Election 2024: The Democratic National Convention Begins on Monday

Democrats are in an upbeat mood as their national convention opens in Chicago on Monday. An election that seemed to be getting away from them just a month ago now seems winnable. The trend is the Democrats’ friend at the moment.

Like the Republican convention in Milwaukee last month, the Democrats’ four-day gathering will be a highly scripted affair. But there will be at least one important difference. Former President George W. Bush, former vice presidents Dick Cheney, Mike Pence, and Dan Quayle, and former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney all skipped the Republican National Convention. The Democratic convention, in contrast, will showcase the party’s past standard bearers.

President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are set to speak Monday night. Expect the president to get a roaring ovation from the delegates. After all, they were initially selected to support his candidacy. Former President Barack Obama will speak Tuesday night in his hometown. Former President Bill Clinton will speak Wednesday night before vice presidential nominee Tim Walz speaks. Kamala Harris will accept the nomination, which was formally awarded earlier this month in a virtual vote, on Thursday night.

Harris and Walz will preface their convention appearance with an “on the Road to Chicago” bus tour. The two candidates will campaign with their spouses, marking the first time the four have campaigned as a group. The tour will begin in Pittsburgh on Sunday and make multiple stops in western Pennsylvania. That’s hardly by accident. The Keystone State is a must-win for the Harris-Walz ticket. And the bus tour won’t head straight for the Windy City. Harris and Walz plan to hold a rally at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee on Tuesday. That’s where the Republicans met last month. Wisconsin also happens to be a must-win state for the Democrats.

The stakes are high for Harris in Chicago. Most Americans know little about her. Donald Trump and JD Vance are busily trying to paint her as “Failed. Weak. Dangerously liberal.” Her Thursday night speech is her opportunity to define her own narrative and to present her vision for the country. She won’t have another unchallenged opportunity to define herself at any other point during the campaign.

Democrats are hoping that Harris will rise to the occasion. If so, Chicago could propel her to victory much as it helped secure Clinton’s reelection victory in 1996. But any Democratic gathering in Chicago brings back memories of the party’s disastrous 1968 convention. Then, violent protests over the Vietnam War dominated the news coverage and likely cost Hubert Humphrey the presidency. It was cold comfort for Democrats that a national commission later blamed the violence on a “police riot” rather than on anti-war protestors.

Chicago expects thousands of protestors next week, with many of them demonstrating against U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Those crowds won’t match the number of protestors that Chicago saw fifty-six years ago even if they feel as passionately about their cause. Democratic officials seem more concerned about protests inside the convention hall. Thirty of the nearly 4,000 Democrats at the United Center next week are uncommitted. Most of them won their seats because of voters who opposed Biden’s support for Israel’s war.

While the number of uncommitted delegates is small, a well-timed protest or viral moment could hurt the image of unity and confidence that Democrats want to project. For that reason, Democratic Party officials have been negotiating with leaders of the Uncommitted National Movement over whether critics of U.S. policy toward Gaza will be allowed to address the convention. Those discussions have yet to yield a resolution.

If the Democrats can navigate this and other challenges that emerge over the next week, they might extend the impressive string of success Harris has enjoyed since Biden stepped aside. But as Republicans learned just last month, events can quickly derail a friendly trend.

Campaign Update

Tim Walz on Wednesday accepted an invitation from CBS News to debate JD Vance in New York City on Tuesday, October 1. Vance told Fox News on Wednesday night that “I strongly suspect we’re gonna be there on October 1” and said “we should do more than one debate.” He then hedged by saying “we’re not gonna run, walk into a fake news media garbage debate.” By yesterday morning, the hedging was gone. Vance not only accepted the CBS invitation, he announced that he had accepted an invitation from CNN to debate Walz on September 18. The Harris campaign responded with a statement that appeared to reject the call for a second vice-presidential debate while insisting on the need for a second presidential debate. Vance’s reacted by tweeting: “Tim Walz refuses to deploy!”

