The Supreme Court cleared the way Thursday for a provision of Arizona law that requires proof of citizenship to register to vote in some circumstances, the first time the high court has weighed in on a voting dispute in the run-up to the presidential election.

The high court’s 5-4 action follows an emergency appeal by the Republican National Committee and lawmakers in Arizona, which is considered an important swing state in the election. Polls show a tight contest there between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump.

As is typical in emergency orders, the majority did not explain its reasoning for allowing the citizenship requirement to take effect for state voter registration forms.

The order means Arizona election officials must reject state registration forms if voters don’t provide documentation of citizenship. However, the justices kept on hold provisions of the law that could have disqualified voters who register separate federal forms from casting ballots in a presidential contest in person or by mail.

In other words, Arizona voters can still register using a federal form, without proof of citizenship, and vote in the presidential contest.

Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, along with liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, said they would have denied the request from Arizona lawmakers. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch said they would have gone further and allowed the federal-form provisions of the 2022 law to take effect.

Republicans have made noncitizen voting a focus in 2024, despite studies showing it is extremely rare. They are pushing a national proof of citizenship bill, and a handful of states have measures related to noncitizen voting on November’s ballot.

Republicans say the measures are necessary to prevent any instances of noncitizens seeking to cast ballots. Democrats have decried the efforts, however, arguing that they are intended to preemptively question the legitimacy of the upcoming election.

The efforts could result in eligible voters being removed from voting rolls, Democrats argue. They say the measures are ultimately about revving up conservative voters on the hot-button issues of immigration and voter fraud.

Election law expert Richard Hasen, a UCLA law professor, said the court’s action would “make it moderately more difficult” for some voters and “for no good reason, because noncitizens are not voting in large numbers.”

Wendy R. Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice’s democracy program said the change in registration requirements three months before the election will result in a scramble for voters, election officials and voting rights groups.

“There needs to be a massive education effort for people who do not have documentary proof of citizenship for them to understand the correct way to register to vote if they want to be able to vote in the federal elections,” Weiser said. “There’s a real risk of confusion when there are two different voter registration forms.”

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) agreed. He emphasized that state election officials would abide by the court’s decision and “implement these changes while continuing to protect voter access.”

Gina Swoboda, chair of the state Republican Party praised the decision, calling it a “tremendous victory for every Arizona voter who demands confidence that our elections are protected from non-citizen interference. The Supreme Court’s ruling ensures that Arizona can uphold the integrity of its elections.”

The Biden administration and a number of Arizona groups sued to block the law in July 2022, arguing that the federal National Voting Rights Act preempts the Arizona law’s requirements related to the federal voter registration form. The act requires voters to attest they are citizens under penalty of perjury but does not require them to submit proof.

Those challenging the law also pointed to a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that said states violate the Voting Rights Act if they reject a federal voter registration form by requiring a person to submit proof of citizenship. Republicans argued that the ruling does not apply in the current case.

The voting rights groups additionally argued that a 2018 consent decree in Arizona preempted the rules requiring proof of citizenship for state registration forms, a contention rejected by the Republicans.

A trial court judge blocked the Arizona law in 2023, citing the rationale put forward by the Biden administration and the state groups.

The Republicans asked the Supreme Court to put the district court’s decision on hold pending an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. They also requested a prompt ruling, saying the state has an Aug. 22 deadline to resolve litigation related to the election because counties need to begin printing ballots.

“The district court’s injunction is an unprecedented abrogation of the Arizona Legislature’s sovereign authority to determine the qualifications of voters and structure participation in its elections,” the Republicans wrote in their filing.

U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar argued on behalf of the Biden administration that “judicial intervention at this stage would undermine the orderly administration of the election.”

Such action could risk the disfranchisement of thousands of voters who have already registered to vote using the federal form, Prelogar wrote in her brief.

Noncitizen voting is illegal in federal elections and allowed only in some local municipalities and jurisdictions. Trump has often falsely claimed that noncitizen voting cost him the 2020 election and narrowed his margin of victory in the 2016 presidential contest.

A handful of cities, including Washington, D.C., allow noncitizens to vote in municipal elections. But five states have amended their state constitutions since 2020 to ensure noncitizens can’t vote in local or state elections. This fall, Wisconsin, Iowa, Kentucky and Idaho will vote on ballot measures to enact constitutional bans on noncitizen voting.

Patrick Marley and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez contributed to this report.

During his speech at the Democratic convention Tuesday, former president Barack Obama made an underrecognized point about political decision-making in the United States.

“The rest of the world is watching to see if we can actually pull this off,” Obama said. “No nation, no society has ever tried to build a democracy as big and as diverse as ours before. One that includes people that, over decades, have come from every corner of the globe. One where our allegiances and our community are defined not by race or blood but by a common creed.”

“And that’s why,” he continued, “when we uphold our values, the world’s a little brighter. When we don’t, the world’s a little dimmer — and dictators and autocrats feel emboldened, and over time, we become less safe.”

This is true. It is true that the rest of the world — in no place as composed of immigrants and their children and in no place as racially and ethnically diverse — is tracking whether pluralistic democracy can succeed here. It is true that those hostile to diversity and immigration are happy to see us fail, to see the United States prove incapable of collectively choosing our future. Should that happen, they have a potent argument against diversity and immigration in their own countries.

It is also true that the stability and success of our democracy is still uncertain. It has been less than a century that Black Americans were allowed to participate fully in democracy, to the extent that this was secured by the Voting Rights Act. When Oprah Winfrey on Wednesday night spoke of Ruby Bridges and other Black girls who were among the first to integrate Southern schools, she didn’t mention that Bridges was about her age.

