(CHICAGO) — The Democratic National Convention is set to begin Monday, Aug. 19 in Chicago — during which Democratic Party delegates are set to support Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz after their unconventional path to the party’s nomination.
During the four-day convention, Democratic heavyweights are set to fire up the base and rally behind Harris, who was officially certified as the Democratic presidential nominee earlier this month after getting the vast majority of delegate votes in a virtual roll call.
Harris’ path to the DNC has been an unorthodox and truncated one after President Joe Biden announced he was leaving the 2024 race and endorsed Harris for the job on July 21.
Here’s what to know about the DNC and how to follow along with all of the action.
When and where is the DNC?
The 2024 DNC takes place Aug. 19-22 in Chicago.
Official proceedings, primetime programming and speeches will be held at the United Center — home to the Chicago Blackhawks and Chicago Bulls. Other party activities will be held at the McCormick Place Convention Center.
Democrats are in welcoming territory with a Chicago convention. Chicago is a Democratic stronghold that “was part of the ‘blue wall’ crucial to the Biden-Harris victory in 2020 and will be for a Harris-Walz victory in November,” according to the DNC.
“Chicago is the perfect place to bring the story of Vice President Harris, Governor Walz, and the Democratic Party to the American people. Chicago represents the diversity of the Democratic Party and the country,” according to the DNC.
What is the DNC schedule? Who are the speakers?
While the DNC has not released its list of speakers scheduled for each evening, it has detailed some of the convention events through the day, including caucus and council meetings and press briefings on its website.
Biden is set speak at the DNC on Monday.
Sources told ABC News that a working speaking schedule, which can change, has former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking on Monday evening as well; former President Barack Obama speaking on Tuesday; Walz and former President Bill Clinton speaking on Wednesday; and Harris speaking on Thursday.
As is customary, Democratic National Committee Chair Jamie Harrison will gavel-in the first night of the convention.
How can I watch the DNC?
The DNC will stream on multiple platforms — including TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. The official live stream of the 2024 Democratic National Convention will be available on its website.
Prime-time programming will air live from 6:30 p.m.-11 p.m. ET/5:30 p.m.-10 p.m. CT on Monday and 7 p.m.-11 p.m. ET/6 p.m.-10 p.m. CT on Tuesday-Thursday, according to the DNC.
ABC News will have special coverage of the DNC — including primetime coverage from 10 p.m. until 11 p.m. ET on ABC every day of the conventions, and on ABC News Live from 7 p.m. until 12 a.m. ET.
Hulu will also have live reports available all day, and ABC News Live will have robust coverage each day of the convention.
ABC News Digital and 538 will live blog the latest from the convention and provide analysis as the convention events unfold.
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris has received a flurry of endorsements from many of the nation’s largest labor unions since she announced her candidacy for president.
Concern has emerged within the labor movement, however, over the potential selection of Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., as a running mate because he has not signed onto a key piece of labor reform legislation.
Current and former union officials told ABC News that the possible selection of Kelly sounds alarm bells due to his unwillingness to back the PRO Act, legislation that would ease the path toward forming unions and winning labor contracts. Some officials outright oppose the pick, while others say the policy position should be part of a wider assessment of Kelly.
At least one labor leader who backs Harris said Kelly’s position on the measure should not reflect on his support toward labor or deter his selection as vice president.
Kelly and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro are the two leading candidates for the nod as vice president on a Harris-led ticket, a senior administration official told ABC News on Tuesday. Harris is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee after receiving more than half of the party’s delegates.
“Why would the Democrats even consider a senator for the vice presidency if the senator doesn’t support the PRO Act?” John Samuelsen, president of the Transport Workers Union and an ally of President Joe Biden, told ABC News. “It’s the most important piece of national legislation workers have right now.”
The Transport Workers Union is an affiliate of the AFL-CIO, a 12.5 million member union federation that endorsed Harris on Monday. Samuelson, who said he did not attend the meeting at which the AFL-CIO endorsed Harris, will not decide on his union’s endorsement of Harris until after she selects her vice presidential nominee.
Kelly, who took office in 2020, has declined to sign onto the PRO Act throughout his tenure. The latest version of the bill, known as the Richard L. Trumka Protecting the Right to Organize Act, boasts the support of 48 of the 51 U.S. Senators who caucus with Democrats.
Richard Bensinger, former organizing director at the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor organization, said in a post on X that he opposes Kelly due to his position on the PRO Act.
“Only 3 Democrats refused to sign on to the Pro Act, one of whom was Mark Kelly,” Bensinger said on Sunday, after Harris announced her candidacy. “The right to organize unions is the most important thing to labor so that’s a hard no.”
In a statement, Kelly’s office said the Arizona senator has robustly backed labor.
“Senator Kelly is the son of two union police officers and has been a strong supporter of workers throughout his time in the Senate,” Kelly spokesperson Jacob Peters told ABC News.
Peters pointed ABC News to a statement Kelly made to the Huffington Post in 2021 in which he said he supports “the overall goals” of the legislation while acknowledging that he had “some concerns.”
