Democratic National Convention 2024

From Charli xcx memes to fan-made covers interpolating her famous “coconut tree” quote, Kamala Harris’s last-minute presidential bid against Republican candidate Donald Trump has had a fascinating and outsized relationship with pop music.

Various progressive singers, like Ariana Grande and Olivia Rodrigo, have pledged their support. Katy Perry offered one of her latest singles, “Woman’s World,” for the vice president to use in her campaign, though Harris doesn’t seem to have taken her up on it. Meanwhile, Harris’s staff has found ways to use pop music to attract Gen Z voters, having Megan Thee Stallion perform at an Atlanta rally and fully embracing brat memes. This onslaught of memes and coconut-themed “remixes” has almost overshadowed the most crucial music-related decision involved in Harris’s candidacy: her campaign song.

Climate change remains a major platform issue for Democrats, but you’d hardly know it listening to the hours of speeches at the Democratic National Convention last week in Chicago.

Vice President Kamala Harris, accepting her party’s nomination for president, gave a brief nod to the fundamental freedom to “live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.”

As Vice President Kamala Harris reintroduced herself to the nation and laid out her case against Donald Trump, her opponent was, essentially, live-tweeting a political freakout.

“IS SHE TALKING ABOUT ME?” the former president and Republican presidential nominee posted on his platform Truth Social about 20 minutes into Harris’s acceptance speech. That was about the point when she turned away from giving her family history and tracing the biographical milestones that brought her into politics to go after Trump’s criminal convictions and civil liabilities and calling him “an unserious man.”

At the end of the day, the most pressing question surrounding the 2024 Democratic National Convention was: Where the hell is Beyoncé?

The answer: Not at the DNC.

Kamala Harris’s Democratic convention speech served two purposes: She introduced herself to the American people, and she revealed the case she intends to prosecute against Donald Trump.

Harris picked familiar targets: Trump’s attack on democracy, his approach to taxes, and his anti-abortion rights record. But on each, she took a slightly new tack.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech started slow, getting bogged down in a familiar recitation of her biography. But it got stronger over time, really hitting its stride when she got around to a topic that’s often dry: foreign policy. There, she showed a facility with policy and an aptitude for navigating deeply divisive issues like Israel-Palestine that did wonders for her commander-in-chief credibility.

Part of what worked was Harris’s palpably emotional delivery. But there was also a real crispness to the speech’s arguments. Here’s what she said, for example, in discussing Trump’s affinity for dictators:

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) was on track to closing out with little controversy until yesterday, when the Democratic National Committee decided to reject pro-Palestinian delegates’ efforts to get a Palestinian American speaker on the main stage. As a result, “uncommitted” delegates — representing a Democratic primary campaign that encouraged voters to choose “uncommitted” over President Joe Biden to express their discontent over the president’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza — staged a sit-in outside the convention hall. Now, “uncommitted” delegates and their allies have launched a last-minute pressure campaign to get a speaker on the last night.

One of the potential speakers that Uncommitted National Movement organizers put forward was Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian American and a Democratic member of the Georgia House of Representatives. She told me that she and the “uncommitted” delegates had felt optimistic about getting a speaking slot because up until yesterday, the Democratic National Committee had still been in discussions with the group and hadn’t said no to their request.

By now, you’ve probably heard the message loud and clear from Democrats: This election is all about unity.

The Today, Explained podcast team has been at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week, and inside and outside the perimeter of the United Center, Democrats are buzzing with exuberance and relief: They now believe they have a real shot at winning the White House in 2024, and the party’s toughest issues are not a welcome topic of conversation.

President Joe Biden bet his reelection bid on the idea that American voters in November would care about the fate of American democracy. The conventional wisdom now is that Biden was wrong and that Vice President Kamala Harris is not only stepping away from his strategy but doing so for good reasons.

Many Democratic political types today believe that “democracy” is a message that’s both tired and abstract, something that preoccupies elites but not the key voting demographics. They cite data showing ”democracy” at the bottom of the list of voter concerns in the 2024 election, with issues like inflation, immigration, and abortion placing well ahead of what Joe Biden treated as issue number one.

When Vice President Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate, many pundits lamented her decision. In their view, the Democratic nominee should have chosen a vice presidential candidate who could mitigate her liabilities, and balance out her party’s ticket — such as Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

After all, Harris had been a liberal senator from one of America’s most left-wing states and then had run an exceedingly progressive primary campaign in 2020. To win over swing-state undecideds, she needed to demonstrate her independence from her party’s most radical elements. And selecting the popular governor of a purple state — who had defied the Democratic activist base on education policy and Israel’s war in Gaza— would do just that.

On the third night of the Democratic National Convention four years ago, immigration was front and center. Americans heard a series of personal stories about how Trump-era policies had scrambled immigrants’ and their families’ lives.