What other speakers pointed out in their speeches at the convention was that there was a sharp divide between the two parties in the extent to which they mirrored the U.S. population. The Democratic convention has been visibly more diverse than the Republican one last month, a reflection, at least in theory, of the extent to which the Democrats more closely mirror the population.

As it turns out, this isn’t only theoretical. In April, Pew Research Center released analysis exploring the composition of each party. There were relatively recent divergences between the parties (including independents who tend to vote with the parties) on age and college education. But the difference on racial diversity was long-standing.

In 2023, the Republican Party was more densely White than the Democratic Party was in 1996.

The Pew data looks only at registered voters. But we can use their data to compare the parties both to registered voters overall and, looping in data from the Census Bureau, the American population.

What we see is that registered voters tend to run about in the middle of the two parties — which makes sense since most Americans are partisans or independents who tend to vote with a party. But overlaying the population overall, we see bigger divides.

Voters are generally older and better educated than Americans overall. This is in part because you have to be 18 to vote. Naturally, then, the voter pool would be more heavily older and, naturally, they would be more likely to have completed college. Even among adults, though, older Americans and college-educated people are more likely to vote.

Notice the data on race, though. The percentage of Americans who are White tracks closely to the percentage of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents who are White.

This is also skewed to some extent by the age limit on voting. Younger Americans are more likely to be non-White than older Americans, so the percentage of adult Americans who are White is higher than the percentage of Americans overall. But the correlation between the Democratic Party’s and America’s racial composition is striking.

There are other metrics that could be considered here. Women are more likely to be Democrats (or Democratic leaners) than Republicans, according to Pew, though White women are more likely to be Republicans (or Republican leaners). And there are other caveats — like that 18 percent of the Democratic Party is Black, compared to 14 percent of the population overall. Some demographic patterns are harder to compare, like LGBTQ+ identity or religious groupings.

But we began with Obama’s point, that the American experiment centers heavily on our racial and ethnic diversity. Each time he’s run for president, but particularly in 2024, Donald Trump has suggested that this diversity is problematic or a deviation from what America is somehow supposed to be.

This was obviously the focus of a comment offered by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) at the convention Wednesday night.

“In America, you can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people,” Booker said. Then he drilled down on the point: “All the people.”

CHICAGO — Uncommitted delegates to the Democratic National Convention pressed their demands for a speaking slot on Thursday to address conditions in Gaza, gaining support from several individuals and groups at the convention, even as organizers sought to preserve the party’s show of unity.

On the final day of the convention, pro-Palestinian activists and delegates continued to hold vigils and news conferences to broadcast their disappointment with Democratic leaders who, following weeks of negotiations, declined to give them a speaking slot during the four-day event. The dispute has exposed tensions amid the otherwise celebratory mood that has followed Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a leader of the party’s left-leaning faction who gave a fiery speech in defense of Harris on the first night of the convention, saying the vice president has worked “tirelessly” to end the Gaza war, called on the Democratic National Committee late Wednesday to “change course” and allow a speaker to discuss the suffering in the Palestinian enclave.

“Just as we must honor the humanity of hostages, so too must we center the humanity of the 40,000 Palestinians killed under Israeli bombardment,” Ocasio-Cortez posted on X.

The United Auto Workers union, a major supporter of the Democratic ticket, issued a statement saying that if “we want to win this election, the Democratic Party must allow a Palestinian American speaker to be heard from the DNC stage tonight.” Many UAW workers live and vote in Michigan, a crucial swing state that is home to a large Arab American population.

A relative of a hostage being held by Hamas also spoke out in favor of allowing a pro-Palestinian speaker.

The Harris campaign defended its decision and pointed to Harris’s posture on the war in Gaza, saying it presents a “stark contrast” with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Many pro-Palestinian activists also say the Harris campaign has been far more willing to engage with them than President Joe Biden’s team was.

Democrats have “a vice president who is committed to ending the violence, ending the conflict, making sure that we resolve this conflict with a permanent cease-fire that allows Israel to fully secure itself” and “also makes sure that Gazans are able to peacefully live and prosper in Gaza,” Harris communications director Michael Tyler told reporters.

Pro-Palestinian activists at the convention said it is inappropriate to deny them a five-minute speaking slot, given the magnitude of the carnage in Gaza.

The conflict in Gaza originated when Hamas militants broke through a border fence with Israel on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people and taking another 250 hostage. In response, Israel has mounted a major military offensive in the Palestinian enclave with the stated aim of destroying Hamas, resulting in more than 40,000 deaths, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Pro-Palestinian delegates ramped up their call for a speaking slot after a decision was made Wednesday to allow the parents of an American-Israeli hostage to speak on the main stage. Some of the pro-Palestinian activists said they supported that decision, and they praised Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin for not only delivering an emotional speech about their son’s 320 days in captivity but also speaking empathetically about Palestinian suffering.

Polin and Goldberg recounted how their son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, had his left forearm blown off before he was taken hostage into Gaza. They were greeted by a sustained standing ovation and chants of “Bring them home.”

The activists said it was unfair that a Palestinian American would not be given the same opportunity to speak firsthand about the suffering in Gaza. “We started pressing more when we found out the convention was going to give a prime-time spot to families of hostages, which we fully support,” said Waleed Shahid, a founder of the “uncommitted” movement.

Alana Zeitchik, an Israeli American who has a family member held captive by Hamas, posted on X, “Rachel and Jon deserved every second on that stage. I also believe a Palestinian American voice deserves to be heard on that stage.”

