Democratic presidential nominee and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris takes the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, U.S. on Thursday.Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Kamala Harris conjured a dark vision of a U.S. return to rule by Donald Trump, presenting herself as an alternative who would lead the country to new wealth and strength as she accepted the Democratic party’s nomination for president.
At the close of the Democratic convention in Chicago, Ms. Harris promised to cut taxes for 100 million Americans, ease grocery costs and provide solutions to the country’s housing shortage.
“Our nation, with this election, has a precious fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past, a chance to chart a new way forward,” she said.
Ms. Harris is hoping to make history as the U.S.’s first female president, riding the sudden wave of momentum that accompanied her unexpected elevation to the top of her party.
Ms. Harris, a 59-year-old former prosecutor sketched her roots as the daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother, and invited Americans of all political stripes to consider her candidacy against Donald Trump, a 78-year-old convicted felon who has built his political brand on nativism, in a neck-and-neck race for the White House.
“In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man,” she said. “But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.”
She couched her most serious warning with a reminder of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity.
“Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” she said.
Kamala Harris caps ‘unlikely journey’ to nomination with a highly personal speech at DNC
She warned that Republicans intend to monitor abortions and miscarriages nation-wide. “Simply put, they are out of their minds,” she said. Democrats have pledged to protect abortion nation-wide if they can muster a level of Congressional support they do not currently enjoy.
Mr. Trump, in a series of posts to his Truth Social network, accused Ms. Harris of attempting to “gaslight America.”
“She should leave the Speech right now, go to Washington, D.C., close the Border, allow fracking in Pennsylvania and other places, and start doing the things she’s complaining about aren’t done!” Mr. Trump wrote.
Since replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket last month, Ms. Harris has recaptured the party’s poll lead, breathing new life into a once-flagging campaign. Now, she must show that this energy is sustainable enough to generate the voter turnout that will decide the election.
Ms. Harris spoke about her history as a prosecutor, San Francisco district attorney and California attorney-general against Mr. Trump’s status as the first former president to be criminally convicted. He was found guilty in a New York hush-money case this spring, faces three other criminal trials – including for attempting to overturn the 2020 election – and within the past year has been held liable for business fraud and sexual abuse in civil suits.
Vice President Kamala Harris formally accepted the Democratic nomination for president on Thursday with a rousing call to end the war in Gaza and to fight tyranny around the world, drawing a sharp contrast with Republican Donald Trump.
Reuters
Mr. Trump has demonstrated a firm hold on supporters whose faith in him has not been shaken by his years of impolitic rhetoric and accusations of wrongdoing.
But in hopes of reaching voters who might harbour doubts about the former president, Democrats invited to their party’s convention spotlight members of the Trump administration and, on Thursday, former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger. He described his party as unmoored from the conservative principles it once held, its soul suffocated by the hand of a self-interested leader.
“Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong,” Mr. Kinzinger said.
“His fundamental weakness has coursed through my party like an illness, sapping our strength, softening our spine, whipping us into a fever that has untethered us from our values.”
Earlier Thursday, the party brought to its stage members of the “Central Park Five,” Black men wrongfully imprisoned in 1989 for rape. Mr. Trump at the time paid for full-page newspaper advertisements calling for their execution.
“That man thinks that hate is the animating force in America. It is not,” said Yusef Salaam, now a member of the New York City Council.
Ms. Harris, meanwhile, projected an optimism about the future of the American people and their place in the world.
“I will make sure that we lead the world into the future on space and artificial intelligence, that America not China wins the competition for the 21st century,” she promised a country riven by divisions and doubts over its rightful role as an economic superpower whose own cities are pocked by poverty.
She promised a strong stand alongside Ukraine, vowing never to get close to dictators such as North Korea’s Kim Jong-un “who are rooting for Trump because they know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favours. They know that he won’t hold autocrats accountable because he wants to be an autocrat himself.”
The challenge for Ms. Harris is to translate the buzz around her into votes. While there are relatively few undecided voters in the U.S., there are many low-propensity ones: people who favour one party or another but only vote occasionally. Inspiring such people to turn out on Nov. 5, particularly younger, low-income and non-white voters, will be key for the Democrats.
On the policy front, Ms. Harris has mostly stuck to broad themes – fighting for abortion rights, protecting democracy, championing gun control, preserving programs from Obamacare to social security, battling climate change – with little specificity.
On Thursday, she promised that building the middle class “will be a defining goal of my presidency,” describing an intent to foster an “opportunity economy.”
But she left undefined what that might mean, providing little rebuttal to critics – in and outside of her party – who have faulted her for offering too few new ideas. The Trump campaign this week unveiled an entire spoofed “policy” website devoted to criticizing her approach, blaming her and Mr. Biden for painful inflation, declining savings rates and spending so profligate it hurt the economy.
Democrats, meanwhile, say she must begin to say more about her plans.
Polling suggests U.S. voters feel confident they understand the way Mr. Trump would govern. But “the dominant perception in the data is that the Democrats have no economic plan,” said Celinda Lake, a pollster who works for the Democratic National Committee.
“Not that we have the wrong economic plan – that we have zero economic plan.”
In 2020, the Democrats won thanks to a spike in voter turnout and a big-tent voting coalition intent on getting rid of Mr. Trump amid the COVID-19 pandemic and a reckoning over racism and police brutality. Reassembling all of those voters is the imperative now.
Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project, said the party had to offer more concrete plans for helping people’s lives. Promises to restore democracy are far too abstract for people confronting more immediate problems, he said.
“Stop talking about Donald Trump,” Mr. Robinson said. “We need policies.”
Perhaps even more intractable is the problem of winning back some of the estimated 2.6 million votes Democrats have lost in Midwestern factory towns since 2012. Polling suggests the party’s economic ideas are popular in those places, if only they can find voters’ ears.
“If we don’t figure out that strategy, we’re not going to be winning these states any more,” said Mike Lux, a Democratic consultant who has worked on eight presidential campaigns, and is the author of How to Democrat in the Age of Trump.
Ms. Harris’s popularity so far has been particularly unexpected given her brief 2020 presidential campaign, which ended before the primaries began, and her relative lack of visibility as Mr. Biden’s deputy. Much of the convention was aimed at capturing the same tone as the internet excitement in an effort to ensure it was not just a flash in the pan.
It also provided Ms. Harris a much-watched moment to delineate differences between her life in public service and Mr. Trump’s decades spent accumulating wealth and television ratings.
“He would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States not to improve your life. not to strengthen our national security. But to serve the only client he has ever had: Himself,” she said.
Democrats have boasted of a party unity unseen in a generation, although politically potent fractures remain openly visible. This week, thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters gathered outside the convention after the DNC refused to grant a speaking spot to a Palestinian.
In her speech, Ms. Harris tried to thread the needle on potentially the most divisive issue within her party.
“President Biden and I are working around the clock because now is the time to get a hostage deal and a ceasefire deal done,” she said. “President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, to freedom and self-determination.”
Ms. Harris has sought to build trust among voters by emphasizing a biography utterly unlike that of Mr. Trump, a white man born into a wealthy New York family.
She, by contrast was born to a father who was a civil rights activist and a “five foot tall brown woman with an accent,” Ms. Harris said Thursday.
Her mother “taught us to never complain about injustice but do something about it. And she also taught us, ‘never do anything half-assed.’”