4 Things Kamala Harris Needs to Pull Off at the DNC

When the Democratic National Convention assembles in Chicago on Monday, many will be thinking about what might have been. A month ago, there appeared to be a better than even chance that Democrats would gather to renominate Joe Biden despite fears that the president could not be reelected. Convention organizers might be struggling to generate enthusiasm for a nominee many of his own delegates had come to resent, as tens of thousands of protesters shouting about “Genocide Joe” gave the whole event an added appearance of disunity and rancor. Or perhaps a Biden exit would trigger an “open convention” or a “blitz primary,” making the DNC the first truly deliberative national-party convention in many decades.

However, by withdrawing his candidacy and simultaneously endorsing Kamala Harris on July 21, Biden dispelled these alternative scenarios. Democrats are now planning a celebration of a new ticket that has dramatically improved prospects for victory over Donald Trump.

That doesn’t mean it’s all smooth sailing for convention planners. Some of the usual convention rituals have already played out off-stage. Kamala Harris isn’t the “presumptive nominee” but the actual nominee, having all but unanimously won a “virtual roll call” on August 6 designed to avoid ballot-access questions in at least one state. And Harris preempted another big moment that used to be prime convention fodder, the running-mate reveal. While these decisions will be reaffirmed at the convention, generating drama won’t be easy. Fortunately for Democrats, authentic enthusiasm may be a better-than-adequate substitute for artificial suspense.

The late twist in the very nature of this convention means information on the speaking schedule and other details has been very slow to emerge. Newsweek summarized the reports and rumors on when current and past presidents and nominees will speak:

Sources told ABC News that Biden has been given the keynote slot on Monday night. …

Barack and Michelle Obama are expected to have prominent roles in Chicago, with the former president said to be given the headlining speaking slot on Tuesday night. …

Hillary Clinton is scheduled to speak Monday, according to reports, while Bill Clinton has reportedly been tapped to introduce Gov. Tim Walz on Wednesday.

As usual, the convention will culminate with Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech on Thursday. There’s a lot of the buzz about the possibility of guest appearances by mega-celebrities like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift (neither has given any indication that they will be there, though either would provide quite the contrast to Trump’s deployment of Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock at his convention). In any event, Democrats have a lot of star power to drawn on given their Hollywood and music industry connections.

So what are Harris’s big objectives during this four-day opportunity to dominate media coverage of politics? There are four big goals she needs to achieve:

Keep up the Kamala-mentum

It is difficult to overestimate the momentum change in Democratic prospects for 2024 that has accompanied Harris’s advent as presidential nominee. It’s evident in the top-line national polling numbers showing her leading Trump as much as Trump led Biden before the switcheroo. It’s also evident in the battleground state polling showing her with multiple paths to 270 electoral votes. And perhaps most of all, it’s evident in indices of Democratic enthusiasm that appears to be leading most Biden 2020 voters back into the corral with renewed interest in voting.

These are the hard cold valuable facts beneath all the chatter about Harris’s memes and vibes. If Harris can keep this sense of momentum and optimism and enthusiasm alive beyond the convention, she will have a relatively short runway to November 5 (not to mention September and October, the start of early voting in most states) and an easy transition to get-out-the-vote efforts as opposed to the massive effort to turn around swing voters that Biden would have faced.

Ideally, the DNC will produce a convention “bounce” in the polls that gives Harris a clear lead against Trump going into the stretch run of the campaign. But as Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball recently explained, convention “bounces” are far from a given, particularly when “big moments” like a veep reveal are handled earlier; neither Biden nor Trump got a convention “bounce” in 2020 (though the COVID conditions had something to do with that). So anything the DNC can do to move the needle in Harris’s direction would be valuable.