After weeks of negotiations, the Harris campaign this week met some of the demands of the Uncommitted National Movement, which represents about 750,000 people who voted uncommitted in the Democratic primaries. A large number of them voted that way to protest Biden’s firm support for Israel amid the Gaza war.

The Harris campaign granted the activists a brief rope line greeting with Harris and vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz; meetings between senior campaign officials and uncommitted delegate leaders; “vigil” space at the convention; and a panel about Gaza off the main stage, which featured pro-Palestinian voices.

But the refusal to provide a main-stage speaking slot, confirmed after the third night of the convention had already begun, was a major rebuff, uncommitted leaders said. One group, Muslim Women for Harris-Walz, said it had “disbanded” because of the decision.

“The family of the Israeli Hostage that was on the stage tonight has shown more empathy towards Palestinian Americans and Palestinians than our candidate or the DNC has,” the group said in a statement.

It is unclear whether the dispute will die down or flare up as the nearly 4,000 delegates at the convention look ahead to Harris’s acceptance speech Thursday night as a culminating high point of the gathering. The pro-Palestinian protests at the convention have been smaller than organizers predicted, in part because activists view Harris as more sympathetic than Biden.

But the broader question of how the Harris team navigates the volatile issue of Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war could persist through the campaign, especially if Israel and Hamas fail to reach a cease-fire agreement before Election Day.

Communication between the Harris campaign and the uncommitted movement is continuing at the convention, including talks about setting up additional meetings, but the conversation about a speaking slot will not be reopened, people familiar with the discussions said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal dynamics.

Several speakers on the main stage, including Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), have mentioned Gaza and called for a cease-fire. Harris’s team has not said whether she will address the war during her acceptance speech, something that could send a signal to the pro-Palestinian activists as well as the party more broadly.

Michael Scherer contributed to this report.

CHICAGO — Kamala Harris concluded her first speech of the Democratic National Convention on Monday with what has become a familiar mantra: “When we fight,” she said, “we win!”

As Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison spoke that same day, he nodded toward the line to rile up the crowd. “And believe me,” he said, “when we fight, we win.”

Steve Kerr, the head coach of the Golden State Warriors, wrapped up his speech with the same phrase.

“When we fight, what happens?” he asked to the familiar shouts back. “And we are going to win this thing together.”

All campaigns rally behind certain phrases that become inextricably linked to a candidate. Harris did not coin the phrase: It’s been used for years, and she’s only adopted it recently. But it has become one of her signature lines.

She included it in her first campaign video, behind the strains of Beyoncé singing “Freedom.” She said it as she wrapped up her first visit to the campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., to greet the Biden staffers that had become hers. And now it’s written in big bold letters on her campaign website.

Political slogans date back centuries, and they have long moved American voters and defined elections. In 1840, William Henry Harrison used banners and songs with a catchy, “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too” as a reference to Harrison’s role in the Battle of Tippecanoe and his running mate, John Tyler. Herbert Hoover defined his 1928 campaign with “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s simple slogan — “I like Ike” — helped him win a 1952 landslide.

Hillary Clinton cycled through a number of different slogans before settling on “Stronger together.” Donald Trump is most identified with “Make America Great Again,” but Republican crowds have also rallied around slogans like “Drill baby drill” and “Build the wall.” They used to chant, “Lock her up” as a reference to Clinton.

Obama used “Yes we can.” But this year, the national mood is more combative.

After Trump survived an assassination attempt last month, he stood up, pumped his fist and yelled, “Fight.” A few days later, Donald Trump Jr. led the Republican convention in chants of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Clinton’s signature campaign song in 2016 was Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) used “Dream big, fight hard” during her campaign for the 2020 presidential nomination.

At this week’s convention, Democrats see the phrase as an inclusive call to action that asks supporters to link arms in solidarity.

Greg Jobin-Leeds, who co-wrote a 2016 book titled “When We Fight, We Win: Twenty-First-Century Social Movements and the Activists That Are Transforming Our World,” traces the first use of the phrase to City Life/Vida Urbana, a Boston-based social justice organization that has its roots in civil rights and antiwar movements and used the chant in anti-eviction efforts over the past several decades.

After Jobin-Leeds’s book came out, he set up a Google alert for the phrase to keep track of other uses of it. The musician Rev. Sekou released an album and a song by the same name in 2019. But Jobin-Leeds, by his own account, is getting way more Google alerts now.

“Part of the sentiment is we don’t always win the legislation or the bill or the labor strike or the immigrant policy that we’re looking for,” he said. “But you always win your humanity when you fight. And if you don’t fight and you just roll over, you’ve already lost.”

The phrase uses “we” twice, and he said it’s a key concept in building a collective rally behind a cause.

“You build a ‘we’ during the fight,” he said. “Whether fighting for tenants’ rights or teachers having adequate pay, you build a unified we. And you build your self-confidence and your ability to fight. It’s in the fighting that you already win.”

Jobin-Leeds has been intrigued to see Harris adopt the phrase, but has mixed feelings about it being used in mainstream politics.

“Generally it’s been a phrase of the underdog — of the immigrant and the tenant and not the billionaire,” he said. “It’s interesting to see it in a political campaign which is more within the Democratic establishment.”

Delegates here have quickly embraced the phrase, learning to complete the sentence and join along in the chant. Deloris Rome Hudson, a retired teacher from Ohio, said she loved the slogan.

“Often, in order to achieve what you want — that’s the fight,” she said. “You have to get people behind you to be successful. That’s what this is all about.”

Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia and longtime Democratic Party official, called the slogan “a call to action for the grass roots.”

