Democratic Convention Wrap-Up: 16 Years Later, It's Still Obama's Party

A few notes on the week the Democrats just had in Chicago:

1. 20 years after his national emergence as a keynote speaker at the 2004 convention, and 16 years after he won his first presidential nomination, Barack Obama remains the defining face of the contemporary Democratic Party. The 2024 convention demonstrated the potency of Obama's legacy in three major respects.

• On policy: the convention presented Harris as a center-left candidate in the Obama mold, consistently liberal on both economic and cultural issues but not doctrinaire in manner and maintaining a quiet distance from the Sanders/Warren "progressive revolution" platform that some observers have viewed as a harbinger of the party's future. The convention programming consistently emphasized practical incrementalism over ideological transformation. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's speech on Monday night did not take a distinct ideological tack from the rest of the party, and nobody was in the mood to stir up factional conflict.

• On representation: Obama's demonstration that white voters in swing states could support a person of another race for high political office (not at all an obvious assumption when he first ran for president in 2008) has, in the years since his election, unlocked the door to a steadily widening stream of non-white candidates who have sharply increased the demographic diversity of the Democratic Party's, and the nation's, leadership. Harris is, of course, a beneficiary of this trailblazing, but the convention stage this week was occupied at various points by many other Obama legatees: Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, Wes Moore, Angela Alsobrooks, Ruben Gallego, Hakeem Jeffries, Catherine Cortez Masto, Andy Kim, and so on. But like Obama, Harris prefers not to invoke her race (and gender) explicitly in a cry for historical justice, but instead assumes that voters will notice it anyway and hopes that they view it as a symbol of positive change.

• On tone: Obama has made it unmistakably clear over the years that he doesn't like self-righteous, scolding, negative-affect political rhetoric, and he thinks it's politically counterproductive when it comes from the left. His address on Tuesday night echoed this point, albeit indirectly enough to ensure that "Obama trashes wokeness" wouldn't be the big media story of the evening. Harris obviously agrees. Her acceptance speech last night, as well as the bulk of the speeches over the four nights of the convention, were welcoming to non-progressives and explicitly presented a positive and patriotic view of the country, complete with repeated "USA" chants and signs in the crowd. This is not "1619 Project" progressivism, portraying the country as enduringly shamed by its history of injustice; this is instead a reaffirmation of Obama's preferred framing of the United States as a nation that can be proud of the racial progress that it has made and of the example that its multicultural democracy can now offer the world.

2. Harris is clearly a fan of short speeches. Since starting her campaign, she's tended to speak at her public rallies for only about 20 minutes ot so. Last night's speech was 37 minutes long, which turns out to be the shortest acceptance address since Walter Mondale's in 1984 (not counting Biden's in 2020, which had no in-person audience due to the pandemic and hence no breaks for applause). This offers a contrast with her opponent, who has delivered the three longest acceptance speeches in history. In a digital age of shrinking attention spans, perhaps Harris sees strategic value in relative brevity.

3. Of course, a shorter speech means leaving some things out. Harris's autobiographical narrative emphasized her experience as a prosecutor and attorney general but skipped over her tenure as vice president almost entirely. The reason is clear—with Biden's approval ratings hovering around 40 percent, she needs to win over some Biden critics and has decided to present herself as a new face in politics, unburdened by what has been. But this isn't a risk-free strategy. She also needs voters to view her as qualified for the presidency, and discussing her vice presidential experience could be helpful in passing that test.

4. In general, journalists don't like conventions all that much. For them, being stuck in a crowded arena while a parade of politicians deliver partisan boilerplate for hour after hour is boring and annoying; the excitement among the press corps provoked by the (false) rumor that Beyonce might made a surprise appearance at last night's session partially reflected media members' lack of interest in the people who were actually on the schedule. But for citizens who aren't already saturated in politics every day, the conventions can serve as a useful window into the political world. A non-expert who spends an hour or so watching both parties' conventions will usually get a pretty good picture of each side's main messages and how they differ. Conventions are also important for the internal operations of the parties as complex political organizations—a quadrennial national gathering of top leaders and activists where information can be shared, relationships can be built, and party business can be settled. Conventions, much more than debates, are truly essential milestone events during every presidential campaign, and they shouldn't be judged only by the superficial entertainment value of every speaker at the podium.

What the Tim Walz Pick Tells Us About Kamala Harris

Every four years, public speculation about the identity of the vice presidential nominees tends to focus on governors or senators from competitive states that may hold a pivotal position in the electoral college. But almost every time, presidential candidates wind up choosing running mates who don’t come from electoral battlegrounds. This should be a clue that presidential candidates don’t place as much emphasis on the potential ability to deliver a home state as conventional wisdom assumes. But that raises the question of what they do value in a VP, and why.