Turn the page on Biden and making Harris a “change candidate”

Perhaps the trickiest thing for Harris to do in Chicago is to cleanly execute a handoff from Biden that lets her continue to represent “change” rather than simply a continuation of the status quo. Since Biden was pretty clearly in the process of losing the election if it turned out to be a “referendum,” and given the many indices of voting unhappiness with the direction of the country, it’s critical that Harris appear to offer a fresh start, and even an end to the Biden-Trump era of politics. From that perspective, having Biden appear on the first night of the convention and then go back to Washington is a good plan, particularly if he can reinforce the idea that Harris is very much her own person.

Another part of the “change candidate” mission is for Harris to deal decisively with those aspects of Biden’s record that the Trump campaign is certain to tie to her, without representing too much change in the direction of controversial (that is to say, non-poll-tested) progressivism. Her new economic plan is designed to address claims that Democrats don’t have any policies to reduce cost-of-living concerns, and her campaign’s TV ads are drawing heavily on her history as a “cop” (actually a prosecutor) to suggest she can resolve a uncontrolled border crisis (earlier steps by Biden may have given her a boost on this issue). There are limits to what Harris can accomplish in four days on this front, and the Trump-Vance campaign will continue to call her a radical leftist and/or just Biden 2.0. But she needs to convey that she has a workable strategy for turning the page without turning it too far.

Make Trump and Vance the candidates of unsafe change

While Harris and Walz need to thread the needle to become the candidates of “safe change,” it’s all part of an equation in which they continue the Biden campaign’s efforts to depict Trump and Vance the candidates of unsafe change, determined to impose an extremist agenda on the country that endangers fundamental freedoms along with peace and prosperity. There will be plenty of opportunities in Chicago to thrill party stalwarts and alarm persuadable voters with attacks on Trump the felon, Trump the would-be authoritarian, Trump the union-hater, Trump the undertaker of abortion rights, Trump the billionaire coddler and admirer of Putin and Orban, and even (with Biden out of the way) Trump the doddering old man.

It’s an added bonus for Democrats that Trump did not choose an anodyne running mate (like, say, runner-up Doug Burgum) but instead J.D. Vance, who has reinforced every impression that this ticket is an extremist creepshow. So far, Tim Walz has show an exceptional ability to run circles around Vance, and he should continue to do so in Chicago.

Obviously the presidential and vice-presidential candidate debates will provide the acid test for Harris’s and Walz’s abilities to contrast themselves successfully with Team Weirdo, but the convention can and should frame the comparisons and the choice.

Avoid distractions

Like any expensive production, the DNC needs to avoid missteps, bad speechwriting, and unexpected disruptions. The biggest potential disruption comes from the tens of thousands of protesters — most focused on the Israel-Hamas War — converging on Chicago as delegates arrive. To be clear, the specter of a revival of the chaos of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago was never realistic, if only because convention security has really evolved in the last half-century or so; even before Biden’s withdrawal Democrats were planning to move some events off-site (like the “virtual roll call”) to reduce the number of protest targets. It’s also true that some of the passion underlying the pro-Palestinian protests may have dissipated with the self-defenestration of “Genocide Joe.”

But protests are still going to happen, as David Weigel reports in Semafor:

Protest organizers in Chicago expect between 30,000 and 40,000 people to join Monday’s march on the Democratic National Convention, and are asking the city for a permit that would get them closer to the event itself.

“We’re going to march regardless, but we’re fighting for the best route possible,” said Faayani Aboma Mijana, a spokesperson for the March on the DNC coalition. “We’ve got our park permit, but the City has refused to allow us to use port-a-potties, a stage, and a sound system.”

While protesters naturally want to get within “sight and sound” of delegates, their real objective is to crash into media coverage of the convention and disrupt the happy unity party Democrats are planning. And that can happen with events far from the convention site, or even in Gaza. So Team Harris needs contingency plans for managing or mitigating the distractions.

As someone who worked in the script and speech operations of six Democratic conventions, I can certify that these events are as tightly controlled as a TV ad. But it’s often not easy to accurately figure out how to maximize these four days of relatively strong exposure in the context of a fast-moving presidential election, much less one as wild as this one has turned out to be.