Unity, Millennial Cringe, And Overwhelming Relief Abound at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
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We hereby call the in-person portion of the 49th Quadrennial Democratic National Convention to order. The 2024 Democratic National Convention is in full swing. As Vice President Kamala Harris prepares to officially accept her party's nomination, the Democratic Party has put together a packed schedule for convention.

The convention kicked off Monday night with a keynote speech from President Joe Biden, who dropped out of the race last month. She'll be a president we can all be proud of. And she will be a historic president who puts her stamp on America's future. With just 75 days until the election, will Harris be able to maintain her very new campaign's momentum in the broadest spotlight yet?

I spoke with my colleague, New Yorker staff writer Andrew Morantz, who was on the ground in Chicago reporting on the sights, sounds and broader implications of the DNC. You're listening to The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. Hey, Andrew. Hey. Thanks so much for being here. Yeah, it's a lovely morning in Chicago, and the vibes are pretty, I don't know, exciting, unified.

Yeah, definitely excited. That's great. I'm sure that's exactly what the party wants to hear right now. Yeah, there's a lot of unity buttons and unified party merch. And so far, so good, I guess, from that perspective. So the lead up to this convention has been...

atypical, to say the least. You've got Trump's felony conviction and the attempt on his life, you know, just thinking about the Republican side. And then on the Democratic side, you have the fact that Kamala Harris took over the top of the ticket just a month ago. How do you think that this tumultuous summer has affected the party's strategy going into the DNC? Yeah, it has certainly been atypical and like in many ways unprecedented, which is a word that people throw around. But having a

Being doing a little reading on the history of this stuff, I think it's totally fair. I mean, the most immediate way it's affected the convention here is is just that there's this palpable sense of relief from like every Democrat you talk to, you know, conventions are always pep rallies. They're always about cheering on the nominee.

And in fact, in the modern era, that's the only real reason they exist, right? Because the actual nomination happened over Zoom. So it's mostly just, you know, for TV pep rally purposes. But in this one, there does seem to be this other kind of subtext, which is like, can the Democratic Party pull itself back together after, you know, this moment of sort of near crisis that it faced in July when, you

Biden had that debate and it wasn't clear whether he was going to proceed or step down. And so, yeah, the number one you get from everyone from floor delegates to strategist people to just, you know, man on the street type people is, oh, my God, this was such a nightmare a month ago. And now it feels like a dream.

So we're speaking on Tuesday morning right now. The first day of the convention was yesterday, and we got a bunch of big speeches last night. And I'm wondering if you can just talk a little bit about what the biggest moments from last night were from your perspective as someone who was in the room kind of, you know, feeding off of the energy, seeing who was coming on stage. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I wish I could say I was entirely feeding off the energy. I was falling asleep. Yeah. Falling asleep, distractedly running around. I mean, you know, many, many people said and I was one of them. If I am this tired, like how is the 81 year old president going to stay up this late? Yeah. I mean, one thing that stuck out immediately was Hillary Clinton's speech. She was kind of, you know, the big headliner other than Biden last night. And she

The sort of moment that stuck out to me was when Brave by Sara Bareilles started playing. And I couldn't I mean, I'm so glad you mentioned Hillary Clinton's speech because I I was kind of having like war flashbacks when she when she walked on stage. There's a lot of energy in this room, just like there is across the country.

That was like another data point in the downfall of Katy Perry, right? Because I was thinking it's either going to be that or Roar and Katy Perry gets passed over once again. Yeah, I just wasn't sure how she was going to be received, right? Thinking as an outsider, I think of Hillary Clinton as the person who lost, right?

But inside that room with the party faithful, she was like hometown hero. Like they loved her in that room. Well, she's the person who cracked the glass ceiling so that Kamala can then, you know, destroy it. Right. Right. Exactly. She put a few cracks in it. She's she's, you know, beautiful.

one of the stars in the firmament of the party. So I think that's kind of easy to forget. I mean, she got a huge ovation. She also was very much in like pugilistic. She was not in the mode of when they go low, we go high. She was, you know, people she talked about Trump's felony convictions at one point and people started chanting, lock him up. And I sort of thought, OK, well, she's got a choice here. You know, how does she receive this? Her choice was to nod and smile. Yeah.

