Obama to deliver ‘forceful affirmation’ for Kamala Harris – as it happened | Democratic national convention 2024

We’re now closing this blog – but join us for all the latest speeches, news and reaction from the second day of the Democratic national convention in our dedicated blog:

Thanks for following along so far. Here is a recap of the key developments of the day so far:

• Barack Obama will deliver a “forceful affirmation that [Kamala] Harris is the right leader for the moment” during his speech on Tuesday night at the Democratic national convention, an adviser to the former president told CNN. A source familiar with Obama’s prepared speech told the Washington Post that he will “affirm why Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are precisely the leaders the country needs right now, lay out the task in front of Democrats over the next eleven weeks, and bring into focus the values at stake in this election and at the heart of our politics.”

• Michelle Obama will address the convention shortly before her husband Barack takes the stage. The couple’s endorsement of Harris in July was seminal in securing the Democratic presidential nomination for the current vice-president, helping to bypass a potentially ugly internal fight.

• Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr. and his running mate, tech lawyer Nicole Shanahan, are considering dropping out of the race and supporting Donald Trump, Shanahan said. In a interview on the End Tribalism in Politics podcast that aired today, reported by the Washington Post, Shanahan said: “There’s two options that we’re looking at and one is staying in, forming that new party, but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Waltz presidency because we draw more votes from Trump. Or we walk away right now and join forces with with Donald Trump and explain to our base why we’re making this decision.”

• The US Secret Service was checking into bomb threats made at “various locations” in downtown Chicago where the Democratic national convention is taking place, AP reported. A threat was emailed to the Fox 32 Newsroom which said pipe bombs were placed at four hotels in downtown Chicago, including the Nobu Hotel, the Hotel Chicago West Loop and the Hyatt House Chicago in West Loop and the University District, the outlet reported.

• Chicago police said there was a “brief breach” of security fencing “within sight and sound of the United Center” on Monday evening, where the DNC is being held. Some 13 protesters were arrested on charges ranging from criminal trespass and resisting and obstructing an arrest to aggravated battery of police officers. The pro-Palestine demonstrations have brought thousands to the city.

• Donald Trump delivered remarks on Tuesday in Howell, Michigan, a city with historical links to the Ku Klux Klan and where white supremacists marched through the streets last month and chanted “We love Hitler. We love Trump.”

• Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary under the Trump administration, will speak at the Democratic national convention today to show her support for Kamala Harris.

• Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, will attend a campaign rally in Wisconsin today where she is scheduled to deliver remarks at around 8pm Central Time.

Robert Tait

Away from the Democratic convention, RFK Jr is considering ending his campaign for president to help Donald Trump, according to his running mate.

The startling disclosure was made by Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s vice-presidential candidate, who said the pair was considering dropping their campaign over fears it might help elect Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, as president.

Shanahan’s remarks, made on the Impact Theory With Tim Bilyeau podcast, were close to an all-out admission that Kennedy’s campaign had more in common with Trump’s than Harris’s. Kennedy was a member of the Democratic party and attempted to run as its nominee before choosing to stand as an independent.

Read the full story here:

David Smith

Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, has warned that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, currently riding high in the polls, faces plenty of ups and downs before November.

“You all remember when President Obama won the Iowa caucuses – if you are old enough to remember that,” Jarrett, speaking at Axios House in Chicago, said of Obama’s first primary campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2008. “We got: ‘Oh, my goodness!’ and ‘We are going for gold!’”

Then came the New Hampshire primary and a “devastating defeat”, she added. “But out of that, people found out who he was. We came out of that terrible experience. It forced us to have to go to many more states and introduce him to many more people and, in the end, it was actually good for us.”

Harris is bound to undergo “a whole multitude of tests”, Jarrett said. “She is absolutely on a roll right now. I think it’s a hands-up enthusiasm. People are just tired of all the negativity, the polarisation, the toxicity. I think what Governor Walz said: she’s full of joy. People want joy. They actually want to like each other.”

Harris, who has replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, has embarked on a much shorter campaign than the one Obama fought. Jarrett expressed confidence in Harris and running mate Tim Walz and their advisers to deal with obstacles and keep pushing forward.

Ed Pilkington

Hot from his primetime appearance at the Democratic convention on Monday night, Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers (UAW), has been explaining to reporters why he wore a T-shirt imprinted with the phrase “Trump is a scab.”

“I’ve been a union member for UAW for 30 years, and we have a term for people that cross picket lines and don’t respect working-class people. We call them scabs, and that’s what Donald Trump is.”

Fain said that the political leanings of the UAW’s more than 1 million active and retired members had remained stable over the years at about 65% Democratic and 30-32% Republican. But he predicted that this time around, the gap would widen as union members gravitate towards Kamala Harris.

“She’s an amazing, very strong woman. I think people underestimate her, and that’s a huge mistake. I think she’s going to move a massive mountain come November,” he said.

The UAW is preparing to launch in the next week or so what has been billed as the biggest field campaign in its history to persuade its members to turn out to vote.

