The stage is set for Kamala Harris’ party. Not everyone will be giving her a warm welcome

It was shortly after 7pm in Denver when Barack Obama took the stage at the Democratic National Convention in 2008 and marked his place in history.

There, amid the blinding flicker of flashbulbs and the joyous tears of delegates, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother became the first African-American to win the presidential nomination from a major party.

Eight years later, it was Hillary Clinton’s turn to blaze a trail – this time appearing at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia as the first-ever woman chosen to run for the White House.

Next week in Chicago, another eight years after Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump, Kamala Harris will have her own groundbreaking moment as she officially becomes this year’s Democratic presidential candidate.

In 2008, Barack Obama accepted his nomination as the leader of Democrats, with Joe Biden as his running mate.Credit: AFP

In a convention that will place the US vice president one step closer to being the first black and South Asian woman to occupy the Oval Office, Harris will formally accept her party’s nomination on Thursday night (Friday AEST), galvanising the Democratic base and offering a contrasting vision to her Republican rival.

And once it’s over, there will be a 75-day sprint to election day, marking the final stretch of an extraordinary campaign that polls suggest is still anyone’s to lose.

“We cannot lose sight of a really important fact – we are definitely running as the underdog,” Harris told a packed rally in Arizona over the weekend.

“We are out in great numbers, but we’ve got a lot of work to do. And this is going to be hard work.”

An estimated 50,000 visitors are expected to descend on Chicago for the four-day convention, including 5000 delegates, 15,000 members of the media, and 200 “content creators” from TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.

President Joe Biden will speak on Monday’s opening night (Tuesday AEST), touting his record of achievement as he passes the baton to a new generation.

“She’s going to make one hell of a president,” Biden said of his 59-year-old deputy as the pair appeared together on Thursday for the first time since he withdrew from the race a month ago.

Bill and Hillary Clinton are also set to speak during the week, as is Obama, helping to excite the crowd before Harris’ running mate Tim Walz delivers his acceptance speech for the vice-presidential nomination on Wednesday.

But while the vibe inside the United Centre convention hall will resemble a party, the area outside will be heavy with protesters angered by Harris’ ongoing support for Israel.

Just as thousands of anti-Vietnam war protesters took to the streets of Chicago at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, resulting in often violent clashes with police, thousands of demonstrators will express their outrage next week over the atrocities in Gaza.

“The people marching are the people that the Democrats claim to represent,” said Faayani Aboma Mijana, a spokesman for the March on the DNC Coalition, which takes in groups covering the labour movement, LGBTQ rights, environmentalists and criminal justice advocates, to name but a few.

A protest group marches in San Francisco on August 11 as Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at a nearby hotel.Credit: AP

“We’re marching to demand an end to the genocide and end all US aid to Israel – and our position hasn’t changed just because Biden is gone. It doesn’t matter who’s at the top of the ticket. They are all complicit.”

The shift in momentum since Biden’s departure has nonetheless been swift and seismic, with numerous polls now showing that Harris has erased Trump’s dominance by consolidating more young people, black and brown voters and independents.

A new Cook Political Report survey released this week, for instance, showed the vice president now leads Trump in five of the seven key battleground states that will decide the election: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and North Carolina.

In Georgia, a state that Democrats feared they would lose under Biden, the pair are now tied, while in Nevada, Trump still leads but Harris has reduced his margin by six points since May when the poll was last taken.

The research also shows Harris leads Trump 48 per cent to 40 per cent among independent voters (in May, Trump led Biden among independent voters by three points) while clawing back much of the Democratic base. Some of those voters had been sitting on the sidelines under Biden; others were considering voting for a third-party candidate such as Robert Kennedy Jnr, progressive activist Cornel West, or Greens leader Jill Stein.

“Now,” said Cook Political Report editor Amy Walter, “they’re coming home.”

And then there are disenfranchised conservatives who have also backed the Harris-Walz ticket.

