Dems to open convention in remarkable array
With cosmic enthusiasm for its new nominee and enormous gratitude for its outgoing president, the Blue Team can barely contain its palpable joy following months of dreary malaise.
👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Welcome back to Once Upon a Hill and Day 1 of the Democratic National Convention. I’m reporting live from … not Chicago! American Airlines canceled my original and rebooked flights yesterday. However, one distressed journalist don’t stop no show, so the jamboree will go on without me until—fingers crossed—I get to Chi-Town tomorrow morning.
Listen, can we talk about what a difference a month makes?
Democrats descended upon the city with a palpable excitement that felt elusive over the past few months. And almost to a person, they attributed the enthusiasm to Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz’s happy warrior brand of politics that has flummoxed former President Donald Trump and stifled his momentum toward winning a second term.
“Roll call,” one House Democrat said when I asked what they were looking forward to the most of the event tomorrow, where all 57 delegations will speak and cast ceremonial votes for Harris and Walz as the Democratic nominees for president and vice president. “That will be historic. I hope I feel Shirley Chisholm in the house that night.” (Chisholm became the first black candidate for a major-party nomination for President of the United States and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 1972.)
It’s incredible that just 29 days ago, President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor. Before the out-of-nowhere announcement, Republicans were riding high on their supply at their mid-July convention in Milwaukee following Biden’s disastrous first presidential debate that launched a sustained pressure campaign to cast him aside and the hero worship former President Donald Trump received from the GOP after surviving an assassination attempt days before its Wisconsin gathering.
Harris, an underestimated political tactician, consolidated the party’s support within hours, thwarting any notion of a “mini-primary,” the quick-and-dirty open process some Dump-Biden Democrats proposed as their preferred method for choosing the nominee. Within two weeks, Harris was named the party’s nominee.
Her candidacy turned back on the spigot of grassroots donors to the tune of $200 million in the first week of the campaign, leading to the single greatest week in fundraising history and the best small-donor month in presidential history.
It reactivated critical segments of the coalition, who assembled on Zoom—during the summer, no less!—to promise each other they’d do whatever it takes to elect the vice president as the next leader of the free world.
It has inspired massive crowds at battleground state rallies that we haven’t seen since the Obama era. It has become such the envy of former President Trump that he's conspiracy theorizing that the audiences generated with artificial intelligence. (It has also inspired Beyoncé to permit Harris to use her empowerment anthem “Freedom” as the official song of the campaign.”
It has upended the polls, put states back in play, widened Democrats’ path to victory, and largely quelled the distress from down-ballot candidates campaigning to win back the House and hold the Senate.
I’ll be glad when my colleagues’ news outlets add the word vibes to their banned words list. But there’s no denying this election in its current form, at least in the national media, is about the feeling that Harris could pull off an upset in November.
This energy will permeate the United Center and the surrounding scene all week.
The overview: Each night of the convention will have a theme and primetime host:
Monday: “For the People” hosted by actor Tony Goldwyn
Tuesday: “A Bold Vision for America’s Future” hosted by Ana Navarro, co-host of The View and a Republican Never-Trumper
Wednesday: “A Fight for Our Freedoms” hosted by actress Kerry Washington
Thursday: “For Our Future” hosted by actress Mindy Kaling
President Biden will give tonight’s final keynote address following First Lady Dr. Jill Biden's remarks and his daughter Ashley’s introduction. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee, will speak too.
Several congressional Democrats are also scheduled to speak:
Rep. Lauren Underwood (Ill.)
Rep. Robert Garcia (Calif.)
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.)
Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.)
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (Texas)
Rep. Grace Meng (N.Y.)
Sen. Raphael Warnock (Ga.)
Sen. Chris Coons (Del.)
Among the headliners for the rest of the week:
Tuesday: Former President Barack and former First Lady Michelle Obama, Second Gentleman Emhoff and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker
Wednesday: Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee Tim Walz, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg
Thursday: Democratic Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris
Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) are among the four DNC co-chairs, along with former Mayor of New Orleans Mitch Landrieu and Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who will lead tonight’s programming.
The counterprogramming: Former President Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), will campaign in battleground states this week after the Harris campaign relentlessly trolled Trump for failing to do so for over a week.
Trump and Vance gave economic speeches in Pennsylvania this afternoon. The former president will be in Howell, Michigan—a city with a legacy of anti-Blackness—to speak about crime and public safety. Trump and Vance head back to North Carolina on Wednesday to give speeches on national security before Trump heads west to Arizona to hold a rally with the political arm of the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA.
Trump surrogates, including congressional Republicans such as Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), will be counterprogramming the DNC all week with events at the former president’s hotel in Chicago.
The DNC projected anti-Trump and pro-Harris messages—“Project 2025 HQ,” “Harris-Walz: Joy and Hope,” “Trump-Vance: ‘Weird as Hell,’” to name a few—on Trump Tower Chicago last night.
How to watch: Convention programming will air live from the United Center from 6:15 p.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern tonight and 7 to 11 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
The official live stream will be available at DemConvention.com and on over a dozen platforms, including vertical feeds on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. In addition to traditional broadcasters, X, Facebook and Twitch will also carry the programming.
Apple TV, RokuTV and FireTV are the TV device apps (search for “Democratic National Convention” or “2024 DNC”) and Comcast, DIRECTV and U-verse are among the TV providers.
