My takeaways from the DNC.
Gabe Fleisher at Wake Up To Politics:
Last night, one of America’s two political parties gathered in Illinois and heard from a former CIA officer and several military veterans. They waved American flags and chanted “USA” while homage was paid to John McCain and Ronald Reagan. A sheriff spoke about increasing police funding; a Tea Party lawmaker opined on what it means to be conservative. The party’s presidential nominee, a former prosecutor, promised to toughen border security and protect American freedom. No, it wasn’t a Republican convention. Just a new political reality. The Democratic convention in Chicago showed a party finally addressing a core contradiction of the past half-decade. Electorally speaking, the Trump years have been good to Democrats, with victories in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2023 raining down like manna from heaven. But from a messaging standpoint, the era has been one stumble after another, with the party bouncing around the ideological map in search of a narrative that clicks. The persistent sense has been that the Democrats have won more for being the “not Trump” party than due to any positive association in voters’ minds.
Polls show that the party has a brand problem — one they may be able to overcome while Trump is on the ballot, but which will surely be lurking afterwards. But conventions are nothing if not branding exercises; the Democrats’ this past week reflected a party trying to forge a new identity. So what if it meant pissing off some members of their coalition and cribbing several major Republican talking points? The convention showed a party was a party that wants to win — not just against Donald Trump, but after him too — and is willing to remake itself to do it. The Democrats appeared keenly aware of their worst stereotypes and came prepared with carefully calibrated, poll-tested responses to each one.
Soft on crime? “After decades in law enforcement, I know the importance of safety and security,” Vice President Kamala Harris said, in an acceptance speech that returned repeatedly to her experience as a prosecutor. Weak on national security? “I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests,” she declared. Afraid of military might? “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” Harris said. Judgmental? Nearly ever major DNC speaker took pains to offer grace to conservatives, instead of scorning them, from former President Barack Obama noting that when “a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people” to Oprah Winfrey promising that “we are not so different from our neighbors.”
Unpatriotic? When Harris walked onto the stage, the crowd didn’t chant “Kamala” or “We’re not going back” or any of the other slogans in their arsenal. They chanted “USA.” In fact, “USA” chants were heard every night of the convention, often during almost every speech. Attendees held aloft “USA” signs and American flags; later, when they were handed long “Kamala” signs ahead of her acceptance speech, many delegates stuck the American flag on top of them, so that when they cheered for Harris, the floor remained a sea of flags. Many of these epithets are labels that have haunted Democrats for decades, stretching back into the 1970s and in some cases even earlier. In that time, Republicans have reliably been the party that has wrapped themselves in the flag and projected a tough image on national defense and law and order, so much so that the scene from the United Center sometimes seemed straight out of an RNC. Harris also seemed to determined to break with the long Democratic tradition of condescension, from “egghead” Adlai Stevenson to “elitist” Hillary Clinton and her “basket of deplorables.” This convention was one of the first times they seemed conscious of it, and actively tried to move in another direction.
The whole event was a far cry from 2020, when Democrats allowed themselves to become the party of “defund the police” and the academic alphabet soup of DEI and CRT. In just four years, the party went from declaring in their platform that “Democrats believe we need to overhaul the criminal justice system from top to bottom,” because “police brutality is a stain on the soul of our nation,” to pledging to put “more police officers on the beat” in the 2024 version. “We need to fund the police, not defund the police,” the party’s platform now reads. Attendees cheered when a sheriff made that same point on Thursday, something that would have sounded unbelievable to 2020 ears. (As would the nomination of a former prosecutor.) It was also a departure from 2016, when identity ruled the day as Hillary Clinton reminded delegates that she was the first woman nominated for the presidency. Harris never once referred to the fact that she was only the second female nominee, and first Black female nominee, allowing the delegates wearing suffragette white to serve as the lone nod to her history-making nomination.
Other typically Democratic elements were airbrushed from the speech as well. Issues that poll well, like abortion, were emphasized. Issues that poll poorly, like climate change and transgender issues, were mentioned once and not at all, respectively, by Harris. (Democratic fears of yet another label — “woke” — were clear.) These decisions angered some activists, as did the exclusion of a Palestinian-American speaker, but after years of attempting to please every segment of their varied coalition, Democrats have made the cold calculation that the voters they truly need to target are the plurality in the middle. Just as they pushed out Joe Biden in service of chasing victory, evincing little emotional attachment to an aging leader, the party seems newly willing to spite its fringes to save its power.
[...] For me, one of the most enduring images of the convention will be the two young men standing near me who looked like they could have been straight out of a Barstool video — a demographic Democrats have struggled with — screaming “USA” with a fierce intensity. In reality, though, these young men are a Democratic minority: only 29% of Democrats told Gallup they are “extremely proud” to be Americans last year; 60% of Republicans did so. I think back to the conference of young Democrats I covered last year, when a speaker asked how many attendees are “patriotic” and only a scattering of hands went up. [...] The Democratic convention showed a party playing to win, unlike the Republican convention in July, which showed a party that believed it already had. The DNC also showed a party preparing for the future — parading its bench, shaving down its harsher edges to position itself for campaigns against post-Trump opponents — in stark contrast to the Trump-centric RNC. At the same time as Trump appears distracted, Democrats have never seemed more laser-focused on pursuing victory.
Gabe Fleisher wrote in Friday’s Wake Up To Politics newsletter on the Democratic Party’s image makeover that was on display at the DNC by taking the freedom and patriotism mantle and ran with it, while jettisoning or downplaying themes prevalent in the 2016 and 2020 editions.