“Everybody’s unified and jazzed up here. But it’s going to be a tough slog,” he said. “When we fight, everybody’s gotta get out there. We’ve got to knock on doors, make the phone calls. We can’t take anything for granted. Because they’re going to fight hard on the other side.”

“But the fight is to energize people,” he added. “You can’t sit home and complain. You want to get in the game? Go fight. Make calls, knock on doors. That’s what that means.”

In the past, the phrase has been used as a rallying cry in the labor movement. Jesse Jackson used it during a rally in Wisconsin in 2011. Commentator Van Jones mentioned it in a column in 2012. And the slogan was the theme for the NAACP’s national gathering in 2019. Harris attended that convention as part of her 2020 Democratic primary campaign.

Harris used variations of “fight” during that race, but her campaign slogan was “For the People.”

Earlier in her vice presidency, Harris had a routine of ending speeches with a riff on common Democratic principles such as freedom and equality, reproductive rights and collective bargaining. “When we know what we stand for, then we know what we fight for,” she’d say.

Over time, she also tacked on the next line: “And when we fight, we win.” It was an attempt, Harris aides say, to connect her childhood going to civil rights rallies in a stroller with today’s political battles. During the 2022 midterms, she began regularly taking up the phrase that would become her signature.

“We know what we stand for. We know when we fight, we win,” she told an audience at a Greater Boston Labor Council breakfast in September 2022. She said the phrase again that month at a Democratic National Committee meeting, again as she rallied Democrats in Texas and Illinois, and again at a Minnesota fundraiser for Gov. Tim Walz, who two years later would accompany her atop the party ticket.

In 2023, the phrase became her mantra when talking about abortion rights or gun control. She said it at rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin, in Indianapolis and Atlanta. She used it when introducing Walz as her running mate.

Walz, in his introductory video, concluded with: “Like she says, when we fight, we win”

And on Wednesday night, he used it as the climax of his speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination, engaging in a call and response with the crowd.

“As the next president of the United States always says: When we fight?” Walz said.

The crowd chanted in unison: “We win!”

“When we fight?”

“We win.”

“When we fight?”

“We win.”

“Thank you. God bless.”

CHICAGO — More than a few moderate Donald Trump critics were puzzled and concerned by Vice President Kamala Harris’s selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) as her running mate. And Walz’s liberal-leaning record as governor — at least compared to other finalists — has combined with controversies about his biographical claims to give Republicans real fodder.

Shortly after Walz’s selection, Trump even professed to being “thrilled” by what Republicans suddenly had to work with.

But more than two weeks later, as Walz took the stage to accept his party’s VP nomination here Wednesday night, both the fears and the thrill (for Trump) have faded.

Despite plenty of incoming — Republicans have at times seemed more intent on attacking Walz than Harris — Walz is a popular running mate. He’s significantly more popular than Trump running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), a historically disliked VP pick who has wilted in the face of scrutiny.

And Walz’s speech — which included a touching moment when his son, Gus, pointed and said “That’s my dad!” — was well received. It seemed likely to rally Democrats to a pick that some were uncertain about.

So far it’s gone well for Walz. But why? Why has the candidate Republicans have tried to label “Tampon Tim” looked more like Teflon Tim?

First, a look at the numbers. A new AP-NORC poll Wednesday showed more Americans liked Walz than disliked him (36 percent favorable to 25 percent unfavorable). That’s compared to Vance’s double-digit negative ratings (27-44).

A Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll over the weekend showed a slightly less pronounced gap, but a sizable one nonetheless: Walz nine points positive, and Vance 10 points negative.

Other polls have been less strong for Walz, but he hasn’t been underwater in even one quality poll, just as Vance hasn’t seen a positive poll in a month.

There’s a real question about just how much Americans might have consumed the hits on Walz on issues like his military service, his family’s use of fertility treatments and his past campaign’s false version of his 1990s DUI arrest; it’s still relatively early.

But Vance’s quick negative turn would seem to suggest that many Americans are paying attention and are willing to ding a running mate about whom they don’t like what they hear.

A big part of the problem for Republicans would seem to be that they’re casting stones from a glass house.

Their ticket abruptly abandoned any moral high ground on adherence to facts nine years ago, with Trump uttering tens of thousands of false and misleading claims and outright lies since then. Perhaps voters increasingly just assume all politicians inflate their résumés to one degree or another, and Walz’s potential sins are relatively minor.

The GOP’s allegations of Walz’s “stolen valor” might have provided the exception.

But even there, Republicans have severely undermined their own cause.

A Trump campaign letter Wednesday hitting Walz on his claims about his military service — which included his citing a rank he had attained but couldn’t claim in retirement because he hadn’t satisfied the requirements — was signed by 50 Republican lawmakers, but it listed many with “retired” military ranks despite them not having attained retired status. Veterans take these distinctions seriously.

Two of the letter’s signers have faced their own well-substantiated recent allegations of inflating their service; one, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), has claimed the rank of retired Navy rear admiral despite having been demoted in 2022. The letter itself cited rear admiral as Jackson’s current retired rank.

The Trump campaign blamed a “a copy edit mistake made by a staffer” and nixed the ranks from a corrected version. But if it was trying to muddy the waters for its own attack, it surely succeeded.

The handicapping on how Walz would play politically might have missed the root of his potential appeal.

The Midwest has a long history of successful, pretty liberal “prairie populist” Democratic politicians who succeed by cultivating ties with and speaking the language of the working class. Think former Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone, former Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold, former Iowa senator Tom Harkin and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). Democrats maintained a solid foothold in the Dakotas for years with this brand of politics, even as much of the Great Plains had gone red at the federal level.

