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CHICAGO — Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday, capping a turnaround with no precedent in American politics.
“Our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past — a chance to chart a new way forward,” said Harris. “Not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.”
Thirty-two days after President Joe Biden ended his campaign, Harris — a loyal deputy, handed some of the White House’s most thankless tasks — led the ticket that could replace him. She looked out at thousands of delegates dressed in suffragette white, who’d prepared for a slog against Donald Trump, and suddenly had a second chance to elect a female president.
“I’m no stranger to unlikely journeys,” said Harris, linking the crisis that transformed the race to her life story, starting in “a beautiful working class neighborhood,” moving “from the courthouse to the White House.”
She moved on quickly to the partisan contrast she’d drawn all month, while framing the election as a post-partisan choice between freedom and autocracy. Democrats would advance an economic agenda that included “a middle class tax cut” and funds to “end America’s housing shortage” — a Trump restoration would limit abortion, cut taxes for the wealthy, and put allies at risk.
“America and not China will win the global competition,” said Harris, promising to “defend Ukraine and our allies” against Russian aggression. She vowed to defend Israel and prevent another terrorist attack on Israel, but added that “what is happening in Gaza is devastating” and that Palestinians deserve to live freely. That dealt with a conflict inside her party, as she brought the focus back to Trump.
“Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable, because he wants to be an autocrat himself,” said Harris.
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Since becoming the nominee, locking up the delegates who had once been committed to Biden, Harris’ favorability and approval ratings jumped by double digits, from the mid-30s to the high 40s.
Democrats tried to build on that with their convention programming, loading Thursday night with veterans, gun violence victims, and police officers who promised that Harris would be tough on crime and foreign adversaries. A Michigan sheriff credited the Biden-Harris administration with more police funding; a group of Democratic veterans promised that Harris would keep taking care of them.
“I want to let my fellow Republicans in on a secret: The Democrats are just as patriotic as us,” said former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican who retired from the House after voting to impeach Trump in 2021 and serving on the Jan. 6 select committee. “How can a party claim to be patriotic if it would elect a man who would overturn a free and fair election?”
Harris’s team rebuffed a group of uncommitted delegates, elected to protest the Biden administration’s military support for Israel, who had staged a sit-in outside the United Center. They demanded for days that a Palestinian-American get time onstage, sharing the potential speech with reporters — an endorsement of Harris, after condemnation of the way Israel had pursued its war.
Instead, Harris herself spent a significant section of the speech on the war, not adopting the protesters’ position, but talking more about the plight of Palestinians than any nominee had in a speech from this stage. She highlighted her own support for Ukraine’s war against Russia, as protesters outside the DNC perimeter — rowdy, but fewer than organizers had hoped for — accused Democrats of enabling mass killings around the world.
Like Trump’s other two opponents, Biden and Hillary Clinton, Harris accused him of self-dealing and weakness; Trump’s party had used their convention to describe his four years as a time of peace and strength. But Harris dealt directly with an issue that didn’t exist in 2020, the end of Roe v. Wade’s national abortion protections.
“Donald Trump handpicked members of the Supreme Court to take away women’s reproductive freedom,” said Harris. “One must ask, why exactly is it that they don’t trust women? We trust women,” promising to sign abortion protections into law.
David’s view
The last time Harris stood on the Democrats’ biggest stage, her role was to praise Joe Biden and promise healing after the protests and riots of 2020 — and to fight racism, which no “vaccine” could cure easily.
Harris and her party have abandoned some of the progressive talk of that campaign, and she is far more comfortable now talking about priorities that anger the party’s left, like border enforcement. Early in the night, Rev. Al Sharpton was flanked by members of the “Central Park Five,” who Trump attacked with newspaper ads in 1989 after they were falsely accused of rape. But more time was spent portraying Harris as a steely-eyed crime-fighter, an image her campaign was nervous about four years ago.
Republicans had attacked Harris all summer for flipping on some of her 2019-2020 positions, including crime, immigration, fracking, and healthcare. She elided some of those issues on Thursday, offering to protect social programs from Trump but not promising vast expansions of them. Minutes after the speech ended, the left-wing environmental group Oil Change U.S. blasted Harris for only mentioning climate change briefly; it had been left to other Democrats this week to celebrate the Biden administration’s vast green energy investments.
That probably won’t be the last left-wing criticism of Harris. And the campaign wouldn’t mind more. The premise it embraced on Thursday was that most Americans didn’t want Trump back — “we won’t go back” was the convention’s most-repeated slogan — and giving them a Harris-led coalition of pragmatic Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans would succeed.
Notable
- Kamala Harris could win, but painting a picture of how she might govern is difficult, The Economist wrote.
- Barack Obama took care to cast Harris as his heir, Semafor’s David Weigel noted, using his convention speech to invoke the spirit of ‘08.
- Harris’ favorability has jumped 13 percentage points since June, new Gallup polling shows, while Trump’s favorability has declined among voters over the same period.