Democrats regain faith in a November victory with Kamala Harris

An hour and a half by car, if traffic is fair, separates Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from Chicago, Illinois. In chronological terms of the most disjointed presidential campaign in recent US history, that distance is 34 days; the amount that has passed between Donald Trump’s acceptance speech as the candidate, at the end of the last day of the Republican National Convention, and the one that Vice President Kamala Harris will give this Thursday at the Democratic caucus to seal her acclamation as leader of a party that, thanks to her, has regained faith in a victory in November.

An abyss, not just ideological, separates the two speeches. From the perspective of Milwaukee, it seemed that nothing would stand in the way of Trump’s return to the White House, having just survived an attack days earlier, presenting himself as a new man and enjoying an injection of popularity. In another demonstration that nothing should be taken for granted in American politics, Harris is about to give the most important speech of her career in the midst of something that at the time also seemed impossible: the undisguised enthusiasm of her own people, the indications that women and minorities may push her on her way to the White House and the unity, forged in record time, of a party that contains multitudes around an unlikely candidate that almost everyone distrusted not so long ago.

What the Chicago convention would have been like had Biden not resigned is a matter that is entertaining fans of political fiction these days. The rest are left with the certainty that at the end of June it was a party discouraged by the prospect of a candidate too old for the job and that it was sleepwalking towards a disaster at the polls while reviving memories of the 1968 convention, the most turbulent of its last half century. Interrupted by protests over the Vietnam War, that convention, which served to see first-hand how a political party is blown up, produced a disappointing candidate, Hubert Humphrey, who lost resoundingly to Richard Nixon.

No one expected that in the corridors of the Bulls stadium, where the Democratic convention is being held until Thursday, the memory that prevailed after three days of triumphant speeches would actually be that of the 2008 convention. And it is not only because the Obamas, who began the final stretch of their journey to the White House there, stole the show on Tuesday with speeches that showed that they are still the party’s best speakers; nor because another survivor of those heroic times, the artist Shepard Fairey, decided to lend a hand by adapting Harris’ face to the iconic three-color poster he created for that occasion with the effigy of Barack Obama and the word “Hope,” which he has replaced with another: “Forward.”

“Personally, I feel something very similar to what I felt 16 years ago: it is the feeling that a movement is being generated around the candidate,” said strategist Juan Verde in an interview on Wednesday. He has not missed a convention since 1992 and has worked on all Democratic presidential campaigns since Bill Clinton, including this one. “However,” he added, “there is a fundamental difference: she has achieved it in record time, just over a month, when Obama had almost a year.”

Those few weeks were also enough, Verde recalls, to pacify a coalition that threatened to slide into civil war if Biden’s resignation had given way to an open convention. Quite the opposite: there is no trace in Chicago of the underground struggles that Bernie Sanders’ delegates raised in 2016, nor of the symbolic gesture of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2020, when she spoke for 90 seconds to express her disagreement with Biden’s appointment. Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez were among the stars on the speakers’ platform of the first two days.

“This shows that the Democratic coalition has many important leaders, and not just one, as is the case with the Republican Party, Trump, or at most a group of people who think and are like him,” said former ambassador to Spain Julissa Reynoso, who worked as Jill Biden’s chief of staff and has joined Harris’ campaign. “Ours is a machine with a great capacity for mobilization and that knows how to work in one direction. I know Biden well and I know that he is a man who does things very carefully, and that when he handed over the baton to his vice president he knew very well of her ability to unify the party.”

Biden may have had it all figured out, but from a Milwaukee perspective, that didn’t seem easy either. Perhaps that’s why Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, her vice presidential running mate, traveled Tuesday to the stadium where Trump was nominated as his party’s candidate in the most populous city in Wisconsin, a state that will once again be decisive at the polls, to hold a rally with two goals: to reconquer that space and that city and to confirm that attendance at Democratic rallies (18,000 people, according to the campaign) is at numbers that were unthinkable just two months ago, when Biden was a candidate.

On Tuesday, a crowd gathered outside the stadium in Miwaukee five hours before the vice president took the microphone. The following pattern emerged from conversations with about 20 attendees: women and those new to the experience of attending a political rally predominated. T-shirts with messages like “Proud lady with cats and no children” were also abundant, in reference to vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s insults to women who prefer not to be mothers, or “the prosecutor against the criminal,” based on the Harris campaign message that recalls her past as a lawyer and her rival’s status as a convicted felon.

And that served to certify the fortune that another strategy of this new Democratic Party has made: after years in which it was the Republicans who mocked their opponents and who gave the image of being those who had the monopoly on fun, Harris’ campaign has gone on the attack on social networks, in the merchandising election and even in convention speeches (so far, two Obama jokes – about Trump’s fixation with crowd counts, including insinuations about his manhood, and about his tendency toward racist jokes – have taken the cake on the second day).

“The world has changed a lot since the last election, which the Republicans baselessly claimed had been stolen from them,” recalls Verde. “In the empire of fake news and half-truths, we can no longer expect voters, and even less young people, to reflect calmly on the proposals or to have the ability to contrast information. For this reason, and always without lowering themselves to the same level, the campaign has sharpened its messages around two slogans, ‘Forward’ and ‘When we fight, we win’, and a single idea: we look to the future, while they remain obsessed with the past.

Overconfidence

These days, in both Midwestern cities – separated by an hour and a half by car but bathed by the same lake – it is easy to get carried away by the impression that this enthusiastic message could work for the Democrats, although it is worth remembering that the conventions of the two major parties in the United States are enormous machines for generating and selling positive emotions. It is also possible that all this is, as the other side claims, the enormous sleight of hand of the friendly media; media such as CNN, in whose broadcasts from Chicago the jubilation is overflowing this week.

To avoid the unwanted effect of overconfidence, both Harris and Walz warned those who take victory for granted in their speeches at Tuesday’s rally that there is still much to do in the two and a half months remaining until the elections. To begin with, they must make the true personality and proposals of the unexpected candidate known beyond the elites of Washington and the West Coast and the devoted hordes of Hollywood. The speech she is preparing to give this Thursday in Chicago, the most important of her political life, will be fundamental to getting closer to that goal.

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