In 2022, Kelly’s Senate campaign was endorsed by the Arizona AFL-CIO and the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, among other unions.
At least one labor leader whose union endorsed Harris told ABC News that the position taken by Kelly on the PRO Act should not reflect negatively on his perceived support for labor or deter Harris from selecting him for vice president.
The legislation has stood well short of passage in both chambers during Kelly’s tenure in office, the person said. In turn, the person added, Kelly has chosen to prioritize his standing among voters in the highly contested state that he represents. The labor leader requested that their name not be used due to the sensitivity surrounding the Harris campaign.
“I think that Kelly voted against the PRO Act when he felt his vote was not going to make a difference but might have been necessary in order to achieve labor’s bigger objective, which was to control the U.S. Senate,” the labor leader said.
“We don’t question his support for working people,” the labor leader added.
A union president who backs Harris, however, told ABC News they oppose the potential selection of Kelly on account of his position on the labor reform measure. The union president requested that their name not be used due to the sensitivity surrounding the Harris campaign.
“The Democrats cannot afford to have someone on the ticket who is identified as soft on labor,” the person said, referring to Kelly. “This is a huge problem.”
Larry Cohen, former president of the Communications Workers of America, said Kelly’s position on the PRO Act raises concern but the primary consideration in assessing his selection as vice president should be whether he helps the Democratic ticket win in November.
“I wouldn’t rule out Mark Kelly but he certainly wasn’t quick to support what I would call moderate labor reform in a democracy near the bottom in terms of workers’ rights,” Cohen told ABC News.
MORE: Kamala Harris rallies new campaign to fight against Trump after Biden’s endorsement “I would tend to go back to the issue of the swing states. Who can move the needle?” Cohen added, noting Arizona is a battleground state. “The number one goal is beating Trump.”
The AFL-CIO did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Nor did the Service Employees International union, the nation’s largest private sector union, which endorsed Harris.
(CHICAGO) — As the economy tops lists of voter concerns ahead of the 2024 election, some speakers at the Democratic National Convention have sought to emphasize how much the economy has improved under President Joe Biden.
When Biden took office in early 2021, the U.S. was in the midst of the “worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said on Tuesday. Back then, the economy was “reeling,” said former President Barack Obama later in the night.
The claims contrast with Republican depictions of the downturn in 2020 and the ensuing recovery. Former President Donald Trump has faulted COVID-19 for derailing the nation’s economy, while saying the U.S. had recovered in some areas by the time Biden took office.
“Nobody’s ever seen an economy [like ours] pre-COVID, and then we handed over a stock market that was substantially higher than just prior to COVID,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention last month.
An accurate picture of recent economic performance defies the narratives put forward by both parties, economists told ABC News.
The economy had already emerged from the pandemic-induced recession and begun to recover by the time Biden took office, experts said. However, the U.S. remained well below pre-pandemic levels in some key measures of economic health, including employment. Biden faced the difficult task of revitalizing the economy and getting Americans back to work, they added.
“There are kudos to be given to all the different sides,” Frederick Floss, an economics professor at Buffalo State University, told ABC News. “It’s very complex.”
Before the COVID-19 outbreak, the economy performed robustly by some important measures. In February 2020, the unemployment rate stood at 3.5%, matching its lowest level in more than 50 years. Inflation-adjusted gross domestic product increased at a solid annualized clip of 2.1% over the final three months of 2019.
The onset of the pandemic — as well as ensuing shutdowns across much of the U.S. — plunged the economy into a recession. On March 12, 2020, the S&P 500 plummeted nearly 10%, registering its worst single-day performance in more than three decades. The following month, the unemployment rate skyrocketed to almost 15%.
In March 2020, Trump signed into law a $2.2 trillion economic stimulus package, including direct payments of $1,200 and expanded unemployment insurance, among other measures. Months later, in December, Trump enacted a second $900 billion round of government support.
Over the period, much of the economy reopened and business activity returned to something resembling normal.
In turn, economic growth soared over the second half of 2020. The unemployment rate fell to 6.7% by the end of the year, nearly double pre-pandemic levels but well below the peak reached right after the outbreak. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 ended the year at record highs.
The COVID-induced recession lasted two months in the spring of 2020, the shortest U.S. recession ever recorded, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, a non-profit organization that serves as the recognized authority on economic downturns.
Economists disagreed over the extent to which Trump deserves credit for the initial recovery, saying it resulted from a mix of federal support that he had enacted as well as the withdrawal of restrictions imposed by state and local governments.
“It was a very short-lived recession,” Matias Vernengo, a professor of economics at Bucknell University, told ABC News. “That obviously happened under the Trump administration.
Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, added: “It’s faster than we’ve ever seen in any previous crisis but no other recession has had that form where we locked everybody up. It’s much easier to get it back when demand is still there.”
Despite its improvement over the latter part of 2020, the economy remained far from healthy when Biden took office, especially on the all-important issue of employment, economists said.
