-Walz Ticket Aims to Lock In Post-Biden Momentum at High-Stakes Chicago Convention

Chicago — Democrats descending on the Windy City for this week’s Democratic National Convention are optimistic that if all goes as planned, their new presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, could get another boost of momentum to sustain her well into September.

With Joe Biden out of the race, Democrats are giddy now that his vice president has given them a reason to feel electorally optimistic again. But the stakes of this week’s confab in Chicago are high. A successful convention would likely provide Harris with another week of glowing media coverage to help her continue to run up her battleground-state polling numbers against Republican Donald Trump, who has struggled to find his footing after the race was reconfigured.

But Harris’s campaign faces at least one significant obstacle this week: the long-anticipated anti-Israel protests planned to take place throughout the week. Chicago police say they will not allow the protests to turn into riots. But if things do get out of hand, Harris may find herself struggling to distance herself from the leftmost flank of her party at a critical point in the race.

Prominent Democrats are optimistic that the convention will only improve Harris’s prospects. “The convention will take you right into Labor Day, and that Labor Day will take you right into the debate,” says David Axelrod, the longtime adviser to former president Barack Obama. “It’s quite possible that she can stretch this momentum out for quite a while here, well into when people are voting.”

After spending her first three weeks as the presumptive Democratic nominee dithering on policy, Harris finally unveiled a concrete list of policy proposals ahead of the convention that amount to an extension of the Biden-Harris economic agenda: Building 3 million new housing units, ending alleged corporate price-gouging of groceries, restoring and expanding an expired child tax credit for low- and middle-income families to up to $6,000 during the first year of the child’s life, and providing first-time homeowners with up to $25,000 in down-payment support.

These progressive proposals came after Harris’s campaign spent recent weeks walking back many of the positions she had forcefully defended during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary — vowing to ban fracking, endorsing Medicare for All, supporting “assault weapon” buybacks and more — through her spokesmen and with no explanation.

And while Harris has started to roll out her economic-policy agenda, she has yet to unveil the rest of her platform in public appearances or on her website. Politico reports that Democrats are “largely content” that her campaign is light on policy details because “they’d rather lay out a specific plan post-November, when a potential President-elect Harris would have to staff up her administration and determine her governing priorities.”

Vague as her 2024 policy commitments may be, Democrats say they’re riding high. Harris has run a “flawless campaign,” Senator Laphonza Butler (D., Calif.), a longtime Harris ally, told National Review. “What she’s been able to accomplish in the few weeks that she’s been in this presidential race has been nothing short of amazing.”

On Monday night, convention attendees will hear from Biden, the man who made the top-of-the-ticket switcheroo possible. During the week, Democrats are also expected to hear from other high-profile speakers, including congressional leaders, 2028 presidential hopefuls, former President Barack Obama, 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton, and the new Democratic ticket, all of whom are expected to lambast the GOP ticket as vengeful, out of touch, and, when Tim Walz gets the mic, “weird.”

“Democrats are coming to Chicago with great expectations and excitement, and Trump seems a bit unhinged because he has a new and more competitive opponent, and he doesn’t know quite how to deal with her,” added Axelrod, the former Obama adviser.

In an effort to reverse Harris’s momentum, Trump has spent recent weeks fine-tuning his attacks on his new opponent with characteristically lengthy campaign appearances and press conferences. He’s leaning in on the “dangerously liberal” label as he looks to remind voters that his new opponent isn’t so new at all.

“​​Does anyone here feel richer under Kamala Harris and Crooked Joe than you were?” the GOP nominee asked a crowd at a campaign stop last week in Asheville, N.C. “Are you better off now with Harris and Biden than you were with a person named President Donald J. Trump?”

Democrats will spend the convention insisting that Trump is clearly rattled that his new opponent is getting so much press coverage. Republicans have “found it incredibly difficult to come up with a line of attack against the vice president that really sticks in the public,” says former representative Donna Edwards (D., Md.). “It’s really hard to get a line of attack out when you have a candidate who, at least for the last couple of weeks, has absolutely dominated the news.”

The irony of this earned-media wave is that it’s not coinciding with many hard-hitting interactions with the press. During one not-so-adversarial back-and-forth with her traveling press corps on the tarmac in Michigan on August 8, Harris reassured the American people that she has spoken with her team and wants “to get an interview scheduled before the end of the month.”

And yet this media-averse strategy has cost her little politically. The problem for the GOP ticket is that Harris completely frees voters of the long-dreaded matchup between Trump and Biden. And even though she carries the baggage of an unpopular administration and seems to have few sincerely held policy convictions of her own, she is young, she can run a real campaign, and she is not Joe Biden.

Republicans, meanwhile, are embracing their underdog status. The 2016 race “was a Hillary lock right up until the election,” longtime Trump pollster John McLaughlin told National Review. “They said we couldn’t win, and we won.”