The Republican rush to define Harris as a “radical left Liberal” makes next week all the more important for Democrats.Credit: Richard Giliberto

Last week, for instance, a “Republicans for Harris” online rally was joined by more than 70,000 people according to organisers. Among them was Olivia Troye, who worked in the Trump White House as a national security adviser for Mike Pence.

“I witnessed the destruction and chaos firsthand,” she said. “A second Trump term will bring more turmoil. As a lifelong Republican, I may not agree with Kamala Harris on everything, but I trust her to protect our freedoms, uphold the rule of law and provide steady leadership on the world stage.”

Nonetheless, Harris also faces several headwinds. Financial markets tumbled in the past fortnight amid fears the Federal Reserve has gone too far on interest rates, exacerbating the risk of taking the US economy into an avoidable recession.

According to most polls, Trump also continues to hold an advantage over the vice president on issues such as the border and immigration, inflation and the cost of living, and violent crime.

And almost a month since Biden stood down, the often-scripted vice president is coming under growing pressure to answer questions in a press conference or an interview to explain her policy positions.

“Kamala Harris wants to say she’s been an important and consequential vice president, but if you take that route, then you have to bear the brunt of your administration’s failures as well,” said Chris Nicholson, a veteran GOP consultant. “She’s going to have to thread the needle carefully.”

Donald Trump departs an event on combating antisemitism at Trump National Golf Club on Thursday.Credit: AP

Amid the Harris honeymoon, Trump – who has spent most of the 2024 election commanding the spotlight – has clearly struggled with the shift in momentum.

In a bizarre digression at the weekend, the former president even suggested that the vice president had used AI to generate photos of the crowd at a rally she headlined in Detroit last week. During a speech on the economy in North Carolina on Wednesday he branded her as “crazy” and “not smart” while mocking the way she laughs.

“I think I’m entitled to personal attacks,” he said on Thursday (Friday AEST). “Some people say: oh why don’t you be nice? But they’re not nice to ME. They want to put me in prison.”

Republicans have nonetheless begged Trump to stop obsessing over things such as Harris’ crowd sizes or her racial identity and instead focus on attacking her policies.

“You’ve gotta make this race not about personalities,” former Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy said in an interview with Fox News on Monday. “Stop questioning the size of her crowds, and start questioning her position, when it comes to: what did she do as [California] attorney general on crime? … What did she do when she was supposed to take care of the border as a tsar?”

Former presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, who endorsed Trump at the Republican National Convention last, was even more blunt with her advice.

Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley speaks during the Republican National Convention last month.Credit: AP

“Quit whining about her,” she said. “We knew it was going to be her. She’s not going to give an interview. They’re going to hold out as long as they can. That’s their right. That doesn’t mean we can’t talk about what she believes in – and we should be getting out there and doing that.”

The Republican rush to define Harris as a “radical left Liberal” makes next week all the more important for Democrats.

Typically, a political party’s national convention is used to choose a presidential nominee and update their party platform.

But Harris has already locked in the 1976 delegates she needed, and secured the nomination on August 1.

Without a challenger, she will avoid the ugly scenes that occurred in 2016, when Hillary Clinton’s convention was dominated by boos and jeers from supporters of her then-rival, Bernie Sanders, whenever her name was mentioned.

But Harris’ big moment next week is not just aimed at the die-hard Democrats, but the doubters, the disengaged and those disinclined to vote at all.

It’s essentially a prime-time chance to re-introduce herself to the American public and spell out a vision for the next four years.

“People don’t really know who she is, which is why she shot up in the polls,” said veteran political strategist Larry Sabato.

“They were just so relieved that Joe Biden stepped down and that they would have another choice, especially those who didn’t want to vote for Trump. But a convention is basically a free advertisement for five days on every channel, so she needs to use that to reinforce the good feelings people may have about her, dispel the bad ones, and give voters more information.

“Whether she can sustain the momentum is the unanswerable question,” he added. “But if she can sustain it, she’ll probably win.”

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