• The Democratic National Convention continued Wednesday night as Tim Walz formally accepted the nomination for Vice President. He went full “coach mode,” whipping supporters into a frenzy as Vice President Kamala Harris prepares to receive the nomination as the Democratic Presidential candidate on Thursday.
• Meanwhile, protestors outside the convention center continue to challenge Democrats from the left on issues like the war in Gaza, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ freedom. Chicago journalist Shawn Allee brings us the perspectives of young voters from the convention as they share which issues matter most to them at the ballot box.
• In anticipation of Vice President Kamala Harris’ nomination, we talked to Jay Caspian Kang, a staff writer for the New Yorker, about the Harris campaign’s lack of details on policy proposals. With just over two months remaining until election day, we asked him what people want to hear from Harris as she gives her much-anticipated acceptance speech this evening.

Show Notes:

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TRANSCRIPT

Josie Duffy Rice: It’s Thursday, August 22nd. I’m Josie Duffy Rice. 

Alexis Johnson: And I’m Alexis Johnson, guest hosting today and this is What a Day. The show where we’re still basking in the glow of Michelle Obama ripping Donald Trump to shreds in her DNC speech Tuesday night. 

Josie Duffy Rice: And she did it so elegantly, too. I feel like I just had a spa day. Like her outfit, her look, her skin, her words, all that was very cleansing. I feel spiritually cleansed, you know? [music break] On today’s show, we talked to New Yorker writer Jay Caspian Kang about what he wants to hear from Vice President Kamala Harris tonight. 

Alexis Johnson: But first, night three of the Democratic National Convention, all eyes were on Tim Walz. He accepted the nomination for VP before going into coach mode and revving up Democrats to fight for their freedoms. 

[clip of Tim Walz] Let me finish with this team. It’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal, but we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field. And boy, do we have the right team. Kamala Harris is top. Kamala Harris is experienced. And Kamala Harris is ready. Our job. Our job. Our job. Our job for everyone watching is to get in the trenches and do the blocking and tackling. 

Alexis Johnson: Well, the current vice president, Kamala Harris’s entrance into the race has been a game changer when it comes to the youth vote. Among voters under 30, the vice president leads Donald Trump in most polls by 15 to 20 percentage points. Those numbers had been lagging under President Biden. Some experts dismiss the significance of the youth vote, though, pointing out that voter turnout is typically much higher among people over 60 than those 29 and under. But according to researchers at Tufts University, more than 8 million young people will be eligible to vote in their first elections this November. So mobilizing young voters could be a game changer in many swing states. We wanted to hear directly from some of these young folks, so we sent longtime Chicago journalist Shawn Allee to the DNC to speak with members of Gen Z who had never voted in a presidential election before. These voters told us about the issues that will matter to them most at the ballot box. 

[clip of Jonathan Person] My name is Jonathan Person. I’m from Columbia, South Carolina, and I am 21 years old. So off the top of my mind, I know for me the economy is a big thing. The job market, especially as someone who’s about to emerge to the job force or the working force, and also I think infrastructure is a big deal, especially for me in South Carolina. 

[clip of Avi Dhyani] My name is Avi Dhyani, I’m actually Georgia’s youngest delegate. I am 18 I’m about to turn 19. Being the son of two Indian immigrants, I really care that we have a good immigration system. But at the same time, we’re not demonizing these people that come into our country. 

[clip of Skye Alex Jackson] Skye Alex Jackson, 21. I’m from Chicago. What’s going on over in the Israel-Hamas conflict, thinking about what our political parties are doing to support that and to support um kind of justice in the Middle East and safety and peace for all. 

[clip of Connor Elliott] Connor Elliott. So I’m 19 years old and I’m from Shelbyville, Indiana. It’s a very Trump town, but I’m excited to be voting for Kamala Harris and representing that area. I come from a generation that was flying through, you know, high school and the fear of gun violence and school shootings, right. So I remember back in 2022 when there was a few big school shootings that happened. I went and picketed out in my town in Shelbyville, which is a very conservative rural area. So standing out there holding a sign saying, hey, we need to pass commonsense gun legislation. That was that was a little nerve wracking, but that’s something I’m very passionate about. 

Alexis Johnson: Connor and several of the other young voters we heard from said they were actually all in on Biden when he was still in the race. 

