CHICAGO — You could hear the bass from the warehouse at the end of a deserted street from blocks away. Inside, influencers hoisting “Hotties for Harris”-branded coconuts and “Walz on the Beach” cocktails were twerking to a remix of Tinashe’s Nasty Girl on the dance floor, while their friends posed for photos on the “Property of J.D. Vance” couch. Across town, young Black and brown activists and staff for Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden crammed into a pop-up dance club blaring house music at The Second City comedy theater on W North Avenue.
“The highlight of the party was seeing the current [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] director get down on the dance floor to Chicago house music legend Derrick Carter,” says Brad Jenkins, a former Obama White House official and a Second City board member who organized the Tuesday event. “And also seeing Congressman Gabe Amo of Rhode Island just be himself and get down and dance — the whole night was a night of joy.”
Former President Obama had concluded his speech just hours earlier at the United Center, and throngs of Democratic staffers and elected officials were doing what attendees (and, to be fair, media people…) at these types of decadent, cash-and-sponsorship-drenched nominating conventions always focus on as the clock inches closer to midnight: snagging every opulent party invite they could. But even at the constellation of different themed late-night parties, some of which spilled over into the 4 a.m. hour, the rowdy conversations and rejuvenated optimism were peppered only very occasionally with a small sense of, well, dread.
“I think the vibes are ahead of the polls,” said one person who works with Democratic causes. “I think it’s good to be happy, but [we] need to make sure everyone still recognizes the actual state of things.”
Even with Vice President Harris’ recent uptick in the battleground-state polling, the presidential contest between her and former President Donald Trump — who is running on a blatantly authoritarian, almost cartoonishly brutal platform of MAGA revenge and abuses of power — remains confined to razor-thin margins. At this time, for so much of the Democratic Party elite and rank and file, this race is still the No Country for Old Men election, as in: “What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?”
“We have to keep things in perspective,” Jenkins adds. “That’s why we threw that party for all those young staff and organizers. They’re going to be the ones not sleeping, and traveling the country, and knocking on all the doors, and doing all this shit while we’re bedwetting and sharing memes. We win elections because of those kids…I mean, this election is going to be really, really close… The memes are nice, but memes don’t win elections.”
Earlier that day, inside a warren of hotel conference rooms and ballrooms at McCormick Place — the Democratic convention hall — group after group unveiled internal polling that portended the tectonic shift that had taken place in the 2024 campaign over the last month, especially in battleground states.
A pollster for EMILY’s List, the powerful pro-choice Democratic Super PAC, presented reporters with a survey, fielded eight days after Kamala Harris was named the nominee. Between July and August, they found, enthusiasm among voters in battleground states has jumped 47 points, with 79 percent of likely voters reporting they were excited to vote in November. The shift was even more dramatic among young women 18 to 44, a group that experienced a stunning 57 point jump in enthusiasm after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
“Kamala Harris erased the enthusiasm gap,” said pollster Jill Normington. A few doors over, the Gen-Z group Voters of Tomorrow was touting polling of their own that detected a similar phenomenon: “massive” growth enthusiasm among voters age 18-29, with more than two-thirds now reporting that they were excited to vote in November.
But even with that enormous shift in enthusiasm, Biden had been losing so badly that the net effect, essentially, puts Harris roughly neck-and-neck with Trump in the race overall. Chauncey McLean, president of Future Forward, one of the super PACs supporting Harris’ bid, said something to that effect this week. “Our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in the public,” McLean said.
All across Chicago on Tuesday, blissed-out Democrats sporting Brat-green wristbands and swilling coconut-rum cocktails were basking in a strange, new feeling: pure, uncut cockiness that they had this thing locked up — a confidence that, it bears noting, was at odds with the polls themselves. The vibes were so good — so different from what they had been just a few weeks ago — that it almost felt like Democrats had temporarily repressed the potential horror of a Trump restoration. Political staffers from D.C. who had worried just a month ago that their jobs might be purged, Project 2025-style, were now able to speculate giddily on the prospect of expanding the child tax credit.
The good vibes carried over to the United Center where red-white-and-blue blinking bracelets lit up the venue and, just as the roll call was getting underway, Lil Jon bust into the aisles, belting “Turn Down for What,” his megahit collab with DJ Snake. By the time the Obamas took the stage, the United Center felt like it was going to bust loose from its foundations and levitate from the sheer weightlessness of Democrats’ collective spirit.
In this moment, Democrats are not cowed by finger wagging critics telling them to cut out the dick jokes and the couch-fucker cracks. Democrats are trolling Trump — projecting taunts on Trump Tower Chicago, skipping over to Wisconsin and filling Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum during their own convention just for kicks, making jokes about the size of Trump’s… crowds to an audience of 12.9 million at-home viewers — with abandon.
In their convention speeches Tuesday night, both Obamas gave a nod to the reality that while the feelings are stellar, the presidential race is deadly close.
“Yes, Kamala and Tim are doing great right now. They’re packing arenas across the country. Folks are energized. We’re feeling good,” Michelle Obama said. “But there are still so many people who are desperate for a different outcome… No matter how good we feel tonight, or tomorrow, or the next day, this is still going to be an uphill battle.”
On Tuesday at least, there wasn’t time to worry about that: there were too many parties. For now, Democrats are still soaking it all up.
