DNC unites around 3 core themes

Jon Lieverhead of research at Eurasia Group and managing director of U.S. political and policy coverage, shares his perspective on American politics from the DNC in Chicago.

What we follow in American politics: The common thread during the Democratic National Convention.

I’m here in Chicago for the third night of the Democratic National Convention, where vice presidential nominee Tim Walz gave a speech tonight at the United Center.

There are a couple of big themes that I’ve noticed in this convention so far. The first is the attempt to focus on Donald Trump only thinking about himself. This is something that you’ve heard Pete Buttigieg talk about, it’s something that you’ve heard Bill Clinton talk about, and it seems like this is an emerging big theme for Democrats to hammer home, which is that Donald Trump doesn’t really care about America that much. He cares about himself. So that’s something that you’re going to hear a lot about going forward.

The second thing is that the Democrats are trying to reclaim “freedom” as a concept and as a term that actually aligns more with their values ​​than what they call Republican values. And this is something that Tim Walz has talked about a lot, you’ve heard Michelle Obama talk about it, you’ve heard Oprah Winfrey talk about it. Freedom is about people being free from government interfering in what goes on in their bedroom or in their doctor’s office, of course pointing to social policies where Democrats and Republicans have major differences; and trying to flip the script on decades of political rhetoric about who is the party of freedom. So that’s another thing that you should expect to hear a lot about in the coming weeks and months.

The third big theme of this convention so far has been celebrating Kamala Harris’s history as a prosecutor. This isn’t really something we heard a lot about in the 2020 campaign; maybe because of the George Floyd riots that were happening at the same time, and the fact that a lot of Democrats were becoming openly skeptical of police and policing. But now, four years later, where crime is a growing issue in the political discourse, and you have a lot of attention on Harris’s history as a prosecutor; they’re talking about her prosecution of transnational drug gangs, her prosecution of people like Donald Trump, who of course now has felony convictions in his past.

So, those are three themes that we’ve heard so far at the Democratic National Convention, and I think we’re going to hear a lot more of them over the next 74 days. On the fourth night, Kamala Harris will make her own pitch for why she should be president. And of course, the Chicago crowd will be euphoric and jubilant. But the real question here is: Do these messages resonate with the moderate voters that they need to win?

So, thanks for watching. We’ll be in Chicago tomorrow and we’ll see you then.