Yes. And that was immediately notable. And I sort of thought, I wonder what Fox News is going to do with this. And then I got a Fox News alert about it about 45 seconds later. So, you know, she's kind of playing into that red meat stuff. For the rest of the night, there was a little bit of a good cop, bad cop routine, you know, where Raphael Warnock or AOC or, you know, the various speakers would kind of try to paint the scene.

sort of optimistic, future-oriented vision. And then they'd go off stage and then there would be a video, an interstitial thing that was all about, you know, Donald Trump is a convicted felon, you know, and they would kind of try to keep that division somewhat clean. And Hillary was not having it.

I want to talk a little bit about Biden's speech because he also spoke on Monday night. And I got to say, it's kind of weird to me that this was initially going to be his convention. And now you have him speaking on the first night and reportedly leaving before Harris formally accepts the nomination. And I'm wondering how that works.

reality has affected this, you know, this atmosphere of unity. Just the idea that you have this sitting U.S. president who is speaking on the first night and kind of ditching. And now we get the Obamas and Bill Clinton. And it just seems like in another world, he would have been, you know, the person like introducing Kamala. Yeah. Our colleague Evan Osnos already wrote a piece about this, which is really excellent. And this is what I mean when I say it actually is unprecedented.

There have been other, obviously, incumbent presidents who didn't run. The most obvious is LBJ, Lyndon Johnson in 1968. But he didn't show up at that convention, which was also in Chicago. He kind of ran it from behind the scenes and was in touch with Mayor Daley and stuff, but he didn't show up and give some big valedictory speech. FDR showed up at the 1932 convention in Chicago in person. That was the first time

that anyone accepted a nomination in person. And it was seen as this huge scandal because like it was so ambitious and, you know, personally aggrandizing, right? It used to be that you had to like pretend that you just received a letter that said you are our nominee for the party. So to have the president come and acknowledge I'm not running, but I, you know, am proud of my record. It was just a kind of tough rhetorical balancing act.

especially because he's still the president. So it's just a little weird to say goodbye, but also I'm going to try to solve peace in the Middle East within the next five months. Do you think he pulled it off, the balancing act?

I think so. Evan made this point that, you know, when he stumbled over a word or something, it wasn't like, oh, my God, you know, terror in the audience because this man has to be our candidate. It was, oh, he's getting a nice send off. So I think in that sense, he did. I mean, you know, I felt bad for the guy. They had literally dozens of speakers before him. They even cut James Taylor and they were still way over time. So they didn't get him out there till way, way late in the night.

But he's always like a lot of politicians have their personal narrative, but he's always been very, very leaned very heavily on his personal narrative. His daughter introduced him. He came out in tears because his daughter's speech was, you know, that had moved him. And so in that personal sense, I think he got sort of the moment.

he wanted and he gave, you know, I think to people who needed that kind of like personal psychological closure, I think he achieved that. I don't think he papered over every gap or every policy question or, you know, how is his administration's policy in the Middle East going to differ from Harris's or anything like that. But that's not really the purpose of a speech like this.

I'm curious whether there were any major players in the room who were still mad about, you know, Biden dropping out of the race or kind of being encouraged to drop out of the race. I mean, I've been seeing a lot of quotes from Nancy Pelosi, who is clearly very pleased at how things have worked out. But did you sense any like angry Biden lifers in the room?

Yeah, they were there. You know, it's the moment of priority unity, right? So you're not going to hear that from the stage, certainly. But if you scratch the surface a little bit, the Biden dead enders are still there. You know, I was stopped at one of the concession stands to get some chicken tenders, and I was eating them next to a Florida delegate who said, you know, I'm sad that it's not the president up there, you know, accepting the nomination. And he said, you know, just like Ronald Reagan, he would have won a second term. He was like,

happy to vote for Harris and everything. But it was sort of like all the stuff that was this avalanche of evidence that had convinced Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and eventually Joe Biden that it was time for him to bow out, just like did not land with this

delegate. He was just like, that's my guy. That should have been my nominee. And I think there were a bunch of people like that in the room. And I think probably there's a part of Joe Biden that feels that way. I mean, there's no way to know, but the reporting suggests that he still thinks he could have won despite all the evidence. And so, as I say, a convention is like a pep rally, right? So you're kind of supposed to be

almost unrealistically optimistic. And so I think there's a fine line for a group like the Democratic Party to walk between unbridled optimism no matter what. And we don't believe in polls and we're just going to keep marching forward no matter what.

