Democratic convention live: Demonstrators begin filling Chicago’s Union Park; national guard ‘on standby’, says Illinois governor | Democratic national convention 2024

David Smith

Monday’s speaking line-up also includes Senators Chris Coons of Delaware and Raphael Warnock of Georgia; representatives Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Jasmine Crockett of Texas; Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky; Shawn Fain, president of the UAW union; and “women that have been subjected to cruel and dangerous abortion bans under Donald Trump”.

For sure, Democrats would rather talk about Trump than Gaza. Cedric Richmond, a co-chair of the Harris-Walz 2024 campaign, told a press briefing on Monday:

Now he wants us to hand him back the reins of this nation as he runs on the Project 2025 agenda to ban abortion nationwide, jack up the costs of the middle class by thousands of dollars and fire civil servants and replace them with Trump loyalists.

But the American people know better. They elected President Biden and sent Donald Trump packing in 2020 and they will reject him again in 2024 and they will send Vice President Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to the White House.

Two speeches to watch on Monday as pro-Palestinian protesters gather in Chicago

David Smith

As pro-Palestinian protesters gathering outside the Democratic national convention in Chicago, there are two speeches to watch closely inside the arena tonight.

One is from Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state who backs Joe Biden’s Gaza policy and personifies the party establishment on national security. She had been booed and heckled by pro-Palestinian activists during public appearances, for example in April when she returned to her alma mater, Wellesley College, in Massachusetts.

The other is by Clinton’s fellow New Yorker, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a star of the progressive “squad” in the House of Representatives. Last year she described the Biden administration’s veto of the UN’s call for ceasefire in Gaza as “shameful” and in March she warned that Israel’s blockade of Gaza, putting the territory on the brink of severe famine, amounted to an “unfolding genocide”.

Tonight’s prime time speech will therefore be another defining test for Ocasio-Cortez to find a balance between speaking out on Gaza, which could rile party leaders seeking to project unity, and being a team player who backs Kamala Harris, which could prompt accusations of “sell-out” from the left.

Andrew Roth

The remarks by the liberal nonprofit Future Forward’s Chauncey Mclean came during a public talk with David Axelrod and Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report at Manny’s Cafeteria & Delicatessen in Chicago.

“[Kamala Harris’s] trend line since becoming the nominees is irrefutable, and she’s had this great run, but our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in the public, and that’s by design, and it’s a feature of conducting so many surveys and being in the field,” said Mclean.

If you’re the Harris campaign, you have to win one of Pennsylvania, Georgia or North Carolina,” he added. “But you just think historically about Pennsylvania, which we have as the most likely tipping point state. Biden Trump won it by less than a point in in 2016. Biden won it by less than a point in 2020 and so our expectation, what we’re seeing, is it’s going to be decided by a similar margin.

“And so it’s gonna be very to be very close there,” he said.

Our numbers have us basically in a coin flip.

Andrew Roth

Former Biden advisers from the liberal nonprofit Future Forward have said that their surveys show a “less rosy” picture of the Harris-Walz campaign’s chances to win the election than many public polling agencies.

Future Forward’s Chauncey Mclean said that the group had conducted 375,000 surveys since Harris became the candidate and that their data showed that the race was “tight as a tick”.

The odds of winning Pennsylvania, which he called the election’s “most likely tipping point”, was “basically at a coin flip”.

“Her enthusiasm in the base and with younger voters, voters of color has come so far from where the President was earlier but… we may be able to lean on that a little bit more,” said Mclean.

I mean, we do want to kind of get back to, you know, Biden’s 2020 support. She’s still running behind those numbers slightly kind of across the board, and there’s work to do with all these folks.

Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor, said “antisemitism played absolutely no role” in Kamala Harris’s decision to not pick him as her running mate.

Shapiro, speaking this morning to the Pennsylvania delegation at the Democratic convention, was responding to Donald Trump’s remarks over the weekend that Harris turned him down “because he’s Jewish.”

Shapiro, who was widely considered to be a frontrunner for the Democratic vice-presidential pick, said:

First off, Donald Trump is the least credible person to listen to when it comes to hate and bigotry and certainly antisemitism.

He said Trump was “trying to use me and he’s trying to use other Jews to divide Americans further”, adding:

Antisemitism played absolutely no role in my dialogue with the vice-president. Absolutely none. It is also true that antisemitism is present in our commonwealth, in our country and in some areas within our party, and we have to stand up and speak out against that.

A US arms embargo on Israel is a motivating issue for millions of younger voters whose support Kamala Harris hopes to secure after replacing Joe Biden at the top of the party’s ticket for November.

The issue of a ceasefire in Gaza, which has divided moderate and progressive members of the Democratic party, was not formally discussed in committee hearings when the 92-page platform was being drafted, according to the Washington Post.

Gaza protests in Chicago are planned by more than 200 groups, with organizers expecting tens of thousands to join. On Sunday, the city received a possibly early taste of what some fear could be a repeat of the party’s 1968 convention in Chicago that was characterized by a police riot targeting anti-Vietnam protesters.

A rally against the Israel-Hamas war and restrictions on reproductive rights was met by a larger showing of Chicago police when it set off down the city’s Michigan Avenue. A far larger protest focusing exclusively on US-support for Israel is set to begin at noon on Monday at Union Park.

Meanwhile, Harris and the rest of the Democratic party are convening as US diplomats scour the Middle East for an elusive ceasefire in Gaza, where Israel has been waging war in retaliation for Hamas’s 7 October attack.

Illinois governor JB Pritzker said 250 members of the state’s national guard have been deployed to Chicago this week for the Democratic national convention.

Pritzker said the guard was on “standby” and would act essentially as military police, the New York Times reported. He added:

Nobody expects that we’ll have to use them for anything very serious, but we also want to make sure that we have additional law enforcement type folks who are in uniform and who are trained to be police available.

Ed Pilkington

The proverb that the early bird catches the worm appears to apply even to the Democratic national convention, which is normally a late-night affair.

I’m at a breakfast meeting of the delegation for Wisconsin, one of the key battleground states that will decide the outcome of the November election, and lo and behold but who should show up but Tim Walz, the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee.

There are only about 100 Wisconsin volunteers at the event, yet even here Walz lit up the room the minute he entered it – a skill that bodes well for his keynote convention speech on Wednesday. “It’s been an interesting 11 days for me,” he began, looking genuinely shellshocked after his lightning propulsion on to the national stage following his pick by Kamala Harris as her running mate.

Over the next few days we will show what democracy looks like – it’s inclusive.

As governor of neighboring Minnesota, Walz is a familiar figure in Wisconsin. He’ll have more work to do on Wednesday introducing himself to a country that knows little about him.

He gave a taste of what is to come, saying that his goal with Harris was “not just to beat those guys” but to set out a “vision for our future that people can believe in. The end is a better, fairer, more just society.”

And he repeated what has by now, in 11 short days, become a mantra of the Harris-Walz campaign: joy. He said they aimed to do “politics with a sense of dignity, excitement and joy”.

Wisconsin delegates lapped it up. We’ll see how it goes down with a wider audience later in the week.