Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux for New York Magazine
Just as Michelle Obama reached the crescendo of her speech to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Barack Obama started dancing backstage. As she channeled Kamala Harris’s mother and exhorted the roaring, adoring crowd to “do something,” the ex-president, beaming and carrying a paper cup full of hot tea, began nodding enthusiastically, dipping one shoulder then the other, then slightly bouncing, shifting from one foot to another.
I caught the moment from my narrow angle right off the floor of the United Center. It was brief, but its meaning was clear. The former president was feeling what was obvious to everyone in the cavernous arena. Michelle was right when she opened her speech by telling the crowd something special was happening — the return of hope. The next night, Bill Clinton said he saw something even simpler: “One of the reasons that President-to-be Harris is doing so well is that we’re all so happy.”
You can call it hope or happiness. You might also call it focus. Democrats spent their convention week deep in unfamiliar territory: For the first time in nearly a decade, they are basking in the country’s sustained attention, and, for once, Donald Trump is not the central fact of American politics, culture, and society. Now that the convention is over, Kamala Harris and her campaign are working out how to stretch the good vibes for as long as possible. And, more importantly, how to make sure they turn them into votes.
Around her, there’s a growing suspicion that Harris is both creating and benefiting from a complete inversion of the national consciousness, which in many ways has been organized around Trump since 2015. Her supporters feel she is a chance for a fresh start. Meanwhile, Trump’s desperation for the spotlight is yielding unhelpful flailing. (As she delivered her acceptance speech, he posted about Hunter Biden, insisted Democrats wanted to end Roe v. Wade, then called into Fox News and audibly mashed his phone’s keyboard with his face as he ranted.)
“Since he walked down that escalator, he was always able to commandeer the news cycle. And he could withstand a day or two of negative news, but by the end of the week we were all talking about the thing that he wanted to talk about,” Hawaii senator Brian Schatz told me in Chicago. “The less attention he gets, the more extreme he’s going to get. So I wouldn’t be surprised if he acts even more offensive than he’s ever acted. And I think what’s really going to cause a spiral for him is a collective shrug of the shoulders.”
The new optimism is, of course, partially the product of careful planning to curate the feeling. The convention was designed to give special access to social-media creators who, in some cases, have much more direct lines to everyday voters than the thousands of traditional-media members who piled into the upper rafters. The roll-call vote to nominate Harris — usually either a snoozy or contentious affair — was programmed carefully to be a momentum-building, rollicking party not just for the in-person crowd but for a TV audience that was equally shocked to find itself watching a Lil Jon performance.
In many elections, campaigns think carefully about how and when to build attention and energy for their candidates, but Harris’s electoral calendar is extraordinarily compressed, and her team figures it should maximize attention now because no one is quite sure what comes next. Starting the morning after the convention, the pressure returns to start participating in more traditional, and risky, campaign staples like press conferences, interviews, and policy rollouts. And the next major moment of the campaign is the September 10 debate, which is much harder to stage manage given Trump’s volatility.
No one who’s close to Harris would hazard a guess how long exactly her hot streak — rising polls and $500 million raised since becoming the de facto nominee a month ago — can last. Obama, for one, has been privately cautioning his friends not to get overly excited, since the next two and a half months will still require intense focus and the nation remains starkly divided. Among Democrats in Chicago, there was no doubt that things will slow down, eventually. “This has been a run that’s unique in political history. What’s it been, 34 days? It’s like a baseball team opening the season 34-0,” New Jersey governor Phil Murphy told me. “You’re gonna lose a game at some point.”
And no one I spoke with on the convention’s sidelines was willing to say — on the record, at least — that they were now entirely confident Harris would actually win. At the convention’s outset, Chauncey McLean, the chief of the main super-PAC backing her, publicly warned that his group’s internal polling was less “rosy” for Harris than some of her public numbers. By the week’s end, her national polling lead had grown to more than three and a half points in FiveThirtyEight’s average — her biggest yet, wider than Trump’s widest margin before Biden dropped out. But McLean’s warning had done its job in tempering expectations. “We’ve now wrestled the race to a tie, I don’t think we have a lead,” Connecticut senator Chris Murphy said over a Red Bull and a plate of hotel scrambled eggs and sausage high above Lake Michigan on the convention’s final morning. A day earlier in the United Center, Colorado governor Jared Polis had ducked out of a Fox News hit and told me he doubted there was much room for growth from here. “This is gonna be a race to the finish line,” he said, “a photo finish.”
This is partly because there’s no consensus around the campaign about whether Harris will get much of a “convention bounce,” since those tend to come from voters who are tuning in for the first time. One commonly held belief is that this group has already been accounted for thanks to the attention-sucking madness of the last month.
Still, her longtime confidants, her new supporters, and her colleagues were all happy to live in the moment for once, sitting with a suspicion that this moment might actually last a while longer. “I don’t think the American public is in as much of a hurry as the D.C. class to turn the page after this convention,” Murphy said. “This is a moment where people are feeling things they haven’t felt in a long time.” We were speaking the afternoon before the final night of programming kicked off with a Morgan Freeman–narrated video about Harris’s upbringing and career. This, and the autobiographical opening of her acceptance speech, were significant concessions for Harris, who’s spent decades rebuffing her advisers’ insistence she talk more about her personal life. (She’s seen the polling that makes clear voters want to learn more about her.)
Onstage, there was relatively little detailed talk of policy proposals and more of Project 2025. “The challenge with Joe Biden is he was very keen on running on what he had done rather than on what he wanted to do. The American people always want to know what you are going to do for me tomorrow and the next day, not just a pat on the back for what you’ve done,” said Polis. Instead, just about every speech and performance after Biden’s swan song shared an underpinning: It’s time for a new political era. Or, as Harris put it, complete with capitalization on her teleprompter, “a New Way Forward.”
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