[clip of Connor Elliott] So mind you I’m 19, and when President Biden came into the race in 2020, um that was really when I started getting really focused into politics and trying to figure out who I was as a person and who I identified with. President Biden was that Democrat that pulled me in. Coming from a working class family. That’s what my family is and just fighting our way through life. That’s who President Biden is. And just helping people is what I was taught to do. Uh. So Biden was who made me a Democrat and showed me the way. 

[clip of Avi Dhyani] President Biden was an amazing president. I think he did not get enough credit for what he did, and what he was able to get it done, and he was overshadowed by some narrative that the other side was trying to spin. 

[clip of Olivia Julianna] My name is Olivia Julianna. I am from Houston, Texas. I am 21 years old. I was what some people call a Biden dead ender, uh and I got a lot of flack for that because I tell people I’m like, look, when Joe Biden told us he was going to combat gun violence, he signed into law the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, and he told us he was going to combat climate change. He passed the IRA. 

Alexis Johnson: But Connor, Avi, and Olivia all told us they’re excited to vote for Vice President Harris and their peers echoed that sentiment. 

[clip of Meaghan Elsner] My name is Meaghan Elsner. I’m from Baltimore, Maryland. I think as someone who is Gen Z, it was really nice to kind of see someone that’s a little closer to our age, who’s a little bit more in touch with, I guess, social media and also understanding like what the young people want. I really enjoyed it because she does kind of make that effort with young people that you don’t normally see with, I guess uh, people who have been more tenured and stuff in politics. So I was thrilled, I really was. 

Alexis Johnson: Here is Skye Alex Jackson again. 

[clip of Skye Alex Jackson] As a woman of color, I’m so stoked and so excited. And so I think from a personal note, it’s really incredibly inspiring. And I full heartedly believe in Kamala. And I don’t think that any politician doesn’t need to be held accountable, but I personally am super excited to see what she does in office. 

Alexis Johnson: While all of the young voters we spoke with are spending time this week inside the convention hall, it’s been impossible to ignore the protests that many young people are taking part in directly outside of the DNC. The protests have been on issues including the war in Gaza, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ freedom. So we wanted to know why these young folks are putting so much energy into working from inside the system. 

[clip of Emma Schriberg] My name is Emma Schriberg. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and I am now living in Indiana. I’m 20 today. I turn 21 tomorrow. I was raised by a family that believes in democracy in the democratic process, and I really believe that the power needs to lie with the people. And I really believe that the most important way we can do that is to run for office, run for positions like delegate and bring our values and our family to the table. And the only way that action can happen is if we work for it. And the way to do that in America is to work within the democratic process. 

Alexis Johnson: Finally, Skye Alex Jackson told us that she sees the significance of working from within the DNC, but also fully supports pressuring it from the outside, which makes sense since she happens to be the granddaughter of civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson. 

[clip of Skye Alex Jackson] Well, to me, politics is really all about activism. Just that’s kind of the framework that I come from in my family. And what I love about activism is that there’s so many different routes and ways you can go about it, and I honestly respect all roots of safety and peace. And so when we look at activists outside the DNC, I think it’s awesome that people are standing up for what they believe in. I think it’s awesome that people are standing up for what they believe in inside the DNC. I think both are equally as important, equally as relevant to get people to stand up and do what’s right. 

Alexis Johnson: Josie, these young people, I’m always just so surprised that they are just so informed. They are so active. I mean, just spending their summer at the DNC at that age, that’s just not what I was doing personally. But I’m I’m just so proud of them for just being so active. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Yeah, I feel they give me hope for the future for sure. 

Alexis Johnson: 100%. Well, our thanks again to Shawn Allee for speaking with these young voters at the DNC. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Thanks, Alexis. We will get to our conversation about the expectations for VP Harris’s speech in a moment. But if you like our show, make sure to subscribe and share with your friends. We’ll be right back with more of today’s coverage of the DNC presented by PolicyGenius after some ads. 

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Josie Duffy Rice: And we are back with more coverage of this week’s DNC in Chicago. As we mentioned before, tonight is the night when Vice President Kamala Harris will formally accept the party’s nomination for president and close out the convention with a primetime address. 

Alexis Johnson: She’s not expected to lay out any major new plans during her speech. And that’s not really what the convention is for. But with a little more than two months to go till Election Day, yikes. The Harris campaign hasn’t really laid out many policy positions at all. Yes, she outlined a handful of economic proposals, but she hasn’t explained how she would handle some of the other major issues she’d face as president, like the war in Gaza and relations with Israel, the war in Ukraine, immigration or climate change. 

