For more than a year, the message from President Biden was dark. The very foundations of the country were at stake in the election, he said. An American apocalypse was on the horizon if former President Donald J. Trump was re-elected.
With Mr. Biden out, and Vice President Kamala Harris now at the top of the Democratic ticket, the tone of the campaign has changed. But even amid the more joyful, optimistic vibe, protecting democracy has been front and center at the party convention this week.
Speakers onstage have sought to navigate those seemingly diverging sentiments of hope and fear, expressing optimism about the November election but also invoking attempts by Mr. Trump and his supporters to overturn the 2020 election and continuing challenges to voting rights across the country.
“Welcome to the democracy convention,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland bellowed from the podium on Monday night. “Make no mistake, a man who uses fraud, theft and violence to take power will commit any crime to keep it.”
Settling on a messaging strategy will be critical for Democrats, as the issue of democracy has quickly become one of the most pivotal in U.S. elections. A Fox News poll in June found that 88 percent of voters thought the future of American democracy was either extremely important or very important to how they would vote in November. But voters differed in how they defined their concerns. Some expressed worry about free and fair elections; others focused on defending personal rights and freedoms.
At the polls, the issue has seemed to favor Democrats. In the 2022 midterm elections, Mr. Biden led a focused attack on political extremists seeking to disrupt the democratic process, pairing the issue with abortion rights and leading to Democratic wins in several critical states. Images of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol have been fodder for attack ads produced for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot.
Still, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader, explained in an interview the challenge in framing democracy as an issue to drive voters to the polls.
“People think that it’s a given,” he said. But when put into context about how protecting democracy connects to other issues like the economy, “I don’t have any doubt that as a political issue in the campaigns, it’s a winner,” he said.
Mr. Schumer said he intended to put the issue at the forefront of his agenda, pledging to take the significant step of changing Senate filibuster rules to pass federal voting rights legislation if Democrats take back both chambers of Congress.
In marquee speeches over the first two nights of the Democratic National Convention, party leaders described a national crisis of democracy in various tones.
On Monday, Mr. Biden delivered a fiery defense of his administration and a denunciation of Mr. Trump, framing the nation’s democracy as teetering on a precipice.
“We saved democracy in 2020, and now we must save it again in 2024,” Mr. Biden said, his voice rising with every syllable. “It is that simple, that serious. The power is literally in your hands. History is in your hands. Not hyperbole. America’s future is in your hands.”
The next night, former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama pivoted. American democracy was in need of defending, they said, but it also needed to be celebrated and linked to the country’s more intrinsic ideals.
Mrs. Obama called on the delegates “to stand up not just for our basic freedoms but for decency and humanity, for basic respect, dignity and empathy, for the values at the very foundation of this democracy.”
Mr. Obama continued that theme. “Our job is to convince people that democracy can actually deliver,” he said, later adding: “Democracy isn’t just a bunch of abstract principles and dusty laws. It’s the values we live by, and the way we treat each other.”
Other speakers sprinkled mentions of “democracy” into their remarks, creating a steady drumbeat of focus on the issue.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Ms. Harris would “defend democracy and our constitution.” Tony Goldwyn, the actor and host on Monday night, described the election as “the future of our very democracy.” And Mitch Landrieu, a top Biden administration official, opened the convention on Tuesday by talking about a Harris-Walz agenda that included “protecting our democracy.”
A few speakers, however, made democracy the centerpiece of their remarks, previewing themes that Democrats are likely to use in the remaining weeks of the campaign, to claim the mantle of democracy and portray Republicans as its undoing.
Mr. Raskin, a former member of the House committee that investigated Jan. 6, recalled “the pounding of the doors on the House chamber on Jan. 6” and “the screams that followed.” His remarked were preceded by video that flickered with images of Jan. 6 rioters and false claims of election fraud by Mr. Trump.
Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia contrasted the “promise” of his first election on Jan. 5 with the “peril” of Jan. 6. Alluding to the continuing battle for voting rights, he tethered the impetus for the Capitol riot to the current election.
“The lie and the logic on Jan. 6 is a sickness,” Mr. Warnock said. “It is a kind of cancer that then metastasized into dozens of voter suppression laws all across our country.”
Kenneth Chenault, the former chief executive of American Express, tied the country’s democratic institutions to its business successes, reprising a role that the business community took in the aftermath of the 2020 election when major corporations pushed back against new voting restrictions. Mr. Chenault further warned that not just democracy, but also the American economy, hung in the balance.
“The United States is the best place in the world to do business because of the values on which our country was built: democracy, the rule of law, free and fair elections, the peaceful transfer of power,” Mr. Chenault said. “Business requires stability and certainty that our democracy will endure. Our economy and democracy are tightly linked.”
Numerous speakers raised the specter of Project 2025, a policy guidebook created by a conservative think tank in hopes of guiding a future Trump administration. The proposed policies lay out a significant overhaul of the executive branch, including eliminating entire departments and firing scores of career civil servants who work for the federal government across administrations.
Mallory McMorrow, a Democratic state legislator from Michigan, carried an oversize book with her to the lectern, proclaiming it to be the full Project 2025 platform. With performative effort, she flipped open the heavy prop to read a part of the plan about firing federal employees that she claimed would make Mr. Trump a “dictator.”
“That is not how it works in America,” she said. “That’s how it works in dictatorships! And that’s exactly what Donald Trump and his MAGA minions have in mind.”
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