Kamala Harris accepted her party’s presidential nomination amid euphoric scenes at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Here are five takeaways from her speech to delegates as her fight for the White House against Donald Trump formally began.
1 – History maker
This was the night that Kamala Harris made history as the first woman of colour from either party to become a presidential nominee.
Many of the delegates wore white in honour of the suffragette movement on the night the woman who could become America’s first female president spoke.
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But Harris didn’t wear white, perhaps because she did not want to dwell on the history-making nature of her candidacy.
But it is worth pausing to recall that in Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama and now Harris, three of the key speeches of the convention came from black women.
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2 – Unity
“Kamala Harris for the People” was the campaign slogan for her ultimately unsuccessful 2020 presidential bid and she repeated it tonight.
Harris says she is the candidate of unity, focusing on the idea that she is fighting for the ordinary person – talking about her working-class roots and working at McDonald’s – while framing Donald Trump as an elite whose economic policy is designed to look after his billionaire friends.
3 – Personal story
Even though she has been in the White House for four years, in many parts of the United States people are not intimately familiar with her story.
Her speech began by recapping the journey her mother Shyamala took from India to California aged 19, before meeting her Jamaican father.
She spoke about their struggles to afford a house in the San Francisco Bay Area and how her passion to become a prosecutor was fired by witnessing injustice in her own life.
4 – How will she bring the fight to Donald Trump?
The campaign theme of belittling Donald Trump continued. Harris’s running mate Tim Walz coined the phrase “weird” to describe Trump and his running mate, JD Vance.
In her speech, Harris described Trump as an “unserious” man although she did go on to give grave warnings about what a second Trump presidency would mean.
“Consider his explicit intent to set free violent extremists,” she said, “his explicit intent to jail journalists, political opponents, and anyone he sees as the enemy.”
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5 – Policy
The Harris campaign has been derided for being heavy on the vibes and light on the policy detail. While we did not hear a lot new in terms of explicit policy detail in this speech, she gave a window into what a Harris presidency would look like.
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There were sections in her speech on housing, reproductive rights and on Israel and Gaza.
Wavering voters now have more of an idea of what kind of president she would be.
