Producing Chicago

At a political convention, power is rendered as geography. The rank and file are stuck in the rafters of the arena; the delegates jostle on the floor. Donors and VIPs are positioned up in a ring of luxury suites, their status-conferring badges and passes flapping from their many lanyards. The staffers toil down in the bowels, harried and molelike, their eyes on their phones. But this week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, maybe the most important piece of real estate was a narrow space up metal gangway stairs at the back of the United Center, where Ricky Kirshner worked in front of a bank of a half-dozen flat-screens. The Democrats in the hall were extras in a televised event, and Kirshner was producing the show.

At 7:45 p.m. Chicago time on the convention’s third night, Kirshner took off his headset to talk for just a moment. “I’ve got Stevie Wonder coming,” he said. A veteran producer of awards shows like the Tonys and the Golden Globes, Kirshner had been tasked with creating compelling entertainment out of a four-day speech marathon, making the most of the precious hours of prime time that the television networks had committed to the Democrats each night. He was coordinating, chiefly through nods and signals, with two directors at his table, who were running the stage and the house cameras, while communicating what was coming next to the networks through his headset.

Every modern presidential convention has been more a television commercial than a selection mechanism, but the producer’s role became unexpectedly central this year. The Democratic Party’s last-minute candidate switch forced the event to serve purposes that could not have been anticipated just a few weeks before: an emergency family meeting, a retirement send-off for Joe Biden, a coronation for Kamala Harris, a party for a party that felt like it had just survived a near-death experience. On top of this, it still had to do the basic job of reminding voters what they like about the Democrats and hate about Donald Trump. And there was yet another unusual function: For the first time since 1968, the party had to present a nominee, in Harris, who had not run in a single primary or gone through many of the hard but clarifying steps of a campaign. In a sense, the event was a throwback to a distant time when bosses picked candidates in a backroom. But in this 21st-century version of the brokered convention, the power plays and emotions were out in the open — “All this talk about how I’m angry with all those people who said I should step down, that’s not true,” Biden said unconvincingly — and designed to be spliced into tiny clips that people would come across for weeks in their “For You” feed. It all culminated, on the final night, in a speech in which Harris, by most lights, delivered a blockbuster performance and came into her own as a candidate.

The night before, though, Kirshner was concentrating on making the program run smoothly, so that the first major speaker would come onstage just a little after the networks started their prime-time coverage at 9 p.m. on the East Coast. “We’re trying to hit them with Hakeem Jeffries right at the right time,” Kirshner said. As Wonder played “Higher Ground,” director Glenn Weiss, a grizzled, long-haired guy in a baseball cap, poked his finger at little numbered boxes on a screen that corresponded to cameras trained on the arena floor: “Nine take … Seven take.” Senator Cory Booker introduced Kenan Thompson of Saturday Night Live, who took to the stage with an oversize copy of the Project 2025 agenda for a bit illustrating the consequences of Trump’s (semi-disavowed) plan. Soon, actress Mindy Kaling arrived to set up Jeffries, who appeared right on schedule. After his own speech, Jeffries pitched to Bill Clinton — an eternal nemesis of live-television timetables.

Clinton had some prepared remarks, which ran a brisk 1,201 words, but no one in the hall expected him to stick strictly to his script — least of all Kirshner, who had been involved in the production of the DNC since 1992, the first time Clinton was the nominee. Sometimes Clinton would just completely wing it with brilliant results, and other times … not so much. (“That’s just him,” Kirshner said later, “and that’s great.”) The prepared text appeared on a teleprompter screen at the center of Kirshner’s console, but Clinton veered off it from his very first sentence.

“Let me ask you something,” Clinton said, adjusting his microphone with a grin. “After the last two days, aren’t you proud to be a Democrat?” As he went on, riffing, digressing, and jumping around in his planned speech, the teleprompter text seized up and scrolled down in jittery fashion. Clinton was scheduled to speak for 12 minutes but blew past his slot, rapping on the podium, needling Trump, joking about his age, and ruminating on his mortality. With little to do until Clinton decided to yield the stage, Kirshner put down his pen, took off his headset, went to the back of the room, and retrieved a basket of French fries and chicken fingers.

That evening’s headliner, vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz, wouldn’t reach the podium until 11:22 on the East Coast; it was the third night in a row that the event had spilled out of the prime-time window. But the ratings were strong, and they suggested viewers were sticking with the broadcast late into the night. “We’re in the 20-something millions,” Kirshner told me in the hours before the convention’s final evening. “That is a lot of people for a televised event, especially these days.” And those who watched the show live on TV represented just a fraction of the consumers Democrats were hoping to reach with their programming. The convention planners said they cared much more about what voters were seeing the next day on their phones and sprinkled the program with carefully orchestrated “moments” that were designed to go viral. And with just ten weeks to go until the election, every impression counts. “In the new world in which we live, it is very hard to break through and grab people’s attention,” Dave Cavell, a former Harris speechwriter, told me just before the convention. “This is one of the few moments to do it.”

