THE NIGHT BEFORE the Democratic National Convention kicked off in Chicago last week, a woman was busy taking a photograph outside one of the only hotels in the city that wasn’t packed with people.
She carefully angled her phone for a few seconds across the road from the Trump International Hotel, where 6-metre high letters spell out the surname of the former US president on the front of the building.
Satisfied, she stuck her middle finger up at the building and took several photos.
One thing that no-one ever really says about political get-togethers like the Democratic National Convention is that for a lot of the attendees, this is a chance to let loose. It’s a bit of a party.
This is what happens when tens of thousands of people with a shared interest only get to see each other every four years.
That night before it began, the cavernous lobby of the biggest hotel in Chicago was filled with hundreds of people checking in and catching up. It was buzzing.
People wore newly-minted Kamala Harris badges and t-shirts (Tim Walz is so newly on the ticket that there was barely anything with his name or face on) as they excitedly shouted to each other.
“Girl!” shouted one woman wearing an Educators For Kamala t-shirt. “GIRL!”, her friend shouted back. “GIRRRRRLLLLLL!!!!” the first woman returned.
The most frequently-asked question was which afterparties people were already planning to attend.
Would the atmosphere have been the same if Joe Biden had still been the nominee for president? Almost definitely not. This was the newly-energised party in human form, looking to show their support for their brand-new nominees.
The main part of the convention took place in Union Center, a huge arena which is home to the Chicago Bulls.
The security was tight and the logistics were patchy. On the first day, the media queue stretched for several hours along the side of the road past the nearby Malcolm X College, hours before the convention was due to begin. Free shuttle buses brought attendees from their hotels to the stadium, taking up to 90 minutes to travel the 15 minutes it should have taken – and that was before the security queues.
It was a lot of people, to be fair. At the heart of the convention were the 4,696 delegates from the states and territories of the US who are the ones to formally choose the party’s nominee for president (even though this was, unusually, done in advance of this year’s convention).
Then there’s everyone else: 15,000 members of the media – three for every delegate! – some 12,000 volunteers, thousands of people who work for the party, from Congresspeople to interns, plus hundreds of speakers. This was a huge production.
And that’s the second thing to know about US political conventions. They are basically a gigantic TV show.
Every night over the four days, beginning at around 5.30pm each day in the arena, the Democrats put on the politics equivalent of a Broadway show – one Twitter user described it as ‘the Eras tour for liberals’ – broadcast live on all of the main US tv channels for five hours each night.
On that first day, there were around 60 speakers across the evening, beginning with a call to order, a prayer, the US pledge of allegiance and the national anthem, all before the first speech. There are so many speakers that if you’re bored watching one person, there’ll be another one along in a couple of minutes anyway.
The speakers loosely fall into four categories: elected party representatives, which can be anyone from the governor of Kentucky to the current president of the United States; activists and normal people, who tell stories about their lives; people who are there to talk about the election, including former Trump employees talking about why they were now supporting Kamala Harris and members of Harris’s family; and celebrities.
Beside’s Michelle Obama’s barnstormer of a speech on the Tuesday night, the normal people are by far the most impactful.
One of the only times the convention crowd was fully quiet was when the parents of a 23-year-old Israeli-American who is being held hostage in Gaza spoke.
“Needing our cherished son and all the hostages home is not a political issue. It’s a humanitarian one,” his father, Jonathan Polin said. He invoked a Jewish saying that every person is an entire universe, saying, “We must save all of these universes” about the hostages.
In a section about gun violence, a teacher from Sandy Hook described sitting in a cloakroom with her class, trying to sing songs and read to them to drown out the noise of the gunshots that killed 20 children and six adults in the primary school.
In a parallel to Ireland’s Eighth Amendment campaign, women told their stories about not being able to access abortions and how it had impacted their lives.
The celebrities are dotted throughout the schedule. Kerry Washington, Pink, Oprah, John Legend. James Taylor rehearses in the arena on the Monday, singing a version of You’ve Got a Friend with modified lyrics to pay tribute to Joe Biden, but it ends up getting cut from the final line-up because everything runs over time.
