DNC 2024 Day 2 live updates: Obamas set to help hand torch to Kamala Harris
(CHICAGO) — After an emotional tribute to President Joe Biden Monday night, the scene at the Democrats’ gathering on Tuesday shifts to appearances by former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama.
In their highly anticipated prime-time speeches, the Obamas are expected to help clearly “pass the torch” to Kamala Harris, who will be holding a rally in Milwaukee this evening ahead of her acceptance speech Thursday night.
Here’s how the news is developing.
Obamas to make prime-time speeches
The attention on Day 2 of the Democrats’ gathering shifts from celebrating President Joe Biden to prime-time speeches from former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama. They’ll help pass the party torch to Kamala Harris.
The convention will also hold a ceremonial roll call to nominate Harris, which follows the party’s virtual process doing so earlier this month. Harris officially had the vast majority of delegate votes needed to secure her nomination when that process ended on Aug. 6.
It’s expected that California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Harris’ home state delegation will cast the vote putting her over the top.
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to soon face her first post-convention test when she sits for a formal interview — something she told reporters this month she planned to do by the end of August, but has yet to announce.
With an absence of plans for any such sit-down, Republican critics have accused her of dodging the press.
“She refuses to do any interviews or press conferences, almost 30 days now, she has not done an interview,” former President Donald Trump said of Harris at a North Carolina event earlier this month. “You know why she hasn’t done an interview? Because she’s not smart. She’s not intelligent.”
His campaign has said Harris is trying to “duck and hide” from the news media.
The lack of a media interview has yet to hurt Harris, whose poll number are outpacing those of President Joe Biden when he was atop the Democratic ticket, according to 538’s national polling average. As of Tuesday, Harris is polling ahead of Trump, 47.2% to 43.6%; when Biden left the race, he was polling at 40.2% compared to Trump’s 43.5%, according to 538’s polling average.
Harris has also stirred an enthusiasm from Democrats that had been absent most of the campaign cycle — and is riding a high following last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Moreover, she chose a running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whose rural background has helped the ticket craft a message Democrats have said they believe will make inroads with voters in conservative parts of the country.
All the while, Trump has seemed to abandon the discipline Republicans had lauded him for this summer. Recently, he has made false claims about the crowd size at a Harris rally and appeared to forget to mention a policy proposal he had been slated to unveil at an event in Michigan.
Democrats have cautioned that Harris has several hurdles to clear in the coming weeks.
One of those hurdles is the pending media interview, where Harris would likely have to defend the decisions of the Biden administration and specify some of her policy stances.
On Monday, Trump sought to spotlight Harris’ connection to the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, laying wreaths in Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the third anniversary of the suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members.
“Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world,” Trump claimed when he spoke to National Guardsmen at a Detroit event later Monday.
Harris is also likely to be pressed on how much she knew about Biden’s capacities prior to the June 27 debate. That night, she urged Americans to judge Biden not on the “90 minutes” on stage but the “three-and-a-half years of performance.”
Yet, that same debate performance set in motion a weekslong effort by top Democrats to nudge Biden from the race.
Few had a better understanding of what Biden was like behind the scenes than Harris, his No. 2, and an interviewer would likely challenge her about what she witnessed in private.
Harris would surely be asked about the war in Gaza. She said recently, “We need a cease-fire,” but is a member of an administration that has yet to help broker one.
The situation at the southern border would likely be another topic an interviewer would press Harris on. Republicans have linked her to an increase in unauthorized border crossings earlier in Biden’s term, misleadingly dubbing her the “border czar.”
An interviewer might also ask Harris to respond to the criticism of her recently unveiled economic plan, in which she called for an end to grocery “price-gouging,” prompting accusations by some Republicans that she wants “communist price controls.”
Harris travels this week to south Georgia, where she will embark on a bus tour and hold a rally in Savannah, Georgia.
(WASHINGTON) — Climate change remains on the backburner of the 2024 election following little mention of environmental policy during the first — and possibly only — debate between the two presidential candidates.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump faced off for the first time on Tuesday night from the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, where neither candidate dedicated ample time to addressing what they would do to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions and bolster the clean energy industry.
“I think what we learned last night is that climate really is not on the ballot this fall,” Leah Aronowsky, a science historian at the Columbia Climate School, whose research has focused on the history of climate science and climate denialism, told ABC News.
Climate change has not taken center stage this election cycle due to other topics — such as the economy, immigration and abortion — but that doesn’t mean that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is any less important, John Abraham, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, told ABC News.
The first mention of greenhouse gas emissions came amid Trump’s claims that he “built one of the strongest economies in the history of the world.” The former president accused the Biden administration of enacting policies that would destroy the domestic oil industry and cause inflation to worsen.
But, the Biden administration produced 12.9 million barrels per day in 2023, breaking the record set in 2019 at 12.3 million barrels, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows.
During the debate, Harris touted the Biden administration bringing domestic gas production to “historic levels.” Lena Moffitt, executive director of the environmental organization Evergreen Action, an environmental nonprofit, told ABC News the reference was likely an effort to entice a broad array of voters by promising to extend commitment to fossil fuel extraction while also building out a renewable energy industry and focusing more on electric vehicles.
Harris was also questioned during the debate on whether she has changed her “values” on whether to ban fracking.
Reliance on domestic stores of oil necessitates continued fracking, Harris said, making clear that she will not ban the technique used to extract oil and gas from underground rock formations, despite Trump’s insistence that she had been against it for “12 years.”
ABC News could not identify why Trump claimed Harris had been claiming for 12 years that she would ban fracking.