An 11-year-old girl read a letter to then-President Donald Trump; the Trump administration had deported her mother two years before. An undocumented mother recounted how she crossed the border illegally to seek better medical care for her baby daughter — “When we got to the river, I raised her above the water and we crossed,” she said on national TV. She wasn’t the first undocumented immigrant to address the DNC, but she was the first non-DREAMer — more controversially, someone who crossed the border as an adult.

Earth is heating up to record-high temperatures because humanity keeps burning coal, oil, and natural gas to fly, drive, stay warm, grow food, and keep the lights on. But switching away from these fuels toward energy sources that don’t spew heat-trapping gases while meeting the needs of 8.5 billion and counting residents of this planet will require an enormous amount of new construction: mines, factories, ports, transmission lines, power plants, substations, grid batteries.

And to do that, the government will have to give the go-ahead to many, many more projects than it’s doing now, and at a much faster clip.

Members of the media agree: Vice President Kamala Harris needs to start doing press conferences and interviews with members of the media.

It’s been about a month since Harris suddenly became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. In that period, Harris has at times briefly answered questions from reporters publicly — and has reportedly spoken to her traveling press pool off the record. But she’s done no formal interviews and held no formal press conferences.

During his 2024 Democratic National Convention address on Tuesday night, former President Barack Obama made no secret of his disdain for Donald Trump. But his speech was more than just a partisan broadside: It was a philosophical brief in defense of liberalism, a kind of first-principles moral argument that no other major convention speaker offered.

Liberal, in this context, does not refer to the term’s use in partisan American politics. It refers instead to the centuries-old philosophical tradition that sees politics as fundamentally oriented around the values of freedom and equality. Government, for liberals, exists to enable people to live according to their own vision for their lives; it has no business telling people what god to worship or giving certain groups of people more rights than others.

“Something wonderfully magical is in the air, isn’t it?” former first lady Michelle Obama said in her speech at the Democratic National Convention Tuesday. “A familiar feeling that’s been buried too deep for too long.”

“You know what I’m talking about? It’s the contagious power of hope!” she said, adding: “America, hope is making a comeback.”

Since launching her presidential bid, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and its supporters have been eager to frame this election as one of a prosecutor versus a felon. It was among the themes of the first night of the Democratic National Convention on Monday. “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. This is the story of Donald Trump,” a deep-voiced narrator said in a video that blared to the audience at the United Center in Chicago. “We need a president who has spent her life prosecuting perpetrators like Donald Trump.”

The video was a play on what has become a part of Harris’s stump speech, in which she burnishes her legacy as a prosecutor. “I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she told a crowd in Philadelphia on August 6. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who scammed consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” Others have made the contrast between the two candidates more explicit. “The script writes itself: the prosecutor against the convicted felon,” California Sen. Alex Padilla told Vox last month.

Doug Emhoff is just a guy who loves his wife.

At countless fundraisers and campaign events, he gushes about his spouse of 10 years, vice president and current presidential candidate Kamala Harris. He gives interviews about the importance of men supporting the women in their lives. He visits Planned Parenthood clinics to champion reproductive rights.

Chicago is hosting the Democratic National Convention (DNC) this year. It’s a return to the city for Democrats, who hosted an infamous convention there in 1968 that descended into riots in the street and chaos on the convention floor.

That year, Americans, and especially Democrats, were up in arms over the US involvement in the Vietnam War. Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated earlier that year, and the party entered the convention divided between pro- and anti-war candidates (Hubert Humphry and Eugene McCarthy, respectively). And unlike a contemporary major-party convention, 1968 wasn’t a coronation of one candidate: It would come down to how the delegates voted.

With President Joe Biden speaking in the headlining role, the first night of the Democratic convention seemed like it was going to be about passing the torch. And it was — not that the Democrats on stage made that explicit.

Biden’s address was late. It began around 11:30 pm Eastern time, so late that some pundits decided the DNC had buried his speech on purpose (a theory convention officials denied). When the president finally spoke, he entirely skipped over the obvious question raised by his presence: Why her and not him? Biden spent the vast bulk of the speech touting his own record in office, casting Harris as a champion of his legacy without spending a single word explaining why he needed a champion in the first place.

The Trump campaign wants to run against an anti-cop, open-borders “communist” — and believes that it can cast Vice President Kamala Harris in that role.

Harris, for her part, has taken pains to beat such charges of ideological extremism. By abandoning certain progressive commitments, embracing conservative rhetorical tropes, and claiming the mantle of economic populism, she has sought to define herself as the kind of Democrat who swing voters can trust. Much of this week’s Democratic National Convention will likely be focused on that rebranding effort.