key states shortly thereafter.
Democrats may have finished the most embarrassing part of their first-night convention job: ousting Biden.
The 81-year-old president’s decision to drop out of the 2024 race less than a month before the convention threw Chicago planning into disarray — but his handover to Harris also gave Democrats a huge boost in enthusiasm and a boost in the polls. Now, many of the same Democrats who had been publicly and privately urging Biden to abandon his reelection bid will celebrate his legacy.
But it’s not just about Biden. Harris has reshaped the Democratic message for 2024 to be more forward-looking and centered on themes of freedom. But the core tenets of the populist economic platform she rolled out last week are largely based on Biden’s record. Framing that record—which Republicans have blamed for inflation—is Harris’s cornerstone for selling her own agenda.
While Biden will get a hero's welcome Monday night, Democrats acknowledge that this convention will look very different than it would have if they had instead sent him into a second showdown with Trump.
“You’re talking about something completely different, right? This is a candidate who has energized the party in a way that I haven’t seen since 2008,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker told CNN on Sunday. “I haven’t seen that kind of energy and dynamism at any convention other than Barack Obama’s.”
Trump's Shadow
Trump will be everywhere in Chicago — the single force uniting the often divided and competing factions of the Democratic Party.
Although Trump has disavowed it, Democrats have crafted the Heritage Foundation’s “2025 Project,” a 900-page conservative playbook for a second Trump administration, drafted in part by six former Trump secretaries and at least 140 people who served in his administration, as the former president’s agenda.
The party will also address Trump’s history of inflammatory actions — including his full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for the “Central Park Five,” five black and Latino teenagers wrongfully convicted of raping and beating a white woman in 1989. One of those men, Yusef Salaam, was invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention.
But the biggest task Democrats face this week may be to insulate Harris from Trump’s attacks — many of which he has already parried by portraying her as one of Washington’s most liberal Democrats, a flip-flopper who has disavowed the positions she took as a 2019 presidential candidate.
The two-time governor and former congressman was virtually unknown to Democrats outside Minnesota just a month ago. Now, as Labor Day approaches, Walz is the party’s vice presidential nominee and one of its most effective political messengers.
Even during the vetting process, Walz was less well-known than some other potential candidates, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and others also entered the fray with bigger national profiles. Then something “strange” happened.
Walz’s attacks on Trump, the Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, and the Make America Great Again movement, describing their personalities and policies as bizarre and disturbing, have caught the attention of popular liberals. Progressives have been stunned by his populist-tinged tirades, and moderate Democrats have been applauded for his outspoken statements. Republicans have attacked his military record, claiming he has overstated it, but that has not yet dented his star.
Like Harris, Walz has emerged as a prominent figure in popular culture. His taco preferences have sparked a wave of mostly entertaining discussions on social media, and his videos with Harris have been incredibly effective.
But now it’s time to make the big announcement. Walz will speak on prime time Wednesday under a kind of scrutiny he never experienced while in Congress, during his first term as governor, or during all his years as a high school teacher, football coach, and National Guardsman.
The stark difference between the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where no former president or vice president but Trump took the stage, is the role Barack Obama will play on Tuesday and Bill Clinton on Wednesday.
Harris is seeking to make history, just as Obama did in 2008 when he delivered his election night victory speech in Grant Park, less than four miles east of the United Center where Harris will accept the Democratic nomination.
She's doing so through a campaign that increasingly includes a group of Obama-era veterans, including senior adviser David Plouffe, who ran Obama's 2008 campaign.
Obama and Clinton remain hugely popular, but both have fallen significantly ahead of the 2024 election. That could change in the final stretch — but the convention, watched by millions, will be the most important moment the two former presidents play in the 2024 campaign.
Two former first ladies, Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, are also scheduled to speak at the Democratic National Convention. Clinton, a former secretary of state and senator from New York, was the first woman to be nominated for president by a major party in 2016.
Michelle Obama is fulfilling a promise she made in a video with her husband, who endorsed Harris. “We support you,” she said.
How are Democrats handling the Gaza protests?
Despite all that has changed since the party replaced Biden with Harris, the bitter and grinding debate over the administration’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza persists.
For months, protests over Israel’s war on Hamas following the group’s October 7 attacks have led to widespread demonstrations across the country calling for an immediate ceasefire. Some of these demonstrations have been blatantly anti-Semitic, with some demonstrators expressing support for Hamas, drawing condemnation from Biden and Harris.
Outside the conference this week, skies are expected to be clear and, according to organizers, there will be tens of thousands of protesters against the Biden administration’s support — particularly through arms sales — for the Israeli military and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It’s hard to predict what will happen inside the United Center. The non-committal national movement, which grew out of efforts to mobilize protest votes against Biden during the primaries, has issued a series of demands to conference organizers. Above all, they want a speaker (or two) to describe what’s happening on the ground in Gaza.
But it is possible, if unlikely, that this demand will be met. But the demand for an arms embargo on Israel is not acceptable to Democratic Party leaders, who will all be following the ongoing negotiations in the Middle East – and hoping for a breakthrough during the convention week.
But there was no shortage of easy comparisons between what is happening in Gaza and what happened in 1968, when Chicago police brutally cracked down on antiwar protesters in parks and streets. The world is different now, and more important, the city’s leadership is very different under Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former union activist who told Mother Jones magazine: “What is happening now[in Gaza]is not only horrible, it is genocide.”
But despite all the planning and political maneuvering that has been going on around the scene this week, uncertainty is the word of the hour.
