What to expect from Harris’s acceptance speech
Plus: RFK and Trump supporters allegedly deface Harris posters and why the Harris campaign thinks the Trump appeal to Black men is overrated.
👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Welcome back to Once Upon a Hill. The general election is in 75 days and we’ve arrived at the final day of the Democratic National Convention. Thankfully, despite several more flight delays and almost missed connections, I eventually made it to Chicago early Tuesday afternoon. If you’ve been watching the DNC from home, what’s been your favorite moment so far? Reply to this email or send a note to michael@onceuponahill.com. I can’t wait to hear from you.
Vice President Kamala Harris will formally accept her party’s nomination for the highest office in the land tonight in the most highly anticipated speech of the four-night spectacle.
The event is the remarkable culmination of a whirlwind set in motion by President Joe Biden’s dual decision to withdraw his candidacy for reelection and endorse Harris as his successor within 30 minutes one month ago, followed by her quick consolidation of support from the vast majority of congressional Democrats, all Democratic governors and the previous three Democratic presidents.
“I think he said himself the first decision, the most important decision, the best decision he made when he became our party’s nominee was selecting Kamala Harris as his running mate,” Harris campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler told me this morning. “Because he knew that she was prepared to step into the role at any given moment if he ever needed to step aside, that she was the one who was uniquely capable of uniting this party and uniting this country and leading this country as we move forward.”
Tyler said that while the campaign is excited about the energy and enthusiasm Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz have generated over the past few weeks, the focus following her speech will be on converting that energy into action on the ground.
“We feel really good about where we are, but this is going to be a margin-of-error race decided by a handful of votes and a handful of states,” he added. “And so we cannot take anything for granted. We have to use every single tool at our disposal to get to 270 electoral votes, so that’s where our focus is.”
Harris is expected to lay out her vision for the future focused on supporting the middle class and protecting American fundamental freedoms, including the freedom to seek reproductive health care. The vice president will share her upbringing as the daughter of a working mom in a middle-class neighborhood and how she fought for survivors of sexual assault and homeowners who were scammed during the 2008 foreclosure crisis as San Francisco’s district attorney and California attorney general.
The theme of tonight’s programming is “For Our Future” and will focus on why Democrats believe a second Donald Trump term would be more devastating than the first. Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) will serve as co-chair. Actress Kerry Washington will be the host.
Several prominent Democrats will speak ahead of Harris, including Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL), the first member of Generation Z to serve in Congress. House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA) and House Assistant Minority Leader Joe Neguse (D-CO) will deliver remarks.
Many Senate Democrats, including vulnerable incumbents such as Tammy Baldwin (WI) and Bob Casey (PA), will also take the stage. (Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Sen. Jon Tester of Montana—two senators running in states former President Donald Trump won in 2020—skipped the convention.) Sens. Alex Padilla (CA) and Elizabeth Warren (MA) have speaking slots, along with Reps. Elissa Slotkin (MI) and Colin Allred (TX), who are running for competitive Senate seats in their states this cycle.
Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson—the Tennessee Three state legislators who were expelled last year after protesting gun violence after a mass shooting at a Nashville elementary school—will also be featured in the programming. Gun safety advocates, including Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA) and former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ), will share their harrowing stories of how their lives were impacted by gun violence too.
And former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) will be the latest in a chorus of Never-Trump Republicans to endorse Harris.
Reporters will be watching the clock to see if tonight’s programming slips out of primetime on the East Coast like the first three nights.
“We’re a party who has a lot to say with a lot of people who, again, are really excited to be here and to support and to talk about why they're supporting Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and all of the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration and so you know that that exuberance has let us a little bit over time a few nights,” Alex Hornbrook, executive director of the Democratic National Convention Committee, told reporters this morning. “But we've been making the requisite adjustments and making sure that we get to the folks that the voters and the delegates really want to seen and hear from.”
Tyler dismissed the concerns about the late nights since the DNC’s ratings so far have outpaced the Republican convention’s from last month and pointed to the millions of Americans experiencing the programming through the more than 200 creators sharing content straight to their platforms.
“We have to make sure that we are continuing to engage all of our target voters in the ways that they're actually consuming their media and so for many of them, it is still sitting in front of the television screen at home on their couch,” he said. “But increasingly, for the voters who we need to reach actually win this election, it's on the phone, it's on the tablet, it's everywhere else that they're moving across this country. And so we're running a convention and a campaign that's actually tailored to the voters that we need to get to 270 electoral votes.”
RFK, Trump supporters allegedly deface Harris posters
When celebrities like Jamie Lee Curtis and top progressive Democrats like Ayanna Pressley enjoy your art, you know you’re doing something right.
Just ask Victoria Cassinova, the Los Angeles-based visual artist behind a portrait of Vice President Harris that the progressive advocacy group People for the American Way unveiled earlier this month as part of Artists For Democracy, a campaign dedicated to defeating Donald Trump.