Absolutely. Andrew, I want to talk to you a little bit about the DNC as a television spectacle and some of the more entertainment-focused aspects of it. But first, we're going to take a quick break. You'll hear more of the political scene from The New Yorker in just a moment. I'm David Remnick, host of The New Yorker Radio Hour.

There's nothing like finding a story you can really sink into that lets you tune out the noise and focus on what matters. In print or here on the podcast, The New Yorker brings you thoughtfulness and depth and even humor that you can't find anywhere else. So please join me every week for The New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

So one of the things I found kind of interesting about the DNC so far, just as someone who was watching from home and reading about it from home, is the sort of the social media aspect of it and all of the influencers who have been invited to speak at the convention. There was this influencer, Deja Fox, who's a 24-year-old reproductive rights activist. I was a free lunch kid raised in public housing, and I got my health care done

That planned parenthood. And there was a little bit of this at the RNC, too, sort of using people from social media and Internet celebrities to appeal to the youths. But I'm curious what you thought of Fox's speech, if you caught it, and what you think about the broader approach that the Democrats are taking here with kind of enlisting these influencers who have millions of followers on TikTok and Instagram. Yeah, she I was like.

on the floor actually when she was giving that speech and it was really disorienting because she was the one speech that didn't happen from the stage. So I could hear her and see her, but I was like, where is she? I was looking at the stage and then I looked over and she was like five feet away from me on the floor. And I just was so disoriented that I didn't know. It was like in the Grammys when they like pull someone out of the audience to sing and you know, but since the Obama administration

I think that Democrats have tried to recognize that, you know, content creators are the wave of the future and stuff, but it's just a little tricky for them to figure out how to be on message without being on message. You know what I mean? Like sort of the point of being a social media influencer is that you can go rogue and you can have this kind of authentic relationship with your audience and, you

if you're an officially sanctioned DNC speaker, that's not the deal, right? You can't go rogue and then be invited back into the party fold. So there's just always a bit of a dance there where it's like you have a little bit of this

astroturf feeling of like, how much are you authentically speaking your mind when you are like everyone else here, you know, running your speech by the people before you give it. But look, I mean, I think it's just one of those things where if they didn't have a media row with, you know, YouTube content creators and podcasters and all that stuff, it would just be completely weird at this point. So I think like many things the Democrats do, I think they're

content with being not quite on the bleeding edge of, you know, how spicy and edgy they can be. And like all the coconut memes and brat memes and a million other things, I think they're comfortable being a little cringe and being a couple of months behind the curve. And that tends to work for them. I mean, I think cringe wins votes more than edgy does.

At least if you're an Democrat. So in addition to all of the social media influencers, the DNC has also brought in these celebrity hosts to sort of like emcee each night. Like last night's was Tony Goldwyn. And then we're going to get... Tony Goldwyn, which is surprising. Like, couldn't they get George Clooney? Like, he clearly was on board with the Cannibals. I know. Yeah. And we have like Mindy Kaling and Kerry Washington. There's a kind of like a millennial flake.

flavor to some of these celebrities. And we've been told that there are these other big names on the schedule like John Legend. And if you think about the celebrities, you know, celebrities in quotes who appeared at the RNC, you had like

Like the UFC CEO Dana White and Hulk Hogan and then Amber Rose, you know, Kanye's ex-girlfriend and I believe a rapper and model in her own right. And what do you think about the Republicans leaning on more niche celebrities and then the Democrats leaning on mainstream celebrities who still in some ways kind of have that cringe millennial thing going on?

