At the DNC, the Democrats Are Finally Fighting

Just over a month ago this was all unthinkable. In mid-July, the Democratic Party was doomed. But a mere four weeks after President Joe Biden announced that he wouldn’t run for a second term, instead endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor, the party’s mood has shifted from despondency to jubilation. In Chicago, over the last four days, speaker after speaker has referenced Harris’s “joy”—as defining a theme as any in this convention. The mood on the floor is at times rhapsodic. It is impossible to imagine a similar situation if Biden was still the nominee. 

Much of that elation is a product of the character of Harris and her running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Harris, prone to cracking herself up, has the energy of someone who loves to crack open a bottle of chardonnay at the end of the day; Walz is a big, cuddly, football-loving midwestern dad prone to cracking the exact jokes you would expect. They are running as normal people who care about normal people. 

But they are also running as normal people who are running against people who are aberrant, dangerous, and, well, as Democrats have repeatedly hammered in recent weeks, weird. One of the most notable things about this convention in which practically every speaker mentions the “joy” of the candidate is that it has also been sharply partisan; refreshingly plain in ways that Democrats have, in recent years, often been reluctant to demonstrate. This is a convention that attacks Donald Trump as a rich man who only cares about other rich people and that correctly depicts Republicans—not all of them, mind you, but many of them—as intent on subverting democracy, trampling individual rights, all in the service of a tiny, freakish and plutocratic elite. It’s a good message—and a different one than Democrats have pushed in the past. 

“In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man,” Harris said as she accepted the party’s presidential nomination on Thursday. “But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.” She then laid out a litany of Trump’s post-election sins and crimes. “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails, and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States...to serve the only client he has ever had: himself.” That has been Harris’s message this week, and it’s an effective change of pace. Her speech attacked Trump and used her middle-class upbringing and relationship with her mother to make the case that she would put the interests of the country ahead of her own. Tim Walz did something similar, largely eschewing the “weird” talk to play up his past as a teacher and high school football coach. 

But the rest of the convention has been bare knuckled. Even the notoriously high-going Michelle Obama accused Trump of “going small.” Speakers have led a stirring attack on Republican policy, particularly the Heritage Foundation-penned “Project 2025,” the proposed political agenda for a second Trump term from which the former president is now trying to run away. The convention has been a four-day broadside against Trump’s racism and misogyny and the Republican Party’s numerous assaults on individual liberties, particularly reproductive rights. 

This has obviously been a part of Democratic politics for the entirety of the Trump era. But it has almost always come in a watered-down dose: In the past, the party has rather desperately sought to appeal to Republican voters, which mean that Trump has been consistently painted as an aberration. Old habits die hard: The 2024 DNC wasn’t free of these flourishes—and several endorsements from little-known Republicans graced the proceedings. But the party’s messaging has largely shifted from four years ago, when Biden attempted to be a bipartisan lion, committed to unifying the parties. This year, these kind of overtures are fewer and further between. These Democrats taste blood: Donald Trump is threatening and weird and the Republican Party is following him into the anti-social wilderness. 

Eight years ago, thinking she could run up the score, Hillary Clinton wasted much of her convention trying to woo potential Republican defectors who never arrived. Four years ago, the Democratic National Convention—to the extent that it existed at all—was a somber affair. Taking place remotely due to a historic pandemic, it was muted and serious. Joe Biden had won a bruising primary by promising that he could not only break the fever of Trumpism but that his decades of experience would restore competence to the government after years of chaos. There was nothing joyful in 2020. Instead, Biden won by promising he could make everything bad—the craziness of the Trump president, the pandemic that was claiming thousands of lives a week—go away. 

Although Biden had recently completed an alliance with Bernie Sanders and was running on his party’s most progressive platform in nearly a century, it was, moreover, also a campaign that attempted to wheedle and woo Republicans who might have grown weary of Trump’s erratic behavior to Biden’s side. Republicans, Democrats argued four years ago, weren’t bad—many in fact were good! MAGA Republicans, however, were a dangerous mutation. 

The 2024 DNC has shed much of that message. They have, as I wrote earlier this week, also ditched much of the pro-democracy message that was central to Biden’s reelection campaign but which seemed to be a last-gasp, desperate hook to keep Democrats in line with Biden after his June debate performance shattered their faith. With the torch now passed, however, there is little concern about maintaining this message, keeping alive Biden’s statesmen-like mien and casting the Democratic standard-bearer as the last line of defense between Trumpian misrule—instead, they’re trying to win an election with partisan cuts and jabs, depicting their opponents brutally and truthfully. It’s refreshing; it feels like we haven’t had a campaign like this in while.  

Democrats aren’t doing everything with unimpeachable precision. This convention has been marred by the Harris campaign’s cowardice and incompetence in dealing with the Uncommitted movement and, in particular, in its refusal to let a Palestinian American state representative from Georgia deliver what was going to be moving, carefully tailored speech about the need to end the massive suffering happening in Gaza. The reluctance to acknowledge the millions of Democrats who are outraged by the Biden administration’s continued support for Israel’s continued assault on Palestinian civilians, which has claimed more than 40,000 lives, is a stain on this convention—and an eminently avoidable one at that. 

Harris’s reluctance in that regard could be a problem down the line. It suggests a candidate who will happily get her hands dirty when dealing with Republicans but who is unwilling to take even small risks to that might engender controversy. It is a choice that she will likely regret, particularly as students return to campuses in the coming weeks. It also undermines Harris’s primary benefit compared to Biden—her heretofore clearer empathy with the Palestinians’ plight. By refusing to reach toward Palestinian Americans at the convention with an open hand, she now owns more of the administration’s Gaza policy than she did before the convention began. 

Some of that cowardice undoubtedly comes from a reluctance to generate bad press coverage or upset donors. But it’s also a side effect of the fact that this campaign, thus far, has been heavy on vibes and light on policies or even broad legislative goals. It’s a potentially risky decision, but it’s one that could plausibly work in such a short campaign—especially one that will be defined in large part by the incoherence and belligerence of Donald Trump. The 2024 DNC was a big party—mostly. But its most winning quality was its occasional partisan viciousness. The Democrats aren’t going high anymore. Nor should they.