The U.S. lost 21.9 million jobs in March and April of 2020, U.S. government data showed. At the outset of the following year, the economy still stood about 10 million jobs short. In addition, pandemic-induced bottlenecks continued to snarl supply chains, restricting economic output worldwide.
“A fair statement is that the economy at the end of 2020 had recovered substantially but there were still millions of job losses that the economy hadn’t recovered from,” Dennis Hoffman, an economist at Arizona State University, told ABC News.
Rothstein, of the University of California, Berkeley, said the economy remained in peril at the outset of the Biden administration in early 2021.”I think calling it an economic crisis is totally fair,” Rothstein said.
Still, Rothstein added: “We did some right things in 2020 and we did some right things after 2020.”
In March 2021, Biden signed a $1.9 billion economic stimulus package of his own, including another round of $1,400 direct payments as well as an expansion of the child tax credit. The following year, Biden enacted the $891 billion Inflation Reduction Act and the $280 billion CHIPS and Sciences Act.
Over the course of the Biden administration, the labor market expanded at a rapid pace while economic growth quickened. By 2022, the economy had recovered all of the jobs lost during the pandemic. In January 2023, the unemployment rate fell even lower than where it stood pre-pandemic.
Economists who spoke with ABC News credited Biden-backed government stimulus for the reemergence of U.S. economic strength, but they differed over whether the spending had contributed to a severe bout of inflation experienced during that period.
“We were able to recover as an economy and job creation has been pretty remarkable,” said Hoffman, of Arizona State University. “That became a very successful program — it also brought inflation.”
Jason Furman, a professor at Harvard University and former economic adviser to President Barack Obama, estimated that Biden’s American Rescue Plan added between 1 percentage point and 4 percentage points to the inflation rate in 2021, Roll Call reported. Michael Strain, of the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, estimated that the legislation added 3 percentage points to inflation.
Vernengo, of Bucknell University, disagreed, attributing the bout of inflation to an imbalance of supply and demand that arose in the aftermath of the pandemic. “Inflation has more or less vanished,” Vernengo said, saying the moderation of prices indicates that the problem owed primarily to a temporary economic shock.
Price increases have cooled significantly from a peak of more than 9%, but inflation remains nearly a percentage point higher than the Fed’s target rate of 2%.
Vernengo, of Bucknell University, said both major parties have offered up misleading accounts of the 2020 economic downturn and the recovery that took hold afterward. “The story is somewhere in the middle,” Vernengo said.
(WASHINGTON) — Charlamagne tha God says President Joe Biden’s exit from the 2024 race and Vice President Kamala Harris’ replacement at the top of the ticket has Americans more “energized in the Democratic Party” than they’ve been “in a long time.”
“Oh, there’s definitely a lot of main character energy on the Democratic ticket,” Charlamagne told “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl. “We know who Kamala Harris is. Like she has super main character energy.”
Karl first sat down with radio personality Charlamagne, also known as Lenard McKelvey, in February. At the time, Charlamagne was critical of Biden’s candidacy, calling him “uninspiring” and urging him to exit the race.
Charlamagne, a co-host of iHeart Radio’s “The Breakfast Club,” told Karl on Sunday that there’s less voter apathy now, but “if I’m the Democrats, I’m not spiking the football yet.”
“The job is not done,” he said. “You know, you still have to bring this thing home in November.”
In the three weeks since Biden’s exit from the 2024 race, the Harris campaign has mobilized at lightning speed. But Harris is facing criticism for not yet having held a formal press conference or sitting for any interviews with local or national media yet.
“She does need to do more interviews,” Charlamagne said on “This Week.”
“It’s striking that we really haven’t seen her answer questions yet,” Karl said.
“I mean, it’s the bottom of the ninth inning, right?” Charlamagne replied. “Like, I feel like she should be any and everywhere, you know, having these conversations.”
Charlamagne told Karl that Harris should take a page from former President Donald Trump’s playbook because he’s “everywhere.”
“He’s [Trump] always calling into conservative talk radio, which is one of my biggest issues with the Democratic Party,” Charlamagne said. “They don’t use the media that supports them the way the right uses the media that supports them.”
At the end of July, Trump dominated headlines for his interview at the National Association of Black Journalists annual convention in Chicago, where he falsely questioned Harris’ race.
“What did you make of the way she responded to his comments about her ‘just turning Black?'” Karl asked Charlamagne.
“I don’t even think that she should have responded,” Charlamagne said. “I don’t think she should have dignified that with a response.”
Harris, who announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate last week, has also faced criticism centered on her race from some Republicans claiming she was a “DEI hire.”
Charlamagne said that if anyone on the Harris-Walz ticket is a “DEI hire,” it’s not Harris, who is both the first Black woman and Asian American to be a major party’s nominee. She is only the second woman to be at the top of the ticket.
“We knew she needed a DEI hire,” Charlamagne said. “She needed a white male to make America comfortable. It is what it is. No need for us to, you know, act crazy about it. We know what it is.”