But last night, a small group of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Trump supporters allegedly defaced with spray paint posters of Cassinova’s portrait posted near the United Center, the venue of the DNC.
Svante Myrick, president of People For, told me he learned of the vandalism from texts.
“I clicked on it expecting it to be people posing in front of it again and smiling and wanting to have their picture with Kamala,” he said. “But when I saw that it was just these angry-looking white guys wearing RFK hats, defacing not just a Black woman, but a black woman‘s art, it was, disheartening, disappointing, troubling.”
Myrick said the incident is also a reminder of what DNC speakers like former First Lady Michelle Obama and former Presidents Bill Clinton and Bill Clinton preached in their speeches this week: The mood may be celebratory now, but Trumpism won’t die without a fight.
“The Trump movement is not about building anything. It’s not about improving anything. The MAGA movement is one gigantic backlash,” he said. “It is a negative reaction to positive progress. It has no forward-looking positive agenda of its own and that's what we saw.”
Myrick also took issue with what he perceived as the lack of imagination among the Harris haters.
“They could make their own Bobby Kennedy art and post it. But that's not what they want to do. They want to steal the joy from those who do create,” he said. And I’m just sick of it. I’m just really tired. It's been eight years since that guy came down that escalator and eight years of joyless negativity. Obviously, he’s inspired a movement of other people who want to deface art and grab joy, but we're just not gonna let it happen.”
Myrick and Cassinova have texted about the situation.
“I think she’s feeling same as me,” he said. “Based on her tone, disappointed that this happened but undeterred.
Cassinova’s portrait, available on the People For website for merchandise, is the latest image release from more than 20 world-renowned artists as part of its pro-democracy campaign. In the coming months, it will include billboards in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and an organization-wide campaign with radio PSAs, on-the-ground organizers, targeted digital ads and art activations with potential expansion into more key battleground states, like North Carolina and Georgia.
Her work ranges from murals to illustration and fine art. It has also served as an integral contribution to many social justice collaborations, including Blackout for Human Rights’s annual MLK NOW event, We Rise Exhibition, Sons & Bros., Truth Initiative and more. She’s also worked with top brands, including Urban Outfitters, Condè Nast with Proactiv & Teen Vogue, Netflix, TIME Magazine, Disney, CNN and Adidas.
A spokesperson for the Kennedy campaign did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Trump campaign could not be reached for comment.
Black male leaders continue outreach at DNC
There’s been plenty of ink spilled this election cycle, including in this newsletter, on whether Black men will abandon the Democratic Party in droves this November to boost Trump’s bid for a second term.
Most Black lawmakers and activists are skeptical that Republicans will make impactful inroads with this group. But Michael Blake and Quentin James, two well-connected Black male political operatives, aren’t leaving any brothers to chance and have been on the frontlines for Harris since she launched her candidacy a month ago.
Blake, who founded the KAIROS Democracy Project, and James, the co-founder of The Collective, launched “Win with Black Men” and organized thousands of Black men to join journalist Roland Martin for a late-July fundraiser, which raised $1.3 million. During the convention, KAIROS and The Collective hosted eight events with headliners like John Legend and Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD) and facilitated several discussions about the strategy to preserve democracy with organizations, including Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight.
Sen. Cory Booker told reporters this morning that although he’s heard some of the discontent from Black men from his conversations over the years, the polls are beginning to shift in part to Black men clapping back against misinformation on the vice president’s prosecutorial record.
“And so a lot of that truth is getting out here and I'm seeing it melt away the kind of falsities that I think have fueled a lot of the discontent you see in a lot of folks,” he said.
Tyler said that as the election draws closer, more Black men are also learning about Trump’s anti-Black record.
“In Donald Trump, what Black men are seeing is somebody who stepped into public life falsely accusing the Central Park Five, never apologizing for it after he already knew them to be the Exonerated Five. This is the person who stepped into political life by taking birtherism and having it go mainstream,” he said. “This is somebody who, when he was president, it's not just the record of racist invective, it is the disastrous economic record by the end of his presidency: The things that had gone up for Black folks in America were the unemployment rate and the uninsured rate after he fumbled the bag on the COVID response.”
Tyler described Trump as someone who is vacant of policy solutions to improve the lives of Black men in this country.
“[Trump] is leading with more invective, leading with more hate, more chaos, more division,” he said. “And so we know this is not for many black men.”
Booker added that he’s encouraged that the Harris campaign isn’t taking any voter for granted.
“This is a campaign that knows they have to earn the vote, that they have to work for, that they have to speak to all of the diversity of America and call us together,” he said.
The New Jersey Democrat characterized some of the disillusionment as unawareness.
“When you start going through the receipts, I think people begin to understand what has been achieved,” Booker said. “And then when you get someone who has lived experience that’s very relatable to most Americans, women, immigrants, people were not born for generational wealth, I think that people begin to understand that they're gonna have somebody in the White House that sees them, that will fight for them and will continue to advance the ball.”
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.