Last week, the Democratic National Convention worked to keep up a party-like atmosphere filled with music and celebrities, and its central message seemed to revolve around themes like “joy” and “freedom.” Viewers who tune into political conventions are usually already committed to the party, but this optimistic tone was likely part of their key efforts to drive enthusiasm (and eventual turnout), both by amping up their base and persuading the handful of undecided voters who could make a difference in this era of razor-thin election margins.
Of course, conventions serve another purpose, too, and that’s to outline the policy differences between the parties and highlight the issues that make them look best to voters. With this in mind, as we did during the Republican National Convention, 538 looked at the issues voters trust Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats with more than they trust former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and analyzed how, and how often, convention speakers talked about those issues.
While frequent scheduling changes at the DNC made this an imperfect process, we analyzed more than 100 speeches scheduled in the prime speaking slots from 6 p.m. Central through the end of the evening. (Speeches were scheduled until 10 p.m., though they ran past that time every night.) We also didn’t count statements made by delegates during roll call, in videos or second and third appearances by DNC committee chairs. With that caveat, evaluating how Democrats spoke about these issues tells us a lot about what issue messaging the party is focusing on as the campaigns race into November.
Democrats had to address both strengths and weaknesses
A huge difference between the RNC and today is, of course, that Democrats have a new nominee, and there has been some movement in the polls since Harris advanced to the top of the ticket. But with partisanship and party identities so dug in these days, it’s no surprise that Harris’s advantages mirror President Joe Biden’s. In late June, a CNN/SSRS poll found that voters trusted Biden over Trump most on abortion, health care and protecting democracy, and they seem to feel similarly about Harris. In an ABC News/The Washington Post/Ipsos poll from Aug. 9-13, voters gave Harris a 12-point advantage on abortion, a 7-point advantage on health care and a 6-point advantage on protecting democracy — all comparable to Biden’s numbers in both a July poll by the same organizations and the June CNN/SSRS poll. The August ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll also included another issue, race relations, that voters gave Harris a 14-point advantage on.
Notably though, voters don’t rank all of these issues as equally important: Of the 11 issues asked about in the ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll, abortion and race relations were among the least important issues to voters, though 59 percent and 50 percent of respondents, respectively, still said they were at least “very important” to deciding their votes. Other issues Democrats were strong on, like health care and protecting democracy, ranked higher in importance (77 percent each), but the economy and inflation remained the top two issues on voters’ minds (89 percent and 86 percent, respectively).
And while Trump still has a 9-point advantage over Harris on the economy, other polls suggest that Harris is outperforming Biden on the critical issue. For example, a Marquette University Law School survey found that Harris has improved on Biden’s numbers across the board, including eating into Trump’s lead on economy and leaping even farther ahead on abortion (on which she’s likely seen as a more credible messenger than Biden).
So while Republicans were largely able to structure their convention around areas of strength, it’s no surprise that Democrats tried to reframe the conversation on issues, particularly the economy, that Biden was notably underwater on. The convention addressed affordability issues (especially the cost of housing, which was brought up by 18 speakers throughout the convention), and sharing personal experiences was at the center of the economic messaging. Eighteen speakers spoke about the middle class, with many highlighting Harris’s middle-class roots, the fact that she and her sister were raised by a single mother in a working-class neighborhood of Berkeley and that she worked at McDonald’s during college. Other speakers, too, portrayed the party as the champion of workers and unions, courting a traditionally Democratic demographic that Trump’s Republican party has made inroads with over the last decade.
This was especially true during New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s speech Monday night. “In Kamala Harris, we have a chance to elect a president who is for the middle class because she is from the middle class,” she said. “She understands the urgency of rent checks and groceries and prescriptions. She is as committed to our reproductive and civil rights as she is to taking on corporate greed.” Some also turned the issue into a direct attack on Trump, painting him as an out-of-touch billionaire born into wealth. “His first word was probably chauffeur,” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer joked during her Thursday night speech. “You think he’s ever had to take items out of the cart before checking out? Hell, you think he’s ever been to a grocery store? That’s what the chauffeur is for.”
This issue, more than others, highlighted the trick Harris needs to pull off in her shorter-than-usual campaign. As the sitting vice president, she has to highlight the accomplishments of Biden’s administration while also presenting herself as a change candidate who will recognize and address Americans’ continuing pessimism over the state of the economy. Harris inherited a campaign bogged down in areas of weakness for Democrats, and the DNC saw the party retool its messaging on economic issues while also highlighting issues like health care and racial equity where they already have an advantage.