Politico reported on Saturday that someone named “Robert” began sending them internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official along with a copy of a lengthy report the campaign had compiled on JD Vance’s potential political vulnerabilities. Other news outlets quickly acknowledged that they had received a similar offer. The Trump campaign confirmed the hack, which it attributed to “foreign sources hostile to the United States.” Trump personally blamed Iran, saying that it was likely because “I was strong on Iran and I was protecting people in the Middle East that maybe they aren’t so happy about that.” The FBI is now investigating the hack, which began by gaining access to the email account of Trump confidante Roger Stone. Google said on Wednesday that a group tied to Iran has been trying to hack the Biden and Trump campaigns since May. Unlike in 2016, when the Hillary Clinton campaign’s hacked emails were given to Wikileaks and then published by news outlets, none of the news outlets that have received the hacked emails have published them.

Trump returned to X for the first time in almost a year on Monday. He posted a campaign video portraying himself as the victim of politicized criminal prosecutions and touted his interview that night with Elon Musk. Other than posting a spoof video of him and Musk dancing to the turn of “Stayin’ Alive” and the audio of his conversation with Musk, Trump has limited his social media posts to his Truth Social account.

Trump’s lawyers yesterday asked Judge Juan Merchan to postpone the sentencing of the former president on his thirty-four felony convictions for falsifying business records. Sentencing is currently set for September 18. The lawyers argued that by adjourning sentencing until after Election Day, "which is of paramount importance to the entire Nation, the Court would reduce, even if not eliminate, issues regarding the integrity of any future proceedings." Merchan has not announced when he will rule on the request.

Arizona and Missouri this week became the latest states to add a referendum on abortion rights to their ballots in November. Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Nevada, and South Dakota already have similar ballot initiatives scheduled. Democrats applauded the news, believing it will help the Harris-Walz ticket and Democratic congressional candidates by increasing the turnout of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters. In the two years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion-rights referenda have passed every time they have been on the ballot, including in red states like Kansas and Ohio.

What the Candidates Are Saying

The potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to sow disinformation in the 2024 campaign has gained a lot of attention. What has gained far less attention is that false claims about AI-generated material can also be used to discredit accurate information. Trump highlighted that danger on Sunday when he posted on Truth Social that the Harris campaign had used AI to generate fake crowds in photos of a campaign stop.

Similar posts were widely shared on X, Facebook, and Instagram as well. The problem is that the claims were false. The photos weren’t doctored, by AI, Photoshop, or any other technology. Trump, however, didn’t retract his charge or take down his post.

Much like Ron DeSantis’s ill-fated campaign launch on X last year, Trump’s interview with Musk got off to a rocky start. Technical problems delayed the start of their conversation for forty minutes.

When the conversation did get underway, it consisted mostly of Musk asking Trump softball questions. Musk made clear that was his intent, saying he had no intention of being “adversarial” and instead wanted “to just get a feel for what Donald Trump is just like in a conversation. Policy issues largely got the short shrift in the conversation. Musk did ask Trump about climate change. He dismissed it as a concern, saying that “oceans are gonna rise one eighth-of-an-inch over the next four hundred years” and that will mean “you will have more oceanfront property.” (That first claim is flat wrong; the second could well be true, but not in a good way.) Many listeners noted that Trump seemed to lisp and slur his words during the interview. Trump later acknowledged the problem, blaming it on modern technology.

Trump gave what was billed as a major speech on the economy Wednesday in Asheville, North Carolina. However, the former president didn’t seem to have much enthusiasm for the assignment. Early on, he seemed to mock his task, calling it “an intellectual speech” and the audience members “are all intellectuals today.” He then veered off course to complain that the United States “has become a third-world nation” and “a banana republic” that is “starting a freefall.” He also launched into his standard personal attacks, saying that Harris is “not smart. She’s not intelligent.”