Totally. Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned millennial flavor because that is my MC name. So I just want to plug all my socials. Yeah, I think there's always been a kind of structural imbalance right between, you know, Hollywood being way more heavily Democratic. And so you always had this kind of star power thing, you know, going back to the Will. I am Obama video and the

imagine video with Gaga Doe. And I mean, these things have always sort of skewed liberal. And so I think the Republican strategy for many years has been to just take whoever they can get. You know, it's like

we'll just run a ragtag crew with Vince Vaughn and Jon Voight and, you know, call it a day. But I was thinking about this almost the inverse last night because, you know, the most kind of peak celebrity culture moment at the RNC, of course, was Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt. And I said, let Trumpomania run wild, brother. Let Trumpomania rule again. Let Trumpomania make America great again.

Thank you.

And the closest analog we got to that last night was Sean Fain, the head of the UAW, quoting the great American poet Nelly and saying, it's getting hot in here, and then taking off his jacket to reveal a Trump is a scab T-shirt. It's hot in here because you're fired up and you're fed up and the American working class is fired up and fed up. So in a way, that's kind of like going toe to toe with the kind of, you know, pop culture, bravado, macho energy.

In another way, it's like, OK, if if one sort of top celebrity is Hulk Hogan and another top celebrity is this like big union leader, you know, that sort of is it makes it seem like at least in that instance, the Democrats are not just leaning on, you know, sort of celebrity glamour. They're leaning on this powerful interest based union workers.

I'm wondering if we can talk for a little bit about what's going on outside the convention hall. For weeks, we've been hearing about the possibility of widespread demonstrations in Chicago over the U.S.'s support of Israel and the war in Gaza. And I'm wondering what those protests have looked like so far to the extent that you've been able to see them.

I know they're happening a little bit further away from the convention center. And what it's like if people are talking about them inside the convention or whether they're just kind of being ignored.

Yeah, people are definitely aware of it. And, you know, we mentioned 1968 that has loomed. I mean, you and I talked about this last fall, the parallel of 1968. So that has been looming the entire time. I stopped by, I think it was Grant Park, and checked out the beginnings of the protest. And the day before I went down there, they were having a press conference.

It's definitely a thing. There were a few thousand people there. And, you know, Chicago is the most Palestinian American city in the U.S. There's people have descended, you know, from various places, but it's not so far at least an unavoidable presence. It's not like the first thing on everyone's lips when they walked into the United Center was like, oh, my God, can you believe the protests? I mean, it's.

Some of that is by design, right, because the city didn't let them get close enough. And there was this ongoing court battle over where the root of the march was going to be for precisely this reason. But.

So far, there hasn't been. There are uncommitted delegates inside the arena, and I've been spending time with them, too. There are 30 delegates out of 4,000-something, and they're definitely a presence. They got their delegates, and people know about them, and they're talking to other delegates and trying to get them to sign ceasefire pledges and stuff. But

it doesn't have this sort of constant walking on eggshells feeling. I mean, I think people are definitely like a lot of tightly stage managed political events. People are a little bit on pins and needles whenever something unscripted happens. But so far, at least there hasn't been anything alarming. I'm glad you mentioned the uncommitted delegates. I'd actually like to talk more about the tensions between the left and the moderate wings of the party. But first, we're going to take another quick break. We'll hear more of the political scene from The New Yorker in just a moment.

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So I feel like one of the, I guess maybe like the elephant in the room here is just the fact that there was no real primary. And, you know, this idea of there being a reckoning among the various factions of the party and, you know, opportunities to move Kamala Harris further to the left or to get her to kind of shift her position on something that didn't really happen in the way that it kind of organically does during the primary. And so I'm wondering how much of that conversation is happening now. Yeah.

And whether that's part of what this convention is about or not, really, since the whole point is unity and not factions. Yeah, for sure. Well, that's something I've been tracking for a while. The question of what is a party, right? Because you have the top down, you know, if you're, I don't know, Jamie Harrison, the head of the DNC or someone like that. Sure, what you want the agenda to be is unity, but the party is not just unity.

that person, the party is all the delegates and all the other people who have influence. And some of those people are people who want to push the party to the left. I mean, one thing, you know, so I've been asking a lot of people about what made it possible for Biden to step aside and that kind of pressure campaign. And one of the things they said sort of counterintuitively was that it was almost harder to get him to step aside because it wasn't an ideological divide.