That breed has seen a sharp decline, as American politics have become more polarized and people vote in an almost parliamentary fashion — viewing a candidate as a vote for one party or another rather than according to their own merits. But it’s not an extinct one.

And Walz has demonstrated a talent for tapping into its ethos. In his speech Wednesday, Walz cited his triumphs in a “deep red” congressional district in southern Minnesota. That’s certainly an exaggeration; his district favored Trump by 15 points in 2016, but it went for both Barack Obama and George W. Bush before then. “Conservative-leaning” would be more apt.

But he did win that 2016 race, even as Trump carried the district by a wide margin. And he survived the 2010 tea party wave in the kind of district that Republicans otherwise cleaned up in.

Plenty of attention has been paid to what Walz did when he was able to pursue a more progressive agenda as governor of a blue-leaning state, and his 2022 reelection win wasn’t as resounding as some other vice-presidential contenders’ most recent races.

But the most gifted politicians can change it up when they need to and be what voters and their party need them to be in a given moment. That populist appeal is clearly what Walz was brought in for. And so far, he seems to be passing that test.

Candy Glazer, a Massachusetts delegate to this week’s Democratic National Convention, has been a member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the nation’s most powerful pro-Israel lobby, for three decades. Like some other Jewish voters and delegates in Chicago for this week’s convention, Glazer believes that pro-Palestinian demonstrators have the right to express their beliefs but worries that some of them “don’t understand the history of the Middle East.”

She also believes that Vice President Kamala Harris is — and will be — a friend of the Jewish state.

“She’s married to someone who’s Jewish,” the 76-year-old Glazer said, referring to Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff.

As war in Gaza, triggered by Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack that left 1,200 people in Israel dead, rages on — with tens of thousands of Palestinian casualties, according to the Gaza Health Ministry — some pro-Palestinian activists have sought to use the Democratic convention to pressure Harris to support an arms embargo on Israel.

Glazer backs continued U.S. arms sales to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. But she has complicated feelings about Netanyahu himself — “he’s got to be responsible for Oct. 7 — he sold his soul to the right to stay in power” — and hopes that President Joe Biden negotiates a cease-fire to allow for a hostage exchange, which she says would be “a miracle.”

As vice president, Harris has created some political distance from Biden by emphasizing Palestinian suffering in public speeches and comments. But Glazer, like many of her fellow Jewish Democrats, sees Harris as cut from the same cloth as Biden: a staunch supporter of Israel with deep connections to the Jewish community and the standard-bearer for a Democratic platform that she described as having the deepest commitment to Israel in the party’s history.

When Glazer’s Jewish friends complain about Democrats’ calls for a cease-fire in Gaza — a position that over three-quarters of rank-and-file Democrats support, according to a YouGov poll conducted in April — she has pushed back, reminding them of the Republican alternative.

“What are the values you admire about being Jewish?” she asks her friends. “Somebody who is honest? Somebody who treats everybody equally, somebody whose values are the same? Is that Donald Trump?”

Despite long-standing Republican efforts to court Jewish voters, American Jews have voted for Democrats by large, steady margins for decades. Jewish Democrats at this week’s convention don’t expect those voting patterns to change anytime soon. But some see a rise in antisemitism on the left and are calling for party leaders to more explicitly condemn it.

“We have to acknowledge that politically, we see a simmering kind of antisemitism on the left,” said Ann Lewis, a Democratic Party strategist and former communications director in the Clinton administration.

Emhoff, who delivered a brief speech on Thursday to a crowded room at the Jewish United Fund of Chicago, said that Harris herself had pushed him to spearhead the creation and implementation of the first-ever national strategy to combat antisemitism.

He said he was currently focused on the safe return of students to college campuses.

“If there’s protests, the protests are fine — but when they cross the line into violence, into preventing kids who just want to go to school and have nothing to do with the policies in Israel — they need to be able to go to class,” Emhoff said. “They need to be safe. When Kamala Harris is president and I’m first gentleman, I’m going to make sure of that.”

Jewish Americans are divided about whether the way Israel has conducted its war in Gaza is appropriate. But 9 in 10 Jewish Americans believe antisemitism has increased since the start of the war, according to February polling by the Pew Research Center. And more than 7 in 10 Jewish American adults support continued U.S. military aid to Israel, according to the same poll.

Amanda Berman, the 39-year-old founder of Zioness, a coalition of progressive Zionist activists, decided to bring the newly formed political arm of her nonprofit to the Democratic National Committee as a counterweight to what she described as the normalization of antisemitic tropes by pro-Palestinian activists.

“We really needed to create a space where Jews at the convention could be safe and proud in who they are, that they had the language that they needed and the confidence to know that they were not alone in talking about what it means to be a proud Zionist, a proud progressive and a proud Democrat,” she said.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators’ push for an arms embargo was a point of contention among Democrats during the public drafting phase of the Democratic Party platform this summer, but the 92-page document that delegates approved Monday did not include the demand. No Palestinian Americans have been invited to speak at the convention, and “uncommitted” delegates to the convention — who have been withholding their support for Harris — held a sit-in outside the convention on Wednesday night after being denied a speaker.

Some speakers, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Biden himself, have acknowledged the war, and the protesters. In his address Monday, Biden decried innocent people “being killed on both sides” and called for the release of hostages, a surge in humanitarian assistance to Gaza and a cease-fire to prevent a wider war.

On Wednesday night, Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin, the American Israeli parents of 23-year-old Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whom Hamas abducted from a music festival during the attack on Oct. 7, delivered an emotional plea from the convention stage for the release of the hostages and a cease-fire deal to stop the killing of Palestinian civilians. After the couple recalled in vivid detail what they had discovered about Hersh’s abduction, the crowd started to chant “Bring them home.”

