The Democratic Party is renewing itself before the eyes of viewers

On Monday night, as the opening gavel signaled the start of the Democratic National Convention, many buses carrying delegates from their downtown Chicago hotels had been stuck in traffic for hours. Outside the United Center, anxious delegates waited in long lines at security checkpoints. Rumors swirled that the blockage was related to a group of protesters protesting the war in Gaza who had breached the fence surrounding the building earlier in the evening. But by 8 p.m., as the evening’s headliners began speaking, the protests had subsided and the stadium was finally filling up. After a month of upheaval, the Democratic Party was ready to assert a new identity under its new nominee, Kamala Harris.

“This lighted mohawk is what you call the Harris special mohawk,” a goatee-bearded Georgia delegate named Danny T. Stone told me when I asked him why he was wearing the lighted headband. Most of the outfits on the convention’s first night were sober—delegates saved their looks for roll call the next night—but Stone decided to make a small statement. “It means I light up the joy that you see here.”

Stone, a retiree who served 34 years in the Georgia National Guard, was a staunch Biden supporter. At first, the change of plans was hard to accept. “I was so angry and upset that I would have run for president of the United States at that convention if he hadn’t come out 30 minutes later to endorse her,” he said. “I did.” He, like many others at the convention, recalled that Obama energy of 2008: “But this is something different. This isn’t just a honeymoon, this is something permanent.”

Monday’s programming seemed designed to convince all viewers that this was true, that the last-minute candidate change was not a botched move, that this was in fact the moment when all the party’s missteps and fractures since the Obama era revealed their historical purpose. The progressive wing of the party would no longer withdraw in protest, as it did in 2016, but would be buoyed by a sense of belonging. Hillary Clinton would no longer be the Democrat who failed to defeat Donald Trump, but would instead claim her place, after Shirley Chisholm and Geraldine Ferraro, in the lineage of women who brought us to this moment, to the finally very real possibility of the first female president of the United States. Biden would be remembered not as a King Lear cursing the wind, but as a self-sacrificing hero. It was as if the various factions of the Party had been quickly rearranged, like stage furniture, to provide the best and most redemptive backdrop for its new crowned star.

The week before, Harris had made her first significant push into the Biden campaign’s message, in a speech on economic policy to a small audience at a community college in Raleigh, North Carolina. For months, the Biden campaign had tried to strike a balance between encouraging voters to value positive macroeconomic indicators such as strong financial markets, low unemployment, and slowing inflation, and acknowledging their frustration with, for example, the 47% increase in the median asking rent in the United States since 2019. With Biden trailing in the polls, that message clearly had not resonated. In North Carolina, Harris presented a broader approach, addressing middle-class anxieties with a series of policy proposals.

“So listen,” Harris said at the beginning of her speech, laying the casual rhetorical groundwork for her change of course. Like Biden, she hailed the state of the American economy as “the strongest in the world.” But, she added, “we know that many Americans are not yet feeling that progress in their daily lives.” Her proposals included building three million new homes by the end of her first term (as opposed to Biden’s proposed two million); regulating business owners; providing $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers (a similar proposal from Biden had been limited to first-generation buyers); canceling medical debt; banning price gouging at grocery stores; and a $6,000 tax cut for families with newborns. Whether these policies come into play or are merely Band-Aids on the country’s wealth gap, they are clear attempts to signal to voters that Harris has noticed their financial concerns.

But the extent to which voters will be motivated by specific policy proposals remains an open question. In a campaign that, thanks in part to Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, has forever changed the word “weird,” one of the strangest phenomena has been the sudden burst of optimism surrounding the Harris-Walz ticket. “I feel like I’m back in 2008,” Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, said in his speech at the community college. (Recent polls have shown that the state, which last went to a Democratic presidential candidate that year, was recently in contention.) Cooper, who was on Harris’s running mate list, is expected to be one of the convention’s final speakers before Harris formally accepts the nomination on Thursday.