In other words, you know, in 68, you could point to now there were other factors with Johnson in 68 and his age was one of them. But you could always just say, look, people are too upset about the war. This is not tenable. And with Biden, there was no issue. You could point to no singular issue. Not Gaza.

Well, so there obviously is the war in Gaza, but it wasn't like there was an anti-war candidate. Yeah. The strength. You didn't have a McCarthy or an RFK. You had an RFK, but not an anti-war one. So the anti-war movement was kind of decentralized. Right. It was, you know, people voting uncommitted, but it wasn't, you know, around a candidate. And now you still have that. But you have Harris stepping in.

And so there's this, it actually reminds me a fair amount of Hubert Humphrey in 1968, because Humphrey comes in, gets the Democratic nomination, but he's a little bit high bound because he is Johnson's vice president. Humphrey is ostensibly to the left of Johnson on the war. I mean, he is to the left of Johnson on the question of the war, but he can't really come out and say it, or he feels like he can't because he's still part of the administration.

It's a huge question in the campaign. Where is Humphrey going to land on the Vietnam War? And eventually he makes his sort of break with Johnson. But it's really late in the campaign. It's September 30th. And there are some historians who think that if he had made that break earlier, he could have won. That's obviously contested. And so the question then, if you're Harris, is what do you learn from that? Right. Do you try to make some big break with the administration over Gaza? Is that even possible?

if you're still part of the administration. There are people who think she is trying to do that, right? She had her separate meeting with Netanyahu, separate from Biden's meeting. She didn't agree to be in the Senate chamber when Netanyahu was giving his joint address. She's clearly trying to create some distance and her tone seems to be different. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering of

And I will not be silent. There are obviously some activists who don't really care if her tone is different. You know, that's not at all sufficient to their demands. But there are others who actually do think that matters a lot. And she has shown more interest in hearing from them and meeting with them. And I think they've always seen her as a little bit more sympathetic. And the question is just, was she a little more sympathetic because she could afford to be because she wasn't the president or not?

Was that a sort of genuine difference in, you know, Biden's sort of in his bones, Zionism, as he calls it, and Harris's approach. So I think it's sort of wait and see. It's wait and see how she defines that issue on the campaign trail. And then if she's president, what she does as president. And there's also just a larger sort of meta question of like, will she want to foreground this at all or will she just want to try to make it

less and less salient and just talk about, you know, brat and jobs and just other stuff that's more fun for her to talk about. Yeah. I mean, to what extent do you anticipate her bringing this up in her remarks on Thursday night? I would not.

anticipated much at all. That's just not the vibe to. Yeah. Yeah. It's just not. I mean, if you go back to the debate that kicked this whole saga off, in addition to Biden being, you know, seeming disoriented and all the things we know,

One of the things that people really fixated on was one answer where he pivoted from his best issue to his worst issue, right? There was a question about abortion, which Democrats see as one of their most popular issues. And Biden took that answer and immediately started talking about immigration and like invasion from the southern border. And that was, I think, a big moment when a lot of Democratic insiders were like, what the hell is this guy doing?

And I bring that up just to say that, you know, a convention acceptance speech where the balloons are about to drop is, I think, a moment. I mean, we'll see. But I think that's the moment when you only want to talk about good vibes. You only want to talk about hope and change in the future. And there might be one moment the way there was in Biden's State of the Union where she says ceasefire. I mean, I could imagine her saying the word ceasefire, but I don't think she's going to want to dwell on that.

You mentioned earlier that you've been speaking with some of the uncommitted delegates. From my understanding, there are 30 of them representing almost a million people who voted uncommitted in protest of U.S. support of Israel. Now that Kamala Harris is the nominee or is the candidate for the Democratic Party, I mean, how has that changed things for these uncommitted delegates? I mean, what are you hearing from them about her? Has this changed their calculations at all?