“There is a surplus of agony on all sides of the tragic conflict of the Middle East,” Polin told the crowd. “In a competition of pain there are no winners.”

Harris has often sought to make a similar point about the conflict.

Harris is “an incredible messenger of empathy” for both the Jewish community and Palestinian civilians of Gaza, Jeremy Ben Ami, the president of the center-left Jewish political advocacy group J-Street, said Wednesday during a panel hosted by the Jewish Democratic Council of America.

In July, Ben Ami noted, Harris met Netanyahu and stated her clear and “unwavering commitment to the existence of the state of Israel, to its security and to the people of Israel” — and then called on Americans to eschew a binary view of the war.

“So, I ask my fellow Americans to help encourage efforts to acknowledge the complexity, the nuance and the history of the region,” Harris said at the time. “Let us all condemn terrorism and violence. Let us all do what we can to prevent the suffering of innocent civilians. And let us condemn antisemitism, Islamophobia and hate of any kind.”

Most Jewish Democrats agree, Jim Gerstein, a Democratic pollster and expert on the Jewish vote, argued during the JDCA panel. The overwhelming majority of Jewish voters still consider themselves very liberal and “have no problem … saying it is okay to be critical of Israeli government policy and still be pro-Israel,” he said. “Those things are not inconsistent.”

Halie Soifer, a former national security adviser to Harris in the Senate, argued that Jewish Democrats were far more concerned with the “tolerance and acquiescence of antisemitism being espoused almost daily by Donald Trump.”

Trump, who has a history of trafficking in antisemitic tropes and cozying up with antisemitic figures and white supremacists, has sought to capitalize on divisions in the Democratic Party over the war in Gaza. He recently called Emhoff, the second gentleman, “a crappy Jew” and on Wednesday night took aim at “the highly overrated Jewish” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in a post on Truth Social, claiming that Harris “hates Israel.”

But some Jewish Democrats think Harris could go a step further in standing with the Jewish community and combating antisemitic language by calling herself a Zionist. Biden has repeatedly described himself as a Zionist who believes that “Israel is a safe haven for Jews because of their history of how they’ve been persecuted,” he explained in an interview last month. Harris has not explicitly used the word but has repeatedly identified herself as a staunch supporter of the principle that the Jewish people should be sovereign in the state of Israel.

For Orna Neutra, the mother of 22-year-old Omer, one of the five Americans still believed to be held hostage in Gaza, Harris’s use of the word could help pierce the “alternative reality we are living in,” she said in an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday.

“I’d like her to say that because there’s this twisted reality where it’s become associated with all of these other buzzwords like genocide, colonialism and all of that — it’s just a distortion,” said Neutra, who was sporting a shirt with a picture of Omer on it and a piece of tape affixed to her chest that read “319” — the number of days he has been held hostage.

“We’re on the same side, we have a shared goal,” Neutra said of the activists committed to preventing more Palestinian deaths. “We want to bring our loved ones home, we want their people to be out of harm’s way.”

CHICAGO — Four of the exonerated members of the so-called Central Park Five — a group of five teenagers wrongfully imprisoned for the 1989 rape of a jogger — appeared Thursday night at the Democratic National Convention, warning of what a second Donald Trump presidency could bring.

“Thirty-five years ago, my friends and I were in prison for a crime we did not commit,” one of them, Korey Wise, said Thursday. “Our youth was stolen from us. Every day, as we walked into a courtroom, people screamed at us, threatening us because of Donald Trump.”

Their concerns about the former president stemmed from personal experience and go back more than three decades: In 1989, five teenagers, all Black or Latino, were arrested after a jogger was found brutally sexually assaulted and tied up in Central Park.

One of them, then-15-year-old Yusef Salaam, would later recount how police used questionable methods, including depriving the teens of food and sleep, to get them to falsely confess to the crime “under duress.” Though all would later recant their confessions and there was no evidence linking them to the rape, the teens became publicly branded as the Central Park Five, were wrongfully convicted and spent years in prison.

During their trial, Trump, already a prominent figure in New York City for his real estate dealings, took out full-page ads in four newspapers calling for the death penalty to be reinstated.

“I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes,” Trump stated in the ads. “They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.”

It wasn’t until 2002, when DNA evidence confirmed a different man’s confession that he had raped the Central Park jogger, that authorities dropped charges against the Central Park Five. The group became referred to as “the Exonerated Five” and in 2014 reached a $41 million wrongful-conviction settlement with New York City. Salaam, a Democrat, won election in November to the New York City Council.

But Trump would never apologize to the group for taking out the newspaper ads or for his public antagonism toward the teens in 1989. During his 2020 presidential campaign, three decades later, Trump continued to call into question the group’s innocence.

“You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt … some of the prosecutors think the city should never have settled that case, and we’ll leave it at that,” Trump said in 2019.

On Thursday, the fourth and final night of the Democratic convention, Salaam and Wise stood on stage with two others of the Central Park Five who had been exonerated: Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson.

“He wanted us dead,” Salaam said, referring to Trump but avoiding using his name. “Today we are exonerated because the actual perpetrator confessed and DNA ruled. That guy still says he still stands by the original guilty verdict. He dismisses the scientific evidence rather than admit he was wrong. He has never changed and he never will.”

It was not the first time Salaam has warned what a Trump presidency could mean. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Salaam publicly spoke out about his concerns that Trump had only doubled down on his actions toward the Central Park Five, even after the group was exonerated.