KEEP READING FOR MORE FROM MY NOTEBOOK:
Harris, Walz bus through Pennsylvania • Vice President Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, completed a bus tour through Western Pennsylvania on Sunday as part of the campaign’s weekend of action ahead of the DNC.
Harris and Walz greeted a crowd of supporters at the Pittsburgh airport before kicking off the tour through Allegheny and Beaver counties with their spouses, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and Minnesota First Lady Gwen Walz. Rep. Summer Lee, Rep. Chris Deluzio and Sen. Bob Casey were among the members of the Pennsylvania congressional delegation on hand for the bus tour launch event.
The first stop was the Beaver field office, where Harris, Emhoff and the Walzes participated in a phone bank before Harris and the governor spoke during a campaign canvass kickoff event there.
Harris also stopped at a firehouse in Aliquippa, a city in Beaver County along the Ohio River, where she delivered two boxes of burnt almond tortes from Prantl’s, a Pittsburgh-based bakery. The vice president also made a new friend with a four-month-old yellow labrador with one of the firefighters.
The bus then stopped at football practice at a local high school in Aliquippa, which gave Walz, a former football coach, an opportunity to return to his roots. Jerome Bettis, the Hall of Fame running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers whose nickname is the “The Bus,” spoke at the event ahead of Walz, Emhoff and Harris.
After football practice, Harris, Walz and the spouses stopped at the new Sheetz gas station in Moon Township to pick up a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos, the snack she stress-ate the night Donald Trump was elected, according to a recent campaign email. (She revealed her soda of choice is root beer; Diet Coke for the second gentleman.)
President Biden won the state by just over 80,000 votes in 2020 due to high turnout in blue counties like Allegheny while flipping voters in conservative counties like Beaver. The Harris campaign believes it can expand upon the 2020 coalition by highlighting the Biden administration’s pro-worker record and the more than half a million jobs created in the state by legislation like the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act.
According to the latest New York Times polling average, Harris is leading Trump 49% to 48% in the state.
Harris talks econ policy pay-fors • During the vice president’s first major policy speech of her campaign last Friday, she announced several sweeping proposals to address the affordability crisis in housing, child care and groceries but offered few details on how she would pay for them.
She told reporters while at Sheetz that she viewed it as a mistake to discuss public policy without critically evaluating how you measure the return on investment.
“When we increase homeownership in America, what that means for increasing the tax base, not to mention property tax base, what that does to fund schools,” she said. “When you are strengthening neighborhoods, strengthening communities, and in particular, the economy of those communities, and investing in a broad-based economy, everybody benefits, and it pays for itself in that way.
A Harris campaign spokesperson later said the vice president supports the revenue raisers in President Biden’s 2025 budget. It proposes a 25-percent income tax for billionaires, a 28 percent corporate tax rate, reforms to the international tax system and capital gains taxes, denying tax deductions on compensation over $1 million to corporate executives, and fully funding the IRS to crack down on tax cheats.
Related: The Harris campaign called on the Trump campaign to walk back plans to impose up to 20 percent tariffs on all imported goods ahead of the former president’s economic speech today in Pennsylvania. The Center for American Progress Action Fund says this policy would amount to a $3,900 tax increase for working families.
“Donald Trump may hope no one notices his plan to increase costs on middle- and working-class Americans while he lies about Vice President Harris’s agenda, but he needs to be held accountable for it,” Brian Nelson, a Harris campaign senior policy advisor, said in a statement. “Their reckless and backwards policies will bring chaos to economic markets, raise costs for working families and send inflation skyrocketing.”
California Dems pitch Harris-inspired housing bills • Following the vice president’s speech, two House Democrats from her home state announced they would work to advance bills to pass Harris’s housing proposals.
Rep. Jimmy Gomez said he would introduce a bill to build affordable starter homes and federal tax assistance for first-time homebuyers. Meanwhile, Juan Vargas said he’s doubling down with the Democrats on the Financial Services Committee to move bills to assist with the lack of housing supply, end homelessness and invest in down-payment assistance.
The bills are unlikely to receive any attention from the Republican-controlled House when members return next month or during the lame-duck session after the election. But they provide a starting point for Democrats if Harris is elected and they control one of both chambers in Congress.
The Harris plan proposes up to $25,000 in down-payment assistance for first-time homebuyers who have rented for two years, expanding on a Biden administration plan. The expansion aims to help over four million buyers in four years. Harris also plans to build three million new housing units to increase supply, lower mortgage costs, introduce a tax incentive for building starter homes, and create a $40 billion innovation fund for affordable housing. Additionally, she will push for legislation to remove tax breaks for large investors buying single-family homes and crack down on corporate rent inflation.
Team Harris buys up $170M in TV ads • The Harris campaign placed $170 million in TV reservations between Labor Day and Election Day to advertise during major sporting events and other national programs before they sell out, like the season premieres of Grey’s Anatomy and the Golden Bachelorette, and continue defining the vice president to battleground voters.
In a sign of the times, the TV buy is in addition to a historic $200 million in initial reservations across digital platforms, including Hulu, Roku, YouTube, Paramount, Spotify, and Pandora. (The reservations do not include paid social, search, video, or display website ads.
The campaign says its strategy is to surround voters wherever they are, whether watching TV, searching online for information or scrolling their social feeds.
Do you have questions about the election? Drop me a line at michael@onceuponahill.com or send me a message below to get in touch and I’ll find the answers.