Josie Duffy Rice: These kind of proposals would typically be laid out during a party primary, but that obviously did not happen this time around, with President Biden dropping out of the race so late. And so far, Harris’ lack of specifics doesn’t actually seem to be bothering voters that much. Jay Caspian King is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He wrote about the Harris campaign’s so far, thin list of policy proposals, and joined me to talk about it. I started by asking if it’s a symptom of the circumstances of her nomination, or something more specific to her campaign. 

Jay Caspian Kang: Oh, no, no, no I don’t. Well, only a little bit. Right. But not so much more so than almost any other politician in America. I think that probably 90% of it is really just a circumstance. And then the other part of it, maybe 10% probably is Kamala Harris herself. She’s never since, you know, I think around the time when she was district attorney, which was when I first came across her, when I was living in San Francisco. She’s never really been clearly defined as one thing or another in the way that a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren might be right, or Donald Trump or um, where there is a thing that they do that you can identify them with. With Kamala Harris, I don’t think that that’s ever quite been there. And we saw that in the 2019 primary season, right, where it was very hard for her to fixate on what a platform would be or what she would be running as. And I think some of that has probably bled over. But I think the overwhelming part of it is a strange situation um, that she has found herself in. 

Josie Duffy Rice: So she’s kind of come up with some, like, economic policy positions, in the past week or so, boosting child tax credits, helping first time homebuyers, banning price gouging. What are these? Or do these feel real? Do they feel still pretty big vague? Do they feel actionable? 

Jay Caspian Kang: It’s hard to tell, but I think that they’re all things that are popular. Right? It’s almost like she looked in like a bucket of stuff that Biden had been considering or had done or was going to talk about in this campaign, and she just picked out all the most popular stuff, for example, bringing back like the tax credits that were available during the pandemic for children is very popular, right? Like it polls very well, building more housing is somewhat popular. Right? That’s something that she talked about as well. And I think that that’s a pretty good strategy, to be honest. If you were just talking electorally, like, why not just pick the most popular stuff if you have full rein to pick whatever you want, because you’re not really going to be held to account for it through a primary process, right? So you can just pick whatever you want, and there’s nobody else that is going to compare themselves to you. I don’t know, it’s just this amazing advantage she kind of has in terms of what policy she wants to pick, is that she gets to just pick them herself. And, you know, she doesn’t have to share with anybody. She just gets them. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Right. And in your article, you were comparing her campaign to what’s called a pusher in tennis. Can you explain what that is and why you used that as a metaphor? 

Jay Caspian Kang: Well, I’m a little bit of a pusher myself. A pusher is somebody who basically just returns the ball and does not try and hit too much offense, and their idea is that they’re going to just kind of force you to make a mistake. I feel like that is similar to her strategy and that, more than anything, seems to be working. Right, because uh, she doesn’t just have one opponent that is erratic and prone to error. She has two, I mean she has Trump and JD Vance. At least once a week, one of them does something that makes Kamala Harris look much better by comparison. So I think that’s kind of where she’s at right now. 

Josie Duffy Rice: To your point, it seems to be working right. It seems like Trump and Vance can’t really, their kind of hits on her are not working. What do you think are the risks to this approach? Are there risk to this approach. Is this like the safe way to run for office basically? 

Jay Caspian Kang: I think it’s the only way that she could have run for office, given the amount of time that she had and the record that she has. Right? I mean, when Kamala Harris was in the Senate, what she was best known for was that she was very good at interrogating people on the Judiciary Committee. But in terms of her senatorial record, that’s actually the only thing that they’ve brought up during the entire DNC or during the campaign. And then as vice president, you know, you’re the vice president. And really what you get is like, oh, I’m next in line. The downsides of it as I see it, are that at some point something might happen in the world that calls her into a greater specificity and a greater responsibility with what she says. Now, this could be anything, right? It could be a stock market crash, for example, or it could be an escalation of a regional war or something like that in the Middle East. Or it could be some sort of big turn in Ukraine. And that at that point, I wonder if there will be a stark contrast between all the joy and the fun of this convention for the Democrats so far. I had a very energetic one. If you’re not a Democrat, if you’re one of these rare people who’s an independent voter, a swing voter, right? Are you having just as much fun as the people who are dyed in the wool democrats? I think is a question that we don’t know the answer to. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Well, that’s what I was going to ask you that actually, because it does seem like some of the pushback to her has been among like swing voters and undecideds has been like, we don’t really know her. We don’t really know what she thinks. And so I wonder what you think about that being a risk. And I guess compared to the risk of being more specific. Right. 

