Democrats enter convention with optimism — and fear: ANALYSIS

Democrats are excited, gearing up for their political party this week as they descend on Chicago for their convention. He was also scared.

In a short period of time, Vice President Kamala Harris has cemented her party as the de facto presidential nominee, riding a wave of social media frenzy and a polling boost over President Joe Biden’s numbers. The formal acceptance of the Democratic nomination this week will cap the latest period of a weeks-long “honeymoon” as he reinvigorates a party that just a month ago was uneasy after Biden’s devastating June debate.

But the party is still deeply afraid of former President Donald Trump, who withstood a vigorous path to victory and who overcame historic odds and stumbled himself to win the White House when the Democrats were last pushed by a woman candidate who made history.

Democrats “are more hopeful than I’ve seen them in a long time, more enthusiastic and energized than I’ve seen them in a long time, nervous because they remember 2016,” said former Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., an ally. Harris, recalling Hillary Clinton’s campaign against Trump. “You can’t take your foot off the gas. You can’t have too much confidence just based on the fact that you feel good right now. It’s going to be a tough race.”

Harris has jumped Trump in the national polling average by 538 and the polling average in several key swing states, albeit by a hair. He filled arenas across the country, hitting the campaign trail with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, his running mate. And he changed his campaign messaging to focus on an upbeat message of freedom, a shift away from Biden’s dark focus on Trump’s threat to democracy.

Poll after poll has shown a corresponding rise in Democratic morale and a drop in the number of so-called “double haters”, a risk for Trump, who has previously fought a party based on depression.

It’s all setting the stage for this week’s convention, which has been described as a jamboree, rather than the relative political revival that had been planned for Biden, who has seen his path to victory so narrow that Democrats have to squint. see it.

“I don’t think we’ve felt national joy in a long time. A lot of people felt it when Biden beat Trump. That’s how I feel,” said one Democratic strategist with ties to Harris’ team. “In talking to people, and if you just see a lot of people, it’s just a feeling of joy. People feel joy.”

But having a festival this week in Chicago is not the same as winning in November, and Democrats know it.

There are still policy issues ahead — campus protests this fall because the war in Gaza could flare up again; inflation is cooling, but so is the labor market; immigration remains fertile ground for attacks by Republicans.

And above all that appears to be Trump, who has struggled to find his feet since Harris emerged as an opponent but still offers strong loyalty to his base and advantages on issues like the economy and the border.

The anxiety of the party has become well-known to the point of cliché, and this week, hanging on the Chicago convention, will pall.

“Don’t take (Trump) for granted. Don’t write him off,” said longtime Democratic National Committee member James Zogby. “He’s going to be a dog boy, and he’s talking with anger and a sense of dislocation and being ignored, being humiliated, that’s an important percentage of the electorate that can’t be ignored.”

Some Democrats who spoke to ABC News brought up the 2016 race between Trump and Hillary Clinton as unexpected, recalling the shock they felt after feeling bullish for months that their candidate would emerge victorious.

“You can never be overconfident. We saw what happened in 2016 when people became overconfident, and we got four years of pure hell from Trump,” said David Brand, a Democratic strategist and Harris ally.

“Not a day goes by that we don’t think about it,” Brand added of the 2016 race.

Some Democrats, though, say that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

That kind of fear — something he didn’t feel in 2016, he said — could force the party to work harder and prevent complacency, the enemy of a campaign that’s fueled by oil.

“It’s healthy. We should be scared,” said Jamal Simmons, a longtime Democratic consultant and former communications director for Harris. “It’s time to sober up.”

However, Democrats made sure to do better after Biden ended his campaign.

Instead of an 81-year-old incumbent whose mental fitness is a constant source of speculation, the standard bearer of the Democrats is now a 59-year-old prosecutor – a fact that the party has never failed to mention because against the 78-year-old convicted in 34 felonies. The fundamental shift has Democrats at least holding their breath, even if it still doesn’t measure the drapes in the Oval Office.

“From a branding standpoint, I’d rather be us than them,” said Democratic strategist Peter Giangreco. “And that’s uncertain.”