Planning for the convention had begun months before, back when Biden was the candidate. Kirshner said the hardware elements of the show, like the stage and the lighting, were set in the spring, but much of the rest of the program was completely upended by the president’s decision to drop out. Stephanie Cutter, a longtime Democratic communications strategist, had been overseeing what Kirshner called the software side of the program — elements including themes and speakers — and she continued to run the messaging component of the show for Harris, who has elevated her to a senior role in the campaign. The messaging team had to take on the complicated task of paying respect to Biden without reminding voters too much of why the Democrats had stuck him on an ice floe. Jeff Shesol, a former White House speechwriter, told me that while Biden’s swift fall was shocking, Harris faced a familiar challenge that had been faced by every VP who sought the top job: “How you establish yourself as your own person and yet avoid disowning a record of some real accomplishment is just inherently a tricky business.”

The most obvious change to the program was shifting Biden’s role. His speech, moved to the end of the first night, became part of the opening act, a humbling position for a sitting president, but the plan was to give him a dignified farewell, a chance to define his legacy and make the case for Harris as his chosen successor. Unfortunately, the lead-up to his address did not go as planned. The organizers had jammed a bunch of other high-profile speakers into the program, including Steve Kerr and Hillary Clinton, and everything went long. The producers bumped a performance by James Taylor and cut some speakers and a tribute video to Biden, but even so, the president did not reach the stage until nearly 11:30 p.m. on the East Coast, and he spoke until after midnight. It was easy to wonder whether the planners had pushed Biden into late night deliberately, or accidentally on purpose, but a Democratic operative who was involved in prior conventions said it was “just a complete screwup.” The DNC put out a statement blaming the delay on the evening’s repeated ovations. Biden, who is famously attuned to both time slots and slights, may not feel so reassured.

By the second day, Biden was gone and his speech forgotten, which was just as well for the Harris campaign. The night would feature the party’s tallest tentpole speakers — the Obamas — but producers were particularly excited about the roll-call vote, a traditional formality they had optimized for social media. Kirshner said the concept had grown out of one success of the socially distanced 2020 convention, when, out of necessity, each state had presented its nomination via video. Some of the goofier segments had gone viral, making a mini-star of a black-masked Rhode Island chef who appeared holding a plate of calamari. (Unfortunately for the Democrats, the “calamari ninja” is now supporting Trump.) Then, at a Bulls game last winter, Kirshner started to think about how the NBA’s commercial-break razzle-dazzle could be adapted for an in-person roll call.

The organizers ended up with a show consisting of 57 musical segments — one for each delegation — with the DJ who played Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s wedding at the turntables. New Jersey delivered its delegates to “Born in the USA”; Massachusetts went with “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” by the Dropkick Murphys. I was advised ahead of time to watch the roll call from the floor, so I happened to be standing next to the Georgia delegation when the DJ cued up “Turn Down for What” and Atlanta’s own Lil Jon came strutting down a stairway to pledge the state’s 108 delegates to Harris. “Just that moment took seven meetings,” Kirshner said later. It killed in the hall and on TikTok.

Down behind the stage, meanwhile, a team of speechwriters was working madly to tighten up the program. “They’re in the Blackhawks locker room,” said Jeff Nussbaum, a former Biden speechwriter who was still in touch with some of his old colleagues. A handful of convention speakers, like the Clintons and the Obamas, retain enough juice in the party to dictate what they want to say. But everyone else gets a “speaker tracker,” a sort of Sherpa who guides them through their appearance, and a set of themes — or maybe an entire speech — assigned by the convention organizers. The speechwriters in the boiler room were supposed to review every word that would be said onstage, checking that remarks were consistent, on message, and concise. Nussbaum told me some speakers will inevitably guarantee they can perform impossible feats, like doing “their 1,800 word draft in five minutes.”

The convention’s second night kept closer to schedule. Many times, the bracketed phrase ITEMS DELETED scrolled up on the teleprompter. Doug Emhoff was introduced by his son and gave an affectionate speech to humanize Harris, starting with a funny story about their first date. Michelle Obama went on around 10:30 on the East Coast and delivered an effectively scornful attack on Trump before her husband closed the night with a call “to be better.”

“The joy and the excitement that we’re seeing around this campaign tells us we’re not alone,” Barack Obama said. Joy was one of the most commonly repeated words at the convention, and the refrain wasn’t just messaging. Democrats genuinely could hardly believe their luck. The speakers sounded the usual calls of alarm, talking about dictatorship and insurrection and bringing up a parade of dissident Republicans and police officers who were attacked on January 6. But mostly the Democrats were whistling happily, as if they were already long past the graveyard. When Hillary Clinton referenced Trump’s criminal convictions, she grinned as the audience chanted “Lock him up.” In Harris’s acceptance speech Thursday night — which started right on time, around 10:30 p.m. ET — she called her opponent “an unserious man,” but she also tried to return the party’s focus to the serious stakes.

Working with little margin for error, Harris managed to skillfully hit a complicated series of notes, weaving together autobiography, a statement of purpose, a policy agenda, and an attack on Trump. I was struck not so much by what she said, though, but by how often she broke into a giant smile. I thought about Norman Mailer’s famous essay “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” about the 1960 Democratic convention, where he observed that when John F. Kennedy “smiled at the crowd his teeth were amazingly white and clearly visible at a distance of fifty yards.” You could hear echoes of Kennedy as Harris spoke, especially as she called for “a new way forward.” (The speech’s primary author, Adam Frankel, was a protégé of the late Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen.) Of course, every Democrat tries to play JFK; few can pull it off at length. For four days, though, the partygoers could hope that Harris had truly picked up the torch — that they’d found another hero.