Jay Caspian Kang: Yeah. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Um. Because this is going to be decided on the margins, probably. 

Jay Caspian Kang: There is that poll that said that over a third of the voters polled said that they didn’t really know what Kamala Harris stood for. Right. It’s a very vague question, and it’s obviously all opinion polling is subject to a lot of weird variance, and it’s hard to trust everything. But that’s like a big number for somebody who’s running for president. And I do think that that is more true amongst an independent swing voter, because they actually have to make a decision. And I think that at first you say, oh, well, this person seems much more normal, and this person just seems much more likable than Donald Trump. I think a lot of people are probably thinking that, but I do think at some point she will start to feel a little bit thin in substance if she continues to not actually give people a lot to hold on to. Right. At some level, she is going to actually have to define herself. But yeah, it’s very risky. It’s a lot easier to just sort of, you know, make fun of Donald Trump because he’s so weak at this point. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Yeah. Are vibes elections just where we are now like politics is pretty like contextless. Like the Democrat from X state looks a lot like the Democrat from Y state unless you’re Joe Manchin. You know, we see AOC speaking at the convention and we see, you know, it’s just sort of like the spectrum has feels like it shrunk. So I just wonder if this is what we have now, like if Donald Trump and maybe Obama ushered in kind of this era of who makes you feel good? 

Jay Caspian Kang: I think so, but I think about it in the context of Elizabeth Warren. What she would do is, I think once a week she would put out a new policy paper, right? She’d be like, here’s a new policy and here’s a new policy. I think that was the last person who could run in that type of way, just because of Elizabeth Warren’s charm, in a way, was that she was so wonky. But, you know, there’s a reason why she didn’t win. [laugh] Right. Um. And so, like, nobody has ever run on as much policy as Elizabeth Warren, so she is an outlier. But I do think that something that this election will have taught the Democrats and the Republicans is that actually it’s better to condense the cycle. It might actually be better to just do this every single election, just spring a candidate on at the last moment that people haven’t prepared for. Somebody who has a lot of energy, somebody who makes people feel good again, which Kamala Harris absolutely does. Like I mean, my friends who are liberal Democratic voters, like, they’re so much happier right now than they were a month ago. It’s like a powerful thing. Like, what else is politics other than, you know, you feel enthusiastic, you want to participate in it. It’s a very important part of it. It’s truly stunning to me. And I, you know, honestly, it makes me realize that I very much underestimated her as like a talented communicator before because um, yeah, I just didn’t see that she could do all this. And then I just see her on stage and I’m like, wow, she’s great. You know, just the contrast of somebody who looks so vital and energized and hopeful compared to, like, Donald Trump. Like, you know, it’s a powerful, powerful thing. And she’s able to give, I don’t know, she’s done a great job so far with this, but yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s much substance to it or if it matters. 

Josie Duffy Rice: That was my conversation with Jay Caspian Kang, staff writer at The New Yorker. And so we will see what she says tonight. Alexis, anything you want to hear from V.P. Harris? 

Alexis Johnson: Yeah, Josie, I think she has to come out and say something about where she stands on the Israel-Hamas War. I know she’s faced several protesters while she’s been campaigning, and, you know, so far, her campaign does seem to be doing a good job at, like, responding to things like that. So I think, you know, on a stage like this, she’s got to mention the war in Gaza and whether she’s working on a cease fire. [?] I know AOC mentioned it but it would be good to hear from her. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Yeah. Something emphatic and clear about wanting this war to end. Absolutely. [music break]

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Josie Duffy Rice: That is all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe. Leave a review, do not underestimate the youth vote and tell your friends to listen. 

Alexis Johnson: And if you’re into reading and not just the crawl on C-Span like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Alexis Johnson. 

Josie Duffy Rice: I’m Josie Duffy Rice. 

[speak together] And when they go low we kick them in the shins. 

Alexis Johnson: That going high stuff is out.

Josie Duffy Rice: I’m like trying to think of how that works. If they are low. 

Alexis Johnson: It’s just not going high. 

Josie Duffy Rice: It’s just not going high. But where are their shins in this situation. Are they squatting? They’re squatting. 

Alexis Johnson: Yeah. Then we’re going super low. 

Josie Duffy Rice: We’re going super low okay. [laughter] [music break]

Priyanka Aribindi: What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Bill Lancz. Our associate producer is Raven Yamamoto. We had production help today from Michell Eloy, Ethan Oberman, Greg Walters, and Julia Claire. Our showrunner is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. 

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