“I campaign for her regularly here in Raleigh, and the enthusiasm is astonishing,” Ellen Powers, a 77-year-old Harris supporter who has vowed to knock on doors or otherwise campaign every Saturday until Election Day, told me before Harris speaks in North Carolina. “People didn’t come to the door when it was just Biden—I just had to leave the flyer on the doorknob. Now, not only are they coming to the door, they’re bursting.” Biden lost the state in the 2020 election by some 75,000 votes, but only 75 percent of Democrats turned out to vote. As a result, she told me, Democrats are currently obsessed with voter turnout. I asked her what specific policy concerns the people she surveyed were expressing. “Literally none,” she said of the party’s declared members. “Literally none. They’re just excited about the possibility of change.”

In this election, with Democrats already in power, the candidate must embody the idea of ​​change without denigrating her predecessor: Harris represents the new because of her age (59), her black and South Asian identity, and her gender. Whether her platform will be significantly different from Biden’s remains to be seen. It was not so much the president’s record that seemed to turn off voters as the sense that he could no longer do the job. His slogan, “There’s no turning back,” is a term vague enough to refer both to a second Trump administration and to a more patriarchal or racist past. Obama’s emphasis on change has been replaced by Harris’s evocation of forward momentum.

The crowd at the Democratic National Convention seemed relieved to have a figure to rally around. On Monday night, the arena exploded into a frenzy when Harris took the convention stage to say hello in a chic beige suit that The Washington Post wore. Job Fashion journalist Rachel Tashjian quickly identified with a “coconut brown” Chloé. (Was this a reference to the viral clip of Harris quoting her mother saying, “Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” It’s possible—Harris likes to be in the loop.) A Florida delegate named Kelly McBride told me she’s seen Harris evolve over the course of several visits to Florida over the past year. “I saw her in July 2023 and I saw her on May 1,” she said, “and I noticed the change in her speech, her body language, and, like, everything.” She added, “I thought the first time I saw her, her style was more like a prosecutor.”

But the party itself seemed ready to show that it had changed, embracing populism more than ever in the Hillary Clinton era. Shawn Fain, the president of the autoworkers union, said “good evening to the people who make this world go, the working class,” unbuttoning his jacket mid-speech to reveal a red socialist T-shirt that read “Trump is a scab.” (“In the words of the great American poet Nelly,” he said, “it’s getting hot in here.”) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she would happily go back to work as a bartender “because there’s nothing wrong with working for a living” and said Trump would “sell this country for a nickel.” dollar If it meant lining her pockets and greasing the palms of her Wall Street friends.” On the floor, photographers lined up to capture Ilhan Omar, the progressive congresswoman from Minnesota who just won the primary, sitting in the front row of the Minnesota delegation. Some online critics have accused Ocasio-Cortez of selling out to the party mainstream; another possibility is that the party has shifted its message in her direction.

For many Democrats, inside and outside the United Center, the litmus test of the party’s moral integrity has been its failure to meaningfully challenge Israel’s murderous invasion of Gaza. At the United Center, some delegates wore keffiyehs emblazoned with the words “Democrats for Palestinian Rights.” After a closed-door meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu in late July, Harris expressed “grave concern about the dire humanitarian situation” in Gaza and said, “I will not be silent.” But despite Ocasio-Cortez’s assertion Monday that Harris is “working tirelessly to get a ceasefire,” Harris has said little since that meeting. On Monday night, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock spoke of “the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza,” and on Tuesday, Bernie Sanders declared, “We must end this horrible war in Gaza.” Bring the hostages home and demand an immediate cease-fire.” But party delegates who had voted noncommittal in protest earlier in the summer wanted more specific commitments. “In the wake of a mass shooting or a school shooting, Democrats are the first to say, ‘Thoughts and prayers are not enough,’” June Rose, a 29-year-old delegate from Rhode Island, told me Tuesday. “And in a room like this last night, filled with the most powerful Democrats and some of the most powerful politicians in the world, I say to them, ‘Thoughts and prayers are not enough.’”