“For 27 years, I’ve been in Donald Trump’s crosshairs,” Salaam wrote in an October 2016 op-ed for The Washington Post, recounting the fear and confusion he felt in 1989 when he and his friends were wrongfully arrested in the case. Those terrified feelings were only magnified when they learned that Trump had called for them to face the death penalty in full-page newspaper ads.

“He called for blood in the most public way possible,” Salaam wrote then. “… I don’t know why the future Republican nominee bought those ads, but it seems part and parcel with his racist attitudes.”

Trump, he added, never apologized for calling for their deaths.

“In fact, he’s somehow still convinced that we belong in prison. When the Republican nominee was recently asked about the Central Park Five, he said, ‘They admitted they were guilty.’ … It’s further proof of Trump’s bias, racism and inability to admit that he’s wrong,” Salaam wrote.

On Thursday, Salaam urged the crowd to throw their support behind Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in November.

Trump “thinks that hate is the animating force in America. It is not,” Salaam said. “We have the constitutional right to vote. In fact, it is a human right. So let us use it … and together, on November 5, we will usher in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz into the White House.”

CHICAGO — Welcome to The Campaign Moment, your guide to a 2024 election in which we’ll apparently have to make do with Beyoncé’s voice.

(Make sure you are subscribed to this newsletter here. And also listen to the Campaign Moment podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We dove into Tim Walz’s ascent Thursday, and we’ll have a brand new episode Friday.)

The big moment

The Democratic National Convention concluded Thursday with Vice President Kamala Harris capping weeks of a whirlwind run for her party’s nomination with her acceptance speech.

Below are our final nightly takeaways from the convention.

1. Harris offers the simplest of pitches: Normalcy and competence

There was some question ahead of Harris’s speech about whether she would unveil a long-awaited robust policy agenda, or perhaps lean into what the Obamas seemed to tee up for her Tuesday — the chance to claim to be the successor to a movement of transformational change.

Harris instead emphasized something much simpler: a promise of normal competence.

“Our nation with this election has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past, a chance to chart a new way forward,” Harris said.

She continued with a series of not-subtle contrasts to Donald Trump’s unwieldiness.

“You can always trust me to put country above party and self, to hold sacred America’s fundamental principles, from the rule of law to free and fair elections, to the peaceful transfer of power,” she said.

She promised to be “a president who leads and listens, who is realistic, practical and has common sense and always fights for the American people.”

In case those “realistic” and “practical” references weren’t clear, Harris ultimately began invoking Trump by name, pitching herself as the antithesis of his unseriousness.

“In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man,” she said. “But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.”

She highlighted Trump’s often-strange comments about dictators and called him “easy to manipulate with flattery and favors.” She cited “his explicit intent to jail journalists, political opponents and anyone he sees as the enemy” and “his explicit intent to deploy our active-duty military against our own citizens.”

She spent much of the rest of the speech rehashing many of the same attacks on Trump that featured throughout the convention, including the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. She outlined the broad strokes of her policy agenda, which included protecting voting rights and reproductive rights, as well as middle-class tax cuts and standing by Ukraine.

None of it was overly detailed.

She actually spent about as much time on the war in Gaza as any other issue — despite the convention previously treating the issue gingerly. Harris made strong statements about Israel’s right to defend itself, while also emphasizing the suffering in Gaza and the need for a cease-fire, which she insisted was her huge priority right now.

In sum, she was asking: Do you really want to go back to that chaos?

So far, being viewed as a competent if somewhat undefined alternative has worked for her, and she’ll apparently keep riding with that.

2. Democrats go for a contrast — darkness into light

Thursday’s program had a markedly different feel from the first three days. Instead of featuring a series of high-profile speakers leading up to the main event, the convention opted for a slow-building contrast, going from a program of darkness into the light of Harris’s speech.

The first few hours were heavy, with multiple speakers addressing ugly recent moments in America’s history. There were gun-violence survivors including former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and Abbey Clements, a former teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary, scene of a massacre of schoolchildren in 2012. There were members of the “Central Park Five” — more recently known as the “Exonerated Five” — whom Trump spotlighted while calling for New York to institute the death penalty. There was Anya Cook, who nearly died after being denied care after Florida instituted an abortion ban. And there was the family of Brian D. Sicknick, a police officer who died after the attack on Jan. 6.

“My family knows how dangerous Trump is,” said Sicknick’s brother, Craig Sicknick. “He incited the crowd while my brother and his fellow officers were putting their lives at risk. We need a real leader, not an autocrat who is stuck in the past.”

After all of them spoke, musical artist Pink played “What About Us,” a song about the government leaving people behind.

To be clear, there were heavy moments the three prior days, including when speakers recapped their painful stories related to abortion bans. But these heavy moments were packed together Thursday in a way that suggested the convention wanted a contrast between some of our country’s most tragic problems and the solution: Harris.

3. A more muscular message on police, veterans and foreign policy

Democrats have spent much of the week trying to flip the script on some key issues, including border security and the perception of which party is more patriotic.

On Thursday, the convention made a concerted effort to align itself with a muscular vision for the military, foreign policy and law enforcement — in a way that past conventions wouldn’t have.

In addition to Sicknick’s family, the program featured Genesee County, Mich., sheriff Craig Swanson, who said that under the Biden-Harris administration, “crime is down and police funding is up.” That was a notable contrast to the “Defund the Police” movement, which gained traction in certain corners of the party years ago — and which Harris in 2020 expressed some sympathy with. (She stopped shy of endorsing its agenda.)

