CHICAGO – On the evening before Vice President Kamala Harris officially debuted as the Democratic presidential nominee, delegates and political consultants gathered for a party sponsored by a prominent gun safety group. It was not a serious night. A senator, his tie loosened, slugged a drink while Joan Jett played behind him. Operatives and consultants ranged from buzzed to being full-on drunk. Jello shots were in circulation.
It felt like a last hoorah, because, in many ways, it was. At least until November.
The veterans of tough general elections – former presidents, past nominees and first spouses who spoke at the convention — all hinted repeatedly that the hard time is coming next. As they joined the rest of their party in celebrating the current good fortune of surging coffers, building momentum and rising poll numbers, they also warned of not growing complacent.
Even Harris seemed to warn Democrats away from relaxing too much.
“Never do anything half-assed,” she told the crowd, recounting what she said was a favorite line of her mother’s. She said it with a smile, and the crowd reveled in its bet on a vice president that appears to be paying off.
But it has not paid off yet. The general election will be hard, and it will be short. Even as Harris took the stage to wild, relieved applause Thursday, Democrats were already thinking about what comes next, and how to translate the excitement within their party into votes.
The top of the party argued that Democrats are miles ahead of Republicans in organizing, and that they will be relying on that infrastructure — which has served them well in recent elections — to turn good vibes into the actual votes they need to win this year.
“Unlike Hillary Clinton in 2016, we have built a party that can absorb that energy, can absorb all those volunteers coming and then utilize that in order to make sure that she wins this very, very, very close election,” Jaime Harrison, chair of the DNC, told NOTUS.
Harris’ momentum has raised the Democrats’ lagging poll numbers this year, but averages show the race to be essentially a dead heat.
“I’ve been telling Democrats everywhere I go this week: Don’t get high on your own supply and think everyone is as energetic as you are,” Rep. Elissa Slotkin, Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, told Politico. “And if you do, you obviously haven’t been to a swing state in a while.”
One of the biggest wins for Harris at the convention was that the four-day event remained focused on the excitement around her. The DNC was expected to be a confrontation between establishment Democrats and enraged progressives, with protests expected to take up a lot of oxygen. Instead, they barely registered in Chicago, coming in smaller and quieter than they likely would have had President Joe Biden remained the nominee.
Progressives are excited about Harris as a candidate. But they need the excitement to translate into action, even among activists still enraged over issues like the war in Gaza.
“Excitement is great because it helps generate volunteers, and it helps keep the buzz going and it helps people feel like they want to be a part of it,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told NOTUS in Chicago. “But you have to do the work on the doors. You just have to, there’s no other way.”
But it was swing state Democrats who seemed most nervous about their party forgetting that they have yet to actually win.
“We can’t take this election lightly, because Kamala Harris is the underdog,” Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia said as he waited for Harris’ speech to begin Thursday. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover. But thankfully, all the trends are in our favor.”
Beyond Republicans’ unity behind Trump, there are other concerns on the ground that Democrats have to deal with now that the convention is over. Across the country, fights over ballot access and new laws restricting voter registration are hurdles for Democrats moving forward.
These battles were on the minds of delegates from states like Ohio, where Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose launched an audit earlier this year of the state’s voter registration database that resulted in the removal of 154,995 registrations that he said had been abandoned and inactive for four years or more.
“One of our main goals will be to get all of them re-registered,” Ohio delegate Lisa Sobecki said. “The Republicans are not going to take us down. We’re going to take them out.”
The rhetoric from the stage included a number of warnings to Democrats not to let the coming weeks go to waste. A less-than-flawless execution could be all it takes for Harris’ historic candidacy to become a footnote.
“For four years, people have said to me, ‘I didn’t realize how dangerous he was.’ ‘I wish I could go back and do it over,’” Hillary Rodham Clinton, former secretary of state and 2016 presidential nominee, told the crowd. “This can’t be another woulda-coulda-shoulda election.”
Democrats spent the whole week basking in a feeling that the political landscape is entirely different than it was when Biden was their candidate. But as the convention closed, the playbook for them still looks much the same.
“They’ve got to go to Milwaukee, they’ve got to go to Atlanta, they’ve got they’ve got to go to all the battleground critical areas, and some of the areas that we’re not even thinking of as critical,” said Cornell Belcher, one of the top pollsters for former President Barack Obama. “And they’ve got to keep galvanizing and taking their message forward.”
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Evan McMorris-Santoro and Jasmine Wright are reporters at NOTUS. Calen Razor is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.