Fain said that in his view, people would lean towards the Democratic ticket because when they look at Harris and her running mate Tim Walz, “they see themselves. I mean, no one looks at Donald Trump and says: ‘I identify with that person.’”

The Democratic national convention just released the full schedule of its second night, confirming that Barack Obama will deliver the evening’s keynote speech, and Michelle Obama, second gentleman Doug Emhoff and independent senator Bernie Sanders are also scheduled to make remarks.

The grandsons of John F Kennedy and Jimmy Carter will be among the early speakers at the convention, along with Stephanie Grisham, Donald Trump’s former White House press secretary.

As the night goes on, we’ll hear from Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, and then Sanders, both of whom will speak at the 8pm CT hour. Emhoff and Michelle Obama will speak after 9pm, and Barack Obama is to address delegates starting at 10pm.

Do not be surprised if the schedule runs late, as it did last night.

George Chidi

Arizona senator Mark Kelly and transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg spoke at the Veterans and Military Families Council at the Democratic national convention today, arguing that concepts of patriotism and freedom are not the monopoly of the Republican party.

“Folks come from all over our country, with all kinds of backgrounds to serve,” Kelly said. “We’ve all served alongside folks of different political stripes, and some who are not political at all … Some Republicans want to think that their political party has a monopoly on patriotism. No party does. But it’s clear which political candidate supports military veterans, and which one does not.”

Kelly took Trump to task for his recent comments suggesting that the Presidential Medal of Freedom was a “better” award than the Medal of Honor because “everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”

“The VFW, of which I am a member, called these comments asinine,” said Kelly, a former astronaut and Gulf war veteran. “I agree.”

Both Kelly and Buttigieg made oblique references to the attacks made by Republicans on the record of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz.

“You can count from the despicable way – the weird way – that he talks about the service,” Buttigieg said, “There’s a through-line that goes all the way back to the days when Donald Trump used his status as a teenage multimillionaire to procure a doctor’s note to pretend that he was unable to serve, so that some working-class man from who knows, maybe the south side of Chicago went to Vietnam in his place. There’s an unbroken pattern right there of not being able to grasp service to others. Veterans understand service to others. Today’s Democrats understand service to others.”

Gwen Walz, wife of the Democratic VP pick, spoke with pride of their service as teachers, and his service as a national guardsman. “I will put that service up against anyone’s,” Walz said. “We are building a future for all of us, each and every one of us that we can be proud of.”

Rachel Leingang

I’ve been over at the McCormick Place convention center all day again, popping in and out of caucus and council meetings. And I finally had a chance to check out Dempalooza, an expo event with a bunch of vendors – some selling Democratic and Harris merch, some selling local goods, some selling politics.

I saw at least five Kamala Harris cardboard cutouts and a “coconut room”, a nod to Harris’ iconic “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree” line that social media loves.

One of those cutouts had Harris in a superhero outfit, and people came up to take photos alongside it. There is also a display of presidential footwear, with displays cases of old shoes.

The area wasn’t very busy – the Democratic convention is spread across McCormick Place and the United Center, and getting from one to the other was a major challenge for some delegates yesterday, so as the day wears on, the McCormick location is getting quiet as folks start to make their way to the United Center for tonight’s speakers.

Singer-songwriter James Taylor was scheduled to perform on Monday night on the first night of the Democratic national convention in Chicago, but as the evening ran long, organizers skipped elements of the program, meaning that Taylor never took the stage.

DNC officials said in a statement that because of the “raucous applause interrupting speaker after speaker, we ultimately skipped elements of our program to ensure we could get to President Biden as quickly as possible so that he could speak directly to the American people,” per NBC News Chicago.

Taylor himself released a statement this afternoon, saying that it “became clear” as the evening went on that there “wouldn’t be time for our ‘You’ve Got a Friend’” adding that “maybe the organizers couldn’t anticipate the wild response from the floor of the United Center.” “Sorry to disappoint,” he added.

But a great and inspirational, quintessentially American moment. We were honored to be there.

Exactly 20 years ago, Barack Obama was a relatively unknown state legislator when he delivered a keynote address at the Democratic party’s convention. Obama said that evening:

I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on Earth, is my story even possible.

His 2004 speech offers one of the clearest examples of how convention speeches can elevate a rising political star to national prominence. Four years later, he returned to accept the party’s nomination for president.

In 2012, he made the case for his re-election bid; in 2016, he advocated for Hillary Clinton to succeed him in office; and during the 2020 convention, he issued an attack on Donald Trump and urged Americans to back Joe Biden for president.

Now, his speech will make the case for the Harris-Walz ticket and the need to defeat Trump.

Here’s what else to know about Obama’s speech tonight.

Donald Trump said he has “no regrets” over how his appointment of three conservative supreme court justices led to the reversal of Roe v Wade and ended the constitutional right to an abortion.

Trump, speaking to CBS News on Monday night, said:

The federal government should have nothing to do with this issue.