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American politics junkies who can’t get enough of a wild 2024 campaign season will have another opportunity for must-see-TV at the upcoming Democratic National Convention (DNC), scheduled for August 19-22 in Chicago.
At the Republican convention in Milwaukee last month, the former president, Donald Trump, was greeted as a deity-like figure by Maga voters after narrowly surviving an assassination attempt days earlier. Now it’s the Democrats’ turn to cheerlead their presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her new running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
The casting has changed. Harris, not President Joe Biden, will play the starring role, despite the newly anointed nominee never earning a primary vote. Yet the script of the show will stay the same: a four-day informercial packed with over-produced, ideological fervour.
When Biden withdrew from the race, delegates he’d accrued during the primaries became “uncommitted”. Although these delegates were free to back any candidate they wished, Harris quickly consolidated endorsements — including from the Clintons, the Obamas, and Biden himself — and officially became the Democratic nominee earlier this month via a virtual vote of approximately 4,000 delegates.
With that drama gone, here are five key storylines to watch out for in Chicago.
1. Identity politics
Harris’s identity will be a top Democratic talking point. Already the highest-ranking woman ever to serve in the federal government, Harris could become the first female president in US history. As a woman of colour (she’s the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants), Harris would become only the second non-white president, after Barack Obama’s historic election in 2008.
Some Republicans have denigrated Harris as a “DEI” (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) hire, citing Biden’s pledge in 2020 to choose a woman for the ticket and the pressures to select a black woman in the wake of the George Floyd protests. Yet Democrats have labelled this criticism a “dog whistle” and see a chance at the convention to highlight Harris’s race and gender.
A month ago, Trump was on pace to collect more black votes than any Republican presidential candidate in history. However, reports suggest surging enthusiasm for Harris among this demographic, which even led Trump to wrongly claim that Harris just recently started identifying as black. Emphasising Harris’s racial background could shore up support among the black community.
2. Focus on abortion
Likewise, when it comes to women voters, reproductive rights are a top priority for Democrats, and they will be a focal point at the DNC. After the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, upending nearly a half-century of precedent guaranteeing abortion rights, Democrats realised they had an issue with resonance.
At the convention, Democrats will laser in on Trump’s three appointments to the court that solidified the right-wing supermajority that allowed for the overriding of Roe. Although Trump has endorsed leaving the abortion question to the states, some Democrats have falsely tagged him as backing a national ban.
Many experts attribute Democrats’ over-performance in the 2022 midterms to grassroots anger over the abortion issue. A series of state-level referenda also indicate that Democrats have the political high ground on reproductive rights. Reminding women that abortion is on the ballot could help to replicate those successes in November.
3. Democracy at stake
As president, one of Biden’s emphatic messages to voters has been that challenges to democracy abroad, including Russia’s war against Ukraine, link closely to challenges by Trump to democracy at home. At the convention, Harris and the Democrats will likely continue that refrain, but couch their language in more tempered terms.
After Trump’s assassination attempt, many Republicans accused Democrats of stoking violence by attacking Trump as an existential threat to the country. At the same time, some reports have suggested that many top Democrats have privately conceded that a Trump win in November wouldn’t mean the end of the “Republic”.
While the language may be dialled back, Harris won’t cede all of the ground on the democracy point. Trump’s threats to go on a “retribution tour” and to root out the “deep state” align with a first term in which adversaries insist he took a sledgehammer to executive norms.
4. Salute to Biden
One month ago, Joe Biden was the 81-year-old, infirmity-ridden political inconvenience whom Democratic leaders like House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer couldn’t dispense with fast enough. Now, he’s the distinguished elder statesman who Democrats can’t stop praising as one of the most accomplished presidents ever.
Biden is slated to deliver a high-profile spech during the first evening of the DNC, where he’ll doubtlessly tout his record that some have called the most progressive since Franklin Delano Roosevelt (or even in US history). Expect lots of praise for Biden’s selflessness and wisdom of “passing the torch” to the next generation.
Biden’s decision to step down was as voluntary as a resignation letter written at gunpoint. Yet Democratic party elites are committed to asking voters to forget that their newly crowned queen was selected, not elected.
5. Gaza protests
Perhaps just as important as what happens inside the convention hall is what goes down outside it. On the heels of college protests over US support for the war in Gaza that rattled US campuses in the spring, protesters are already planning to make their voices heard in Chicago.
Their expressions could be a liability for Democrats. While some experts think that the parallels to the DNC in Chicago in 1968, when police clashed with protesters over the Vietnam war, are overstated, others say the planned protests could be a game-changer.
Famed investor and businessman Steve Eisman, for example, has predicted that protesters “won’t be able to help themselves” in Chicago and that “they will burn Israeli flags, and they will burn American flags and they’ll shout things like ‘death to Israel’ and ‘death to America,’” and the whole country is going to watch and the whole country will be appalled and “the election will be over”.
If that proves prescient, the upcoming convention really is must-see-TV.
Thomas Gift does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
