Kamala Harris comes into town with a never-before-seen spike in the polls. President Joe Biden will hand the baton to Harris on Monday night. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama speak Tuesday.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, landed in Chicago on Sunday night with second gentleman Doug Emhoff, for a presidential convention kicking off Monday that no one could have imagined a month ago.
Harris, Emhoff and her vice presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and his wife, Gwen, will be camped in Chicago from Sunday to Friday morning, with a side trip Tuesday for a Milwaukee rally in battleground Wisconsin.
Democrats are exuberant. President Joe Biden’s decision not to seek re-election — and Harris quickly seizing the nomination and rallying Democrats in Obama-like fashion — means former President Donald Trump, the GOP nominee, has a fight on his hands.
With Harris leading in many polls so fast means this is a political turnaround operation like we’ve never seen in our lifetimes.
Though her acceptance speech is Thursday, Harris will be on stage Monday to take the baton from the president. Biden’s keynote will make the case to elect Harris. He’ll be in Chicago only for a few hours before boarding Air Force One to fly to California after his speech.
Harris, campaigning in swing state Pennsylvania on Sunday, said her convention speech was “almost done,” with some “little tweaks” left to be made.Chicago, the convention city
This is Chicago’s 26th time hosting a convention.
When Democrats met here in 1996 to nominate the Clinton-Gore ticket for a second term, it was a fun-fest, wiping out — so we thought — the bad image the city earned because of the battles between protesters and Chicago cops during the Vietnam-era 1968 Democratic convention.