When Trump did address economic issues, he promised that the economy would grow so rapidly under his leadership that “we will pay off all our debt.” He made a similar promise in 2016. Instead, the national debt grew by nearly $8 trillion during his presidency. He also pledged to cut income taxes and end taxes on Social Security and tips, all of which would drive up the annual federal deficit and the national debt. He also pledged to lower energy costs by “50 to 70 percent” within a year or at a “maximum 18 months.”

Yesterday, Trump held his second press conference in a week. As with Wednesday’s speech, the idea was that the former president would hit the Harris-Waltz ticket on economic issues. He stuck to his script for a while before, as Politico put it, he “once again veered off topic, weighing in on windmills killing birds, repeatedly falsely claiming Harris is a communist, pontificating on the weight of electric trucks and bragging about the audience size of his glitchy conversation on X with tech mogul Elon Musk.” He also continued to insult Harris, saying: “I think I’m entitled to personal attacks. I don’t have a lot of respect for her.”

Earlier in the day at an event on combatting antisemitism, Trump noted that he had given the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the woman who introduced him, Miriam Adelson, one of his most generous campaign donors. Trump went on to say that the Medal of Freedom is “the equivalent of the Congressional (sic) Medal of Honor, but civilian version. It’s actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they're soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.” Trump’s comments sparked sharp criticism and resurfaced his previous remarks denigrating Americans who have made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

What the Pundits Are Saying

Bloomberg’s David Marchick wrote that Trump’s election in November would likely usher in a chaotic transition. Each incoming administration has eleven weeks to make a dent in selecting its cabinet and filling some 4,000 senior government positions. Making that go smoothly requires advance planning. However, “Trump has not appointed a transition director or team to prepare for his presidency should he be elected again, nor has he publicly communicated his plans to do so. By this time four years ago, the Biden-Harris ticket had not only appointed transition leaders but had several hundred people working full time on planning.”

Paul Musgrave argued in Foreign Policy that Walz has held a consistent view of China ever since he taught English there in the late 1980s. According to Musgrave, Walz is “a measured critic of the Chinese Communist Party—prone neither to exaggeration nor accommodation. Nor is this a pose cooked up by spin doctors in the past few weeks. Small-town Nebraska newspaper articles—published well before Walz had any political ambitions—demonstrate that his professed affection for the Chinese people and culture has been matched by a longstanding criticism of the country’s rulers.”

Joe Cirincione wrote in Defense One that Trump’s call for building an Iron Dome over the United States is nonsensical. Cirincione noted that the United States has spent $415 billion over the past four decades on defenses against long-range missiles and succeeded in building a system that works roughly half the time against limited attacks under ideal conditions. The prospects of building a system that works against large-scale attacks are nil. If Trump has in mind replicating Israel’s Iron Dome system, it “is designed to intercept relatively primitive rockets and mortars that travel under 44 miles. That is fine if you want to defend San Diego from rockets launched from Tijuana, some 35 miles away. But the system couldn’t even protect Mar-a-Lago from missiles fired from the Bahamas, some 80 miles away.” Perhaps even more important, neither Canada nor Mexico is deploying short-range missiles to threaten the United States.

What the Polls Show

The latest Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research assessed how Americans compared Harris and Trump on several leadership qualities. Harris fared better than Trump on which candidate was “committed to democracy” and “disciplined”—nearly half of respondents said those qualities better describe Harris, while three in ten said they better describe Trump. Four in ten respondents said that “honest” better describes Harris, while one in four said the term better describes Trump. Americans are roughly split on whether Harris or Trump is a strong leader and who would better handle a crisis, with each candidate getting roughly 40 percent support on both questions.

The Campaign Schedule

The Democratic National Convention opens in Chicago in three days (August 19, 2024).

The second presidential debate is in twenty-five days (September 10, 2024)

Donald Trump’s sentencing hearing on his New York felony convictions is in thirty-three days (September 18, 2024).

The first in-person absentee voting in the nation begins in Minnesota and South Dakota in thirty-five days (September 20, 2024).

Election Day is eighty-one days away.

Inauguration Day is 157 days away.

Shelby Sires assisted in the preparation of this post.