Democrats are still leaning in on abortion rights
One of the biggest political shifts since the last presidential election cycle is, of course, the overturning of Roe v. Wade. While political opinion on abortion was often complicated and difficult to suss out in the years before the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, the loss of abortion rights in many states across the country has solidified many voters’ views. Since the decision, we’ve seen substantial and lasting movement in public opinion toward expanding abortion rights and limiting government restrictions on abortion. Voters’ preference for Democrats over Republicans on abortion is one of the biggest issue advantages Harris’s campaign has going into November. While voters as a whole rank the issue as less important than others, 59 percent in the ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll said it was important in determining their vote — and it’s proved to be a particularly salient issue among Democrats specifically, among whom 79 percent ranked it as important.
Throughout the convention, 40 different speakers mentioned “abortion,” “reproductive freedom,” “reproductive rights” or “reproductive healthcare,” or referred to those ideas with phrases like “a woman’s freedom to choose what she does with her own body.” On Monday, four speakers shared their personal experiences in states that limit or ban abortion care. “A second Trump term would rip away even more of our rights, passing a national abortion ban, letting states monitor pregnancies and prosecute doctors, restricting birth control and fertility treatments,” said Amanda Zurawski, the lead plaintiff in an unsuccessful case against the state of Texas, who was hospitalized with sepsis after being denied abortion care when she experienced complications at 18 weeks of pregnancy.
Calling abortion “reproductive freedom” is a relatively new framing, and there’s polling to show that it may resonate with many voters, especially young Americans, who see abortion rights as tied to individual freedoms and issues like LGBTQ+ rights, birth control access and racism. Earlier this year, the Alabama Supreme Court opened up a new front for Democrats’ messaging on reproductive freedoms when it ruled that the definition of a “child” includes unborn embryos, endangering access to in vitro fertilization and other fertility treatments in the state. Eleven convention speakers spoke about these sorts of treatments as intrinsically tied to a fundamental right for Americans to build families however they choose. This was perhaps most prominently highlighted by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who noted during his vice presidential acceptance speech that his children were born with the help of fertility treatments.
“I’m letting you in on how we started a family because this is a big part about what this election is about: freedom,” Walz said. “When Republicans use the word freedom, they mean that the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office, corporations free to pollute your air and water and banks free to take advantage of customers. But when we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love. Freedom to make your own health care decisions.”
When it comes to health care more broadly, 20 speakers mentioned health care access and affordability. Those mentions tended to be fairly short or connected to the issue of abortion, though several also discussed health care affordability. Former President Barack Obama devoted a short segment to how a Harris administration could build on the Affordable Care Act, his signature legislation, while Harris recounted Republicans’ efforts to overturn the law during Trump’s first term. “We are not going back to when he tried to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, when insurance companies could deny people with pre-existing conditions,” she said. But overall, Democrats’ choice to focus on abortion showed that they still see it as a winning issue, and that it will continue to be at the center of their messaging going forward.
Portraying diversity was key to Democrats’ message on race
The issue of race will likely be top of mind for some voters, with a Black and South Asian woman at the top of the ticket and opponents calling attention to her identity on the campaign trail. Race relations is the issue on which Democrats had the biggest advantage over Trump in the ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll, though it’s also among the issues that the fewest voters said would impact their votes.
How Democrats spoke about race relations during the convention was harder to quantify, because candidates rarely spoke about it in those terms. Eleven speakers mentioned “race” or “racism” during the convention, while some tackled the issue quite indirectly. For example, former first lady Michelle Obama flipped around the idea of “affirmative action,” long evoked by conservatives to disparage the achievements of individuals of color, by applying it to individuals who come from wealth.
And while few speakers explicitly mentioned “diversity” during the DNC, a diverse slate of speakers (and attendees) helped communicate Democrats’ emphasis on representation, largely by sharing their personal experiences. Kicking off the first night of the convention, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Democratic Party Chair Jaime Harrison, who are both Black, spoke to the topic. “This election is about every little boy inspired by a party chair who looks like him, and every little girl who will finally see a president who looks like her,” Harrison said.
Others, like Biden, spoke more directly about the diversity of Democrats in politics, including, of course, his choice of Harris as vice president. “As your president, I’ve been determined to keep America moving forward, not going back,” he said. “To stand against hate and violence in all its forms, to be a nation where we not only live with but thrive on diversity.” Messages like this build on the fact that Democrats have traditionally championed themselves as a diverse party, more representative of the American public than Republicans — and there’s data to support that claim when it comes to both the party’s base and its elected officials.
Speakers also turned to history to make their case, highlighting their party’s long history of championing civil rights, a topic addressed by seven speakers. Multiple speakers paid tribute to civil rights activists like Fannie Lou Hamer, who made headlines with her speech at the 1964 DNC, and Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was in the audience. Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of President John F. Kennedy, also highlighted his grandfather’s support of civil rights. In contrast to Democrats’ (virtual) convention in 2020, current racial justice movements, like Black Lives Matter (which was not mentioned by name), featured less prominently, although Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett spoke about Breonna Taylor, and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison spoke about George Floyd, two Black Americans killed by police officers in 2020.
