Democrats Pulled Off A Successful Convention Despite Themselves

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

That’s A Wrap

What remains most striking about this week’s Democratic convention is that they pulled it off despite switching presumptive nominees four weeks before it started.

By any measure, it was a competent and well-run convention that kept the focus on the nominee and the election ahead while catalyzing the energy and enthusiasm of the party base. But by the measure of what they were up against with a last-minute candidate change, it was an extraordinary tableau, one without any real historical parallel. Nothing remotely like this has happened before in the modern TV-era of politics. Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal in 1968 was months before the (cataclysmic) Democratic convention.

But there’s another level of finesse and derring-do here by convention organizers, the Harris campaign, and the party itself. There’s a cost to being a coalition party. Decision making is often collaborative and diffuse and therefore slow. The party is structured to disperse power and influence, in marked contrast to the very top-down GOP. If the Republican Party is run like a military unit or a corporation, the Democratic Party is run like a church bake sale committee.

That makes any change of direction, unexpected difficulties, or even basic logistical problems hard to address quickly and decisively. There are no quick turns in Democratic politics. But despite all of those structural, cultural, and temperamental obstacles, they defied the odds and pulled it off.

Must Watch

If you watch only one portion of Kamala Harris’ acceptance speech, make it this one:

Harris: In many ways Donald Trump is an unserious man, but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious…he tried to throw away your votes. When he failed, he sent an armed mob to the Capitol where they assaulted law enforcement officers pic.twitter.com/muKQlUGMfe

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 23, 2024

In another section, she explicitly affirmed “America’s fundamental principles, from the rule of law to free and fair elections to the peaceful transfer of power.”

Best Line Of The Night

Kamala Harris: “Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable because he wants to be an autocrat himself.”

The Full Speech

You can read the transcript here.

Reaction To The Speech

• Josh Marshall: “I doubt her advisors and press people thought it could have gone much better. … The most telling comments were those from Republican commentators who couldn’t find their way around saying that it was a strong speech before, of course, reassuring listeners that Harris is obviously terrible and they agree with her about nothing.”
• Susan Glasser: “In a speech that ran close to forty minutes, Harris more than met the moment, offering her rejuvenated party a vision for winning in 2024 that was pragmatic enough to sound possible and inspiring enough to mark the address as the most consequential of her career.”
• John Harwood: “Trump has taken Republicans so far off the deep end as to leave the American mainstream wide open Harris and Democrats spent this effective convention claiming it – on broadly-shared values, on decency, on love of country.”

Just The Cutest

So Much For That Whole Special Guest Thing

The rampant rumor that a special guest was scheduled for a supposedly empty 15-minute block on the last night of the Democratic convention took on a life of its own. In the end, there was no special guest. No Beyoncé. No Taylor Swift. No George W. Bush. No Melania Trump. (Okay, I made up that last one.) Here’s one effort to find the origin of the rumor, but it’s not really clear where it came from or why TMZ thought it had confirmation.

Chicago 2024 Was Not Chicago 1968

Despite considerable handwringing internally among Democrats and anticipatory media coverage for months ahead of time, Chicago did not collapse into the chaos of violent protests and civil unrest during the Democratic convention. The pro-Palestinian protestors who did show up came in fewer numbers than they had hoped for and remained mostly peaceful.

Trump Tries To Counter-Program Harris Speech

A very agitated Donald Trump spent Harris’ acceptance speech furiously posting random outbursts to social media then called into friendly TV networks to give his own meandering reviews of his opponent’s performance.

On The Trail

• Good Riddance: RFK Jr. is expected to end his presidential campaign in Arizona today, with the expectation that he will endorse Trump. In related news, Trump will have a “special guest” at his Friday rally in Glendale.
• Like A Buddy Comedy: Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. lobbied RFK Jr. to drop out and endorse Trump
• Georgia On His Mind: Groveling Trump crawls back to Gov. Brian Kemp (R).

2024 Ephemera

• Fun Fact: More people donated to the Harris campaign in its first 10 days than in the entire 15 months of the Biden campaign.
• Lessons Learned? Democratic pollsters have a warning about Kamala Harris’ lead.

SCOTUS Muddies Voting Requiements In Arizona

In a mixed-bag ruling, a divided Supreme Court allowed some parts of Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship requirements in the voting realm to remain and blocked others:

The Supreme Court left in place a lower court’s ruling that barred enforcement of the law that required voters to document their US citizenship to vote in this year’s presidential election, but it allowed the state to enforce a requirement that would-be voters document their citizenship before registering to vote using a state registration form.

In a partial win for Republicans, in other words, proof of citizenship will be required for new voters in some circumstances. Voters who cannot document their citizenship status will still be allowed to register using a federal form.

Abortion Watch

The Arkansas Supreme Court has ruled 4-3 that an abortion-rights ballot initiative failed to follow the required procedures to make it on the November ballot, leading to some preening by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R).

A special TPM addendum: The case was brought by state Attorney General Tim Griffin, whose name should ring a bell. Way back when, Griffin was among the first of the Bush II loyalists — he’d been a White House aide to Karl Rove — to be installed as a U.S. attorney in the 2006-07 U.S. attorney scandal that led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.

Iceland Is At It Again

A new four-kilometer long fissure unzipped Thursday on Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula, unleashing effusive lava flows in the same general area as the series of eruptions that have occurred since December. The bulk of the lava is flowing away from the evacuated town of Grindavik.

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