The 2024 Democratic veepstakes threw this puzzle into especially sharp relief. An unusual number of the party’s supposed current rising stars represent presidential swing states, including Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Arizona senator Mark Kelly, and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. With an extremely narrow margin in the national polls and a uniquely truncated timeline for settling on a running mate, it seemed natural to many in Washington that Kamala Harris would turn to one of these prominent figures to enhance her chances of building an electoral vote majority. But she opted instead for Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who was not nationally well-known before his selection and who comes from a state that Democrats were already favored to win. Once again, a presidential candidate passed over the battleground states when selecting a VP.

There are four main reasons why this pattern tends to happen.

1. Running mates can’t be counted on to deliver their home states. It’s unclear from the evidence exactly how much of an electoral bonus a party can expect to receive from selecting a home-state VP, but it’s likely to be no more than a couple of percentage points under the most favorable circumstances. The idea that a swing state can be “locked up” by putting its governor or senator on the ticket is simply a myth. Some advocates of Shapiro’s selection argued that there is a non-minimal probability that this year’s election could come down to a few thousand ballots in Pennsylvania, and that even a modest “friends and neighbors” vote for him might therefore decide the entire election. There’s logic to this argument, but it’s still hard for campaigns to game out the probabilities; if running mates could guarantee a 5-point bounce in their home states, presidential candidates’ calculations would undoubtedly be different. According to CNN reporting, the Harris campaign decided from its own polling that putting Shapiro on the ticket would not provide enough of an advantage to justify his selection.

2. Presidential candidates think in terms of voting groups, not individual states. Presidential candidates need to win multiple swing states, not just one. This encourages them to focus on the potential ability of a running mate to attract specific subgroups of voters located across the entire electoral battleground. Donald Trump selected the pious Mike Pence not to win over people from Indiana (he was already assured of carrying the state) but instead to motivate conservative evangelicals whether they lived in Florida or Pennsylvania or Iowa; Barack Obama picked the experienced Joe Biden to reassure persuadable voters across every geographic region that he would be well-equipped to govern if elected. This year, the Harris campaign clearly hopes that Walz’s plain-spoken, regular-guy persona will help them limit the desertion of working-class whites that has endangered the Democratic Party’s competitiveness in exurbs and small towns from coast to coast over the past two decades.

3. The party has its say too. The last thing that presidential nominees want in the heat of an electoral campaign is an internal fight within their party. To this end, they aim to select a running mate that will inspire unity and enthusiasm across all major party factions. In addition, they seek insider intelligence about various potential choices that will help them avoid choosing someone who turns out to have a major political or personal fault. Extensive consultation with other key party actors helps them achieve these goals. As I argued in my piece four years ago about Biden’s selection of Harris, Biden’s lifelong instinct to act as a loyal creature of the Democratic Party mainstream made him very sensitive to pressure from other Democrats to add a woman of color to his ticket—and convinced him that Harris in particular was the best choice. This year, it seems clear that Walz had an active chorus of internal proponents, especially among House Democrats who knew him well from his six terms of congressional service between 2007 and 2018, that Shapiro couldn’t match. Like Biden, Harris appears to solicit and value input from peers in pursuit of a unified party, and it’s likely that these voices in her ear helped convince her to settle on Walz.

4. Presidential candidates want governing partners, not just campaigning partners. Our perpetually election-obsessed political world may only be thinking about the VP selection in terms of its potential effect on the outcome in November, but presidential candidates are also envisioning what life might look like after they win. It’s only natural that a nominee with vice presidential experience of her own will have especially strong preferences about what kind of vice president she would like to have. And personal chemistry is a legitimate consideration; tension between the president and vice president is in nobody’s interest. Multiple news reportssuggest that Walz won out over Shapiro and Kelly in part because he clicked better with Harris and her staff, and because he struck her as someone who would be a more loyal member of her administration (Walz apparently said that he held no ambitions of his own to become president).

So what picture of Kamala Harris emerges from the VP selection process? In general, she acted like a typical presidential nominee—who cared more about appealing to an electoral subgroup than trying to target a particular battleground state, who was responsive to feedback from other members of her party, and who prized personal compatibility as well as electoral strategy. But that doesn’t mean that she made the right choice. The historical record of success in vice presidential selection is rather mixed, and she was denied the usual benefit of having several months after locking up the nomination to gather information and weigh alternatives. But even well-chosen running mates are valuable less for the modest number of voters they might attract than for their ability to share the heavy burden of governing if victory is achieved.