In 2016, while attorney general of California, Harris sued the U.S. Interior Department over its environmental assessment on the California coastline, which would have allowed fracking on the Pacific Outer Continental Shelf. Since 2020, Harris has made it “very clear” that she will not ban fracking, she said during the debate.
“I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases on fracking,” she said. “My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil.”
The only question explicitly about climate change came at the very end, just before the candidates’ closing arguments.
When asked what she would do to fight climate change, Harris first reminded voters that Trump has described the climate crisis as a “hoax” before talking about where Americans are being hit hardest by extreme weather events: their homes.
Homeowners in states that experience extreme weather events are increasingly being denied home insurance, or premiums are “being jacked up,” Harris said.
“You ask anybody who has been the victim of what that means — in terms of losing their home, having nowhere to go,” Harris said.
Appealing to homeowners was a smart move on Harris’ part, Aronowsky said, adding that homeowners will take the brunt of the economic hardships of the extreme weather that is predicted to increase as global temperatures continue to rise.
“We’re going to see more and more insurance companies dropping the homeowners from policies, Americans getting hit with exorbitant insurance premiums,” she said. “So, it’s really a looming political crisis.”
Harris said that young Americans “care deeply” about climate change. It’s because they’ve seen first-hand how climate change can affect their lives, Moffitt said.
“It is an issue that a lot of Americans really care about, especially young voters,” Moffitt told ABC News.
Trump did not answer the question on climate change, instead focusing on jobs that he said are no longer in existence due to Chinese-owned auto plants being built in Mexico.
“They lost 10,000 manufacturing jobs this last month,” Trump said. “It’s going — they’re all leaving.”
Investing in the clean energy industry will actually create more jobs, Abraham said. The U.S. now has an opportunity to participate in the green energy economy to power the country, which will create high-tech, high-paid jobs, he said.
“I think it’s a real missed opportunity for Republicans,” Abraham said. “If you’re a fiscal conservative, you want to be part of this new energy economy and make money off it.”
Clean energy employment increased by 142,000 jobs in 2023, according to a U.S. Department of Energy report released last month.
With the passing of the landmark Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration has made more progress than any previous administration on environmental policy, the experts said.
But environmental advocates and policymakers will have to find a way going forward to help the public understand how climate change will affect Americans in their everyday lives, Aronowsky said.
“It’s becoming clear that talking about climate as a … standalone issue is a political dead end,” she said.
(WASHINGTON) — A group of prominent Black Democratic leaders on Thursday unveiled Project FREEDOM, a new plan aimed at countering Project 2025, a controversial 922-page plan to overhaul the federal government led by a conservative Washington think tank and other politically aligned organizations.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly warn in campaign speeches that Donald Trump, if he wins a second term, wants to use the conservative blueprint to exert unprecedented presidential power and to do away with, among other things, the Department of Education and federal housing assistance and to cut or restrict the use of food stamps and other social welfare programs.
Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, calling some of the proposals “seriously extreme,” but its architects helped shape his Republican Party platform.
Project FREEDOM is designed to engage Black voters in four key battleground areas, the organizers told ABC News.
In the plan, first shared with ABC News, the group says in addition to policy, it aims to mobilize voters of color through town halls, community events, digital campaigns, and phone banks in Michigan, North Carolina, Las Vegas, and the Pennsylvania/Tri-State area.
Project FREEDOM, the leaders say, aims to provide voters with a substantial policy agenda for Democrats ahead of the November election in a clear and precise contrast to Project 2025.
Organizers say Project FREEDOM is based on four pillars: Freedom to Live, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Vote and Freedom to Thrive.
Freedom to Live is based on the idea that the Black community should be able to “live freely and without fear,” the group says. Organizers are calling for the passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act which was stalled by Republicans in the U.S. Senate.
Tamika Mallory, co-founder of Until Freedom, an intersectional social justice organization, told ABC News, “I think that the way to really engage voters to go to the polls, is to make sure that they know, we’re not just going for a celebratory vote. Instead, we’re going to the polls with our bag of demands with us.”
Mallory, says “We can’t sell the message of identity politics as the sole message to people who are suffering with income inequality, people who are suffering with challenges in the education system, people who just watched a video of Sonya Massey being shot in her face by a Springfield, Illinois, police officer.”
Massey, was an unarmed 36-year-old Black woman and mother of two, who was shot by former deputy Sean Grayson in her Illinois home. “What happened to Sonya Massey is probably one of the worst that I have seen in my career for 30 years,” Mallory added.
Freedom to Thrive calls for expansion of the Child Tax Credit, federal minimum wage to raise to meet inflation, and a pilot program for Universal Basic Income in low-income communities nationwide.
Freedom to Learn is focused on education, including canceling student debt and protecting Black American history in public schools.
Freedom to Vote is focused on strengthening voting rights, calling for the passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and reshaping the U.S. Supreme Court.
Michael Blake, founder of Project FREEDOM and CEO of KAIROS DEMOCRACY PROJECT, a program created to mobilize and engage young voters and voters of color, Blake said in a statement to ABC News, “Our Democracy is under siege and by a man and political machine that put themselves above all those in whom they detect ‘otherness.”
Blake, a former vice chair of the Democratic Party, added, “We cannot afford to forget the pain inflicted on our people throughout Donald Trump’s administration, and we certainly cannot afford the destructiveness a second term would normalize.”
The Democratic leaders said in a joint statement, “Make no mistake: Communities of color are the frontline communities targeted by the poison that is Project 2025’s Christian Nationalist vision for the future, and Project FREEDOM is the antidote.”