We noted a diverse list of speakers, many of them history-makers themselves, like Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary; Catherine Cortez Masto, the first Latina to serve in the Senate; and Barack and Michelle Obama, the first Black president and first lady. Black elected officials and leaders featured particularly prominently, and accordingly, Black identity was a frequent topic of conversation: The word “Black” showed up in at least 19 speeches, most commonly to highlight Black experiences and achievement, or to mock Trump’s use of the term “Black jobs” (mentioned by four speakers.)
In her keynote speech, Harris echoed the convention’s less-direct approach to race, evoking the history of the civil rights movement — she said she “grew up immersed in the ideals of the civil rights movement,” and that her parents taught her about trailblazing Black lawyers like Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley — and sharing personal anecdotes about her upbringing as the child of immigrants. “My mother was a brilliant, five-foot-tall brown woman with an accent. And as the eldest child, I saw how the world would sometimes treat her,” Harris said. She was one of several speakers who shared personal stories about the immigrant experience, using messages of diversity and representation to take a different tack on an issue on which Trump and the Republicans have an advantage.
Trump and Jan. 6 are at the core of Democrats’ democracy pitch
Like Biden, Harris maintains an advantage when it comes to who voters trust to protect American democracy. Painting Trump as an existential threat to democracy was a key part of Biden’s pitch to voters, and concerns about protecting democracy seemed to drive some undecided voters into his camp. Unsurprisingly, Biden’s own speech, the keynote of night one, mentioned democracy repeatedly. “We saved democracy in 2020, and now we must save it again in 2024,” he said. “The vote each of us casts this year will determine whether democracy and freedom will prevail. It’s that simple. It’s that serious.”
Some speakers took a slightly different approach to that message, portraying Trump as tiresome, self-obsessed or weird, but the throughline of protecting democracy remained a big theme of the convention. Overall, 17 speakers spoke about the importance of protecting democracy, and 12 recounted the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when pro-Trump protestors stormed the U.S. Capitol in response to his claims that the 2020 election was “stolen.”
This was especially true of the disaffected Republicans who crossed the aisle to support Harris and speak at the convention, like Trump’s former Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham, who recounted her decision to resign immediately on Jan. 6, and former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of only two Republicans who sat on the Jan. 6 select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol.
Kinzinger, who was given a key speaking slot shortly before Harris on Thursday, made a specific appeal to voters concerned about Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies, saying “standing up for our Constitution and our democracy … used to be the soul of being a Republican. But Donald Trump has suffocated the soul of the Republican Party.” He went on to say, “I know Kamala Harris shares my allegiance to the rule of law, the Constitution and democracy … Whatever policies we disagree on pale in comparison with those fundamental matters of principle, of decency, and of fidelity to this nation.”
Harris’s speech also tacked closely to the rhetoric voters had become used to during the Biden campaign, and devoted a large segment of her own speech to laying out what she saw as the dangers of another Trump presidency. “[T]he consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious,” she said. “Consider not only the chaos and calamity when he was in office, but also the gravity of what has happened since he lost the last election. Donald Trump tried to throw away your votes. When he failed, he sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers.”
Trump has more in store for a second term, she argued, referring to his threats to jail journalists and political opponents, his suggestion that he would deploy active duty military to suppress domestic unrest and the fact that the Supreme Court recently granted Trump some immunity from criminal prosecution. “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails, and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States. Not to improve your life, not to strengthen our national security, but to serve the only client he has ever had: himself.”
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When it comes to issue messaging, the DNC suggested that Democrats are as eager to hammer at the areas Trump has an advantage on as they are to highlight their own strengths: reproductive rights, race relations and protecting democracy. It’s a two-pronged approach to lure in as many marginal voters as possible while also motivating more committed Democrats, for whom abortion access in particular remains a top issue.
But the overall tone of the convention was a little more abstract, celebrating ideas like “joy” and “freedom.” Democrats tried to communicate those lofty ideals with a festive convention atmosphere and optimistic message, as well as by tying these ideas to their policy priorities. In comparison, the RNC communicated Republicans’ policy message in a more delineated, organized manner. The themes of each night heavily focused on issues of strength for the GOP: the economy, immigration and foreign policy.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg directly contrasted the two parties in his speech when he said the Trump campaign was “doubling down on negativity and grievance,” setting up Democrats as the party of positivity and gratitude. Pundits have long criticized the Democratic Party for its less-effective policy messaging. But if Harris wins in November, it may suggest that the “joyful warrior” persona she’s adopted and the optimistic tone Democrats struck at their convention resonated with voters.