More than that, though, the program was practically crawling with military veterans. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) spoke of the justness of the first Gulf War. Kelly, Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) and Republican former congressman Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) criticized Trump for not siding more with Ukraine. Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a candidate for Senate, brought dozens of elected Democratic veterans onstage and pointed to Trump’s denigration of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Many of them, of course, cited Trump’s other reported disparagements of injured veterans and dead soldiers — such as calling them “suckers” and “losers.”

Harris herself ultimately called for making sure “America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” She also made a strong statement about combatting Iran, saying she would “never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.”

It’s been a marked turn in American politics in recent years to see Democrats become the party of pushing for more funding for Ukraine, while Republicans balk. And Thursday night, the party embraced the perception that it’s more aligned with military strength and an active foreign policy — and even police — while setting itself up as the true ally of veterans.

Take a moment to read:

• “Democrats signal voting rights bills will top the agenda if Harris wins” (Washington Post)
• “Dispute emerges over lack of speaker on Gaza at Democratic convention” (Washington Post)
• “The story behind Kamala Harris’s ‘When we fight, we win’ slogan” (Washington Post)
• ‘ ‘Tampon Tim’ is looking more like Teflon Tim” (Washington Post)

CHICAGO — Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination Thursday, using the most consequential speech of her political career to cast herself as an avatar of America’s middle class and an avenue to usher the country away from the abrasive style of politics embraced by Republican nominee Donald Trump.

“Our nation with this election has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past,” she said in a speech that reflected on her unexpected journey to the top of her party and to the cusp of becoming the nation’s first female president. “A chance to chart a new way forward. Not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.”

Harris delivered a withering critique of Trump while also making several appeals to bipartisanship and patriotism during her speech, combating efforts by Trump and his allies to brand her as radical or somehow foreign. As she spoke, a packed, jubilant crowd of supporters clapped and waved American flags. Many were wearing white, the color associated with the suffragist movement. More than 100,000 red, white and blue balloons dropped at the end of her speech.

The celebratory moment marked how quickly Democrats’ fortunes have changed over the past two months, in which the party agonized over a disastrous debate performance by President Joe Biden, endured weeks of public infighting over his candidacy and then swiftly united behind Harris after Biden dropped out on July 21. The fast-moving turn of events has injected a fresh wave of energy and enthusiasm into the Democratic Party but has also left some voters with a sense of uncertainty about Harris.

Harris began her speech with a shout-out to second gentleman Doug Emhoff, noting it was their wedding anniversary, and praise for Biden’s “inspiring” character before launching into stories about her childhood and background. But it did not take long before she launched into an extended attack on Trump, blasting him over his legal judgments, protectionist economic policies, his criticism of allies and his praise of dictators.

She also made her most extended remarks yet on the war in Gaza, addressing an issue that has been at the heart of a lengthy conflict within the party.

“Let me be clear: I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself,” she said, before adding that “what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating.”

She reiterated her call for a cease-fire and a release of hostages in Gaza. “President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination,” she said.

As she made a case for her unconventional candidacy, she sought to put it against the backdrop of her life story, describing an only-in-America tale that took her from a working-class neighborhood in Oakland to the becoming the first woman of color to lead a major party ticket for the presidency.

Calling herself “no stranger to unlikely journeys,” Harris recounted the story of being raised by an immigrant mother from India who saved up for a decade before she could buy a home.

Citing her work as a prosecutor who began cases with the five words “Kamala Harris, for the people,” she pledged to represent a diverse country full of people chasing dreams of their own.

“On behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on earth, I accept your nomination to be president of the United States of America,” she said.

The convention also featured additional members of Harris’s family, as part of an effort to show the softer sides of the vice president. Harris’s sister, niece, stepdaughter and goddaughter praised her for being a steady and inspiring figure in their lives. Her great nieces joined actress Kerry Washington onstage to teach the crowd how to pronounce Harris’s first name, breaking it down into two parts: “comma” and “la.” They then led the arena in practicing the proper pronunciation — a dig at Trump who routinely mispronounces her name.

“Confusion is understandable. Disrespect is not,” Washington said. “Tonight, we’re going to help everybody get it right.”

Harris took the stage to more than two minutes of raucous, sustained applause and chants, a welcome even more exuberant than the adulation that has greeted a series of Democratic Party stars and celebrities at the United Center this week.

Democrats in the arena were especially excited on Thursday, giving the scene the feeling of a rock concert. In between speakers, a DJ appeared on the main stage, encouraging attendees to stand up and dance — featuring a medley of pop hits including “Shake it Off” by Taylor Swift and “Celebration” by Kool & The Gang.

While speaking to the party faithful in the room, Harris also sought to offer a broader appeal to the moderate voters she will need to win over to prevail in battleground states.

“I know there are people of various political views watching tonight. And I want you to know: I promise to be a president for all Americans,” she said, presenting herself as a bridge builder willing to unify a country riven by political strife and infighting. “You can always trust me to put country above party and self. … I will be a president who unites us around our highest aspirations. A president who leads — and listens. Who is realistic, practical and has common sense.”

Aides said Harris’s goal was to offer biographical details about her life and background while connecting her story to the modern-day struggles and strivings of Americans.

“We know that the American people don’t know that much about the vice president,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’s campaign chair, said in an interview with The Washington Post on Thursday. “So we really have an opportunity to fill that in for them and to fill that in in a way that really shows how she’s going to make a difference in their lives.”

Harris and her aides spent several days in her Chicago hotel preparing for the speech, aiming to deliver a crisper performance than the meandering 92-minute acceptance speech Trump delivered last month when accepting the Republican nomination in Milwaukee.

She leaned in on a theