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.
Donald Trump looks to an image of Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed during a campaign rally on Sunday, Oct. 25, 2026, in Port Huron, Mich.
Republicans Are Driving the Most Racist Election Cycle in a Generation
In 2010, a splinter group of far-right Republicans known as the Tea Party summoned a red wave of Republican voters in Barack Obama’s first midterm elections, capitalizing on the remnants of the global financial crisis and troop surges in Afghanistan to help the GOP win 63 seats in Congress. The Tea Party wanted to be known as fiscal conservatives, but their darkest power was abject, open fury that the United States had dared to elect a Black man as president.
But 2010 was not, somehow, the most racist election in recent memory. It’s the 2026 midterms, thanks to the invective spewed by the man in the White House and the worst dregs of his movement around the country. With a war in Iran, skyrocketing gas prices, rampant inflation, and a burgeoning housing crisis, the GOP has no claim to fiscal conservatism this election cycle. Instead, all they have is race.
“There’s five hundred million Arabs in the world,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said recently. “And yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”
RFK was making a barely veiled reference to the primary target of Republican racism this cycle: Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed is a muslim, and is sufficiently left wing so as to invite the ire of basically every faction of American politics, including centrist Democrats, centrist Republicans, and the far right, who have taken up the cause of cutting him down with particular zeal. Trump has joined in:
“If Abdul and the Democrats win, they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadis to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas,” Trump said at a rally in Port Huron on Sunday.
Trump has repeatedly issued some of the worst attacks against El-Sayed, repeating the claim that he is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and calling him a “jihadist.” He has also gleefully mocked El-Sayed’s name at multiple campaign stops, and said over the weekend that he would “be the only senator that has to go through a metal detector before he is allowed to go in the Senate,” the implication, of course, being that he is a potential terrorist.
Vice President JD Vance, not one to be out-done, accused El-Sayed of “anti-white” racism, a familiar line of attack by members of the far right looking to mobilize economically disadvantaged white voters.
“Abdul El-Sayed, who maybe more than any Democrat running in the nation has engaged in the kind of explicitly anti-white racial hatred that has become common in the Democratic Party,” Vance said at a rally in Michigan on Tuesday. “I’d say that person should not be elected.”
The attacks on El-Sayed are shocking and crude, but they didn’t spring out of a vacuum. Racist dogwhistles — and more explicit attacks — have been common fodder for the GOP for decades, from Ronald Reagan’s popularization of the term “welfare queen” — a veiled attack on impoverished Black Americans — to Trump’s support of the Barack Obama birth certificate conspiracies. Some of Trump’s earliest political breakthroughs came on the back of demonizing Latin American immigrants and painting undocumented migrants as a boogeyman threatening the livelihoods of “real” Americans.
All these threads have come together in the second Trump administration, with the persecution of Haitian immigrants who were stripped of their Temporary Protected Status by the Department of Homeland Security, a campaign of terror across the heartland committed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, repeated denigration of African countries in public speeches, and constant racist dogwhistles in official government communications. The Trump administration has raided the home of a sitting congresswoman, Somali-American Representative Ilhan Omar, reportedly as part of an investigation aiming to strip her of her citizenship. Trump has repeatedly suggested Omar should be deported, while making fun of her head coverings.
Trump’s racism has spread throughout the GOP, emboldening the most fringe candidates to take positions so blatantly bigoted that some squeamish members of their party are cringing. In Texas, Railroad Commissioner candidate Bo French recently doubled down on a racist post he made remarking on the number of Indian-American students at a recent University of Texas football game. Republican megadonor Elon Musk, a white South African born and raised under apartheid, has spent entire months this year posting incessantly about race, repeatedly returning to racist tropes to attack Democratic candidates as he pours money into attack ads in several states.
This kind of animus is the sign of a desperate party — one whose own consultants are already admitting might be “fucked.” The idea they’re selling to American voters is simple: Hate your neighbor, based not on what they say or do, but because of who they are. The problem is, most of their enemies are just as American as their marks, and no amount of rhetoric can cover up the fact that they’re here to stay.