Second place is the first loser

Democrats left their 2024 convention in Chicago with the same mission that’s been driving them since Joe Biden’s withdrawal last month: Just win, baby.

After four days in the Windy City, it’s clear there’s virtually nothing that can deter the party’s almost monomaniacal focus on defeating Donald Trump. Lingering internal divisions, many of them profound, were papered over in the face of a sort of determined jubilation. Reps. Tom Suozzi, a moderate New Yorker whose special election victory this winter is credited with jumpstarting Democrats’ rightward move on immigration, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair who has publicly slammed that move, both refused to criticize the other wing. Instead, they both played to party unity — Jayapal said she was “all for securing the border.”

But it was Suozzi’s frank electoral analysis that stuck out even more. “The best politician is the one who says what the people are already saying,” he said. “We gotta do what the people want.” If there was a theme to the week, it was giving the people what they want. The loudest cheer during Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech was her section on Israel and Gaza, during which she took a kitchen-sink approach to the conflict, promising policy that would ensure “that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”

That the war itself is premised on the conflict between those goals didn’t matter to many in the arena. That the vice president was largely articulating President Biden’s agenda in more polished way was less a bug than a feature for most attendees. Asked on Thursday what word they would use to describe Harris’s nomination, several delegates and attendees, decked out in white outfits to pay tribute to the suffragette movement, largely used variations of “different,” or “new.”

That tracked with convention staff’s intention. Across all four nights, speakers pitched a Harris presidency as a “chance to turn the page” or “move past the same old tired debates.” It's a message with undeniable appeal: For over a year, polls showed deep, supermajority-level dissatisfaction with the Biden-Trump rematch and both men’s ages. With Harris’ elevation, both sides agree Democrats have gained a prime political advantage.

But the emphasis on beginning a new era of politics (something that delegates, advocates, and campaign officials all genuinely expressed an earnest desire for this week) also spoke to a party that has essentially sifted through its previous eras and pieced together the most successful parts. The week had the same flair and energy as Obama's 2008 coronation, with omnipresent celebrities and innovative social media strategies. And like at Joe Biden's 2020 convention, longtime Republicans were given prime speaking slots, warning of Republican extremism and Trump’s anti-democratic impulses. Harris's invocations of public safety and generational change, paired with a signature pop anthem, also echoed Bill Clinton's 1992 confab.

It created, at times, some interesting hybrids. On Wednesday, speakers brought a newly hawkish immigration focus — attendees cheered calls to pas the bipartisan border security bill, which provisions that a litany of speakers, including Biden and Harris, had previously labeled “inhumane” or “cruel” — at the same time vice presidential nominee Tim Walz declared that not only healthcare but housing is a “human right.” Neither sentiment could have been heard from the stage as recently as four years ago.

Harris’s speech centered abortion rights in a way unprecedented for any Democratic nominee — her four uses of the word “abortion” in her address matched the number of times it had been uttered in all previous nomination acceptance speeches since Roe v. Wade.

At the same time, she made only glancing references to race and no mention of the historic aspect of her own nomination, breaking with the past two nominees.

Even as the campaign remains light on policy specifics, it added up to the prospect of an  intriguing new Democratic identity emerging. Now they just have to win. 

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