The television broadcast is front and centre of the convention, and for good reason: an average of 22 million people tuned in each night. This is more about the audience at home than the audience in the arena.
It’s about more than tv too: each speech is designed to be consumed in snippets on social media and messaging platforms. They all last about 5-7 minutes and the speakers all speak in the tone of someone giving a performance. There is generally no ‘hi, hello, thanks for having me’. Instead, speakers immediately get straight into it, following the teleprompter in front of them.
There are some mis-steps. The governor of Illinois, who comes from generational wealth, took a tone-deaf aim at Trump saying, “He claims to be very rich. But take it from an actual billionaire. Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity.” One speaker from Appalachia criticised Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance for upping and leaving the area as soon as he could to go to Yale, which came across as sour. Bill Clinton’s rambling speech goes well over time, sucking time away from other, better speakers.
But overall it is slick and cohesive. The same small number of themes come up again and again over the course of the four days: A better economy for middle class Americans. Gun control. Abortion rights. Families.
If some of this sounds familiar, it is. The party seems to have stolen a march on the Republicans, appropriating themes usually dominated by them.
The soundtrack of the convention is Beyoncé’s Freedom, which plays frequently on the huge round screen that hangs from the ceiling in the centre of the arena.
The other soundtracks are the chants: “When we fight WE WIN” and “We’re not going back” are heard multiple times a day.
They catch on among the delegates, who start their own (including “LOCK HIM UP” when Hillary Clinton is speaking).
Some of the themes do too.
A number of speakers talk about how the Harris/Walz ticket is about bringing joy back into politics. “This kind of politics just feels better to be part of. There is joy in it, as well as power,” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg tells the crowd.
At an event for Irish-American Democrats in an upscale bar, a number of people have already gotten baseball caps with JOY written on them. On the shuttle bus to the convention centre on the Wednesday, a delegate tells her friend: “I cried so much because of joy yesterday. I cried, I cried, I cried.”
It’s a lot of feelings. The one obvious thing missing from the convention centre though, is policy. Gaza, Ukraine, climate change and migration all get fleeting mentions across the week.
Instead the substantive policy discussions are held during the day-time in a different venue across town, before the televised part of the convention starts.
If the prime time part of the convention is held in the biggest convention center in the US, then the policy part of it is held in the ugliest. Each day, there are caucuses and council meetings which address rural affairs, LGBTQ+ issues, women’s issues, trade unions and inequality.
At one, former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders spends a sentence or two endorsing Kamala Harris before strongly criticising the Democrats for losing so many working class voters to Trump – a blunt rejoinder to the aspirational claims all week from senior politicians about what the party will do for Middle America.
“I think a lot of people are hurting,” he says. “Sixty per cent of people are living pay cheque to pay cheque.”
There is at least one meeting which focuses on Gaza, and while it doesn’t get much play on the main stage, it simmers underneath for the entire week.
Protesters hold demonstrations every single day getting as close to the convention centre as they are allowed to by police, and uncommitted delegates argue strongly – and ultimately futilely – for a pro-Palestinian speaker to be allowed to address the main convention centre.
Kamala Harris does bring it up in her big speech on the Thursday night.
The convention centre is packed for her speech. On the top floor, the corporate hospitality suites are so full that there’s an overflow of people out onto the corridors, who have to watch the event on the television screens dotted around the place instead.
As expected, as well as laying out policy, she uses the speech to introduce herself. The crowd in the convention hall has already heard most of this already over the course of the week from her family members, but they still clap and cheer as if it’s the first time.
Directly echoing Michelle Obama from earlier in the week, Harris describes how her mother always taught her not to complain but to always “do something” instead.
Streaming out of the convention centre afterwards, the crowd was still buzzing. Ready to knock on doors, do phone banks, talk to their friends and neighbours.
But the first thing they were going to do? Find that night’s afterparty.
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