Yeah, I think it has. I mean, there are sort of outside protesters who don't care, you know, genocide, Joe killer Kamala, you know, it's all the same. But the uncommitted delegates I'm talking to don't have that calculus. I mean, I think they're very attuned to the fact that Harris as vice president was talking about a ceasefire before Biden was. I mean, those things matter to them a lot. So, yeah.

My guess is that they're going to ask for some kind of concession from her. I don't know exactly what that could be or would be, but I think if you're a, you know, agitator, you know, sort of inside outside political strategy person, you want to feel that you have someone there.

on the inside who will listen to you and who you can agitate for. You hear this from AOC and those type of people a lot. You don't vote for the person you necessarily agree with 100%. You vote for the adversary you want to have who you can push while they're in office. And so I think that's the sort of paradigm that people are going to be looking for with Harris. It's like they've

They felt like they were shut out of the Biden administration. They weren't being listened to. Biden made up his mind about how he feels about Israel policy years ago, and they're hoping that they can have some kind of fresh canvas. I think realistically, they know they're not going to get everything they want out of a Harris administration. But I think the hope is that they'll be able to keep agitating.

You mentioned AOC, and I'd like to talk about her a little bit since she also spoke on Monday night. You know, one of the things about these conventions, in addition to being, you know, television spectacles that sort of rally the party and they rally the voters, they're also star-making vehicles. Like, I still think about Obama's convention speech back in 2004, which was when I first became aware of him.

And AOC spoke last night before Biden, and I believe her speech ran for seven minutes, which was a significant upgrade from her appearance at the convention in 2020 when I think she spoke for 90 seconds. And I'm curious what you think that the scheduling of the speech tells us about her standing among Democrats and what you thought of the speech since, I mean, my feeling, you know, from watching the way that people reacted to her and just like

What social media was like online afterward was that she just got the crowd incredibly energized. Yes, the crowd seemed into her for sure. But, you know, the crowd also seemed to be really into Raphael Warnock's speech and really into Jasmine Crockett's speech. They're into everything. Yeah.

Yeah, kind of everything. I would say Chris Coons didn't completely light up the room, but... Hochul, too. That was tough. Yeah. But, you know, as I say, it's a pep rally. But look, I think the whole question with someone like AOC is, do you want to be an insider or an outsider? And clearly, last night, she seemed like an insider, right? Again, you can see where my head is at because I keep thinking, you know, sort of this...

larger theoretical question of what is a party, I think in a like properly functioning big tent party, you kind of have to have ideological opponents being in the same room and all feeling like insiders, right? If you, at least in an American sort of two-party system, big tent party, you

you kind of that's the tension you have to be able to hold. If everyone has the same basic ideology completely, then you're not doing the function of a of a of an accommodationist party. If everyone is completely so divergent and all over the map that they don't agree on anything, then what are you? AOC has said in the past, if if we lived in a parliamentary system

I would be in a different party from people like Joe Manchin or even Joe Biden. And then we saw, you know, her sort of political calculus swing from that to being one of Biden's staunchest defenders when he was trying to hold on to the nomination. So I think it's just one of those, you know, strange bedfellows things, but it seems to be very genuine. And she, you know, clearly went out on a limb for him. And I think there were many reasons for that, but, um,

I think one of them is just that the left of the party felt like the Biden administration was a place where they had people listening to them. And for now, at least, the left is, you know, the junior partner in the Democratic coalition. And so they kind of that's they have to take that and build on it.

Andrew, thank you so much for being here and enjoy the rest of the convention. I hope you can maybe get some sleep at some point. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. And I still am not sold on Chicago style hot dogs, but I'm going to keep trying. Andrew Morantz is a staff writer at The New Yorker. You can expect to find his latest piece after the conclusion of the DNC at newyorker.com.

This has been The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett. This episode was produced by Sam Egan and edited by Gianna Palmer with mixing by Mike Kutchman. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of global audio. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Enjoy your week, and we'll see you next Wednesday. My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for The New Yorker. I...

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