What a difference a month makes.
Just a few weeks ago, at the GOP convention in Milwaukee, I looked on as thousands of confident Republicans gloated over Democratic disarray and looked ahead at what seemed to be a likely return to power for Donald Trump in the November election. But now, the dynamic of the race has flipped: Joe Biden dropped out, Trump and the Republicans lost their footing, and Kamala Harris has not only closed the polling gap with the former president, but appears to have become the front-runner.
“We’re dealing with genuine energy,” Illinois senator Dick Durbin, the number two Democrat in the upper chamber, tells me. “You can’t buy it. You can’t fake it. It’s the kind of energy where people stay that extra hour at the headquarters, come in bragging about taking more time and knocking on more doors—a happy, positive approach.”
“I can understand why Donald Trump’s worried,” Durbin adds. “The momentum is on our side.”
And with that momentum has come a mood of exuberance—a sense, as they descend on Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, that a “really special election may be coming,” as Senator Chris Murphy puts it. “I think this country has been looking for something to be excited about for a long time,” the Connecticut Democrat says. “Joe Biden was a great nominee, but he was running in the middle of a pandemic. You were not allowed to feel unadulterated joy in 2020. So this is a special moment, and you can feel this sense of relief from a lot of people that have wanted to feel very good about a candidate and who are now getting to experience that feeling.”
That optimism is a dramatic shift for the party: Biden had been trailing Trump in polls amid concerns about his age and acuity, as well as broader malaise among the electorate about the prospects of a 2020 rematch—and that was even before his disastrous June debate performance. It was a campaign predicated largely on the danger Trump poses to democracy—a real and grave threat, but one that did not appear, on its own, to animate voters the way it did four years ago. “We were behind our president…but there wasn’t excitement there. It was worry,” says Illinois Democratic Party chair Elizabeth Hernandez. Biden’s unprecedented decision to drop out so deep in the election cycle, though, has seemed to reawaken the Democratic coalition, as Harris seeks to contrast a forward-looking vision with Trump’s fixation on his various grievances. “Holy cow, it’s just been a swirl of energy,” Hernandez tells me.
Some of that surely comes from the rise of a newer, younger candidate than the one Democrats were previously running. But the excitement around Harris—who would be the first woman and first Black and South Asian woman to serve as president—seems to go beyond that: “It’s hard to overstate the historic nature of this moment,” Democratic National Convention chair Minyon Moore says in an email, noting that this is the “first time a woman of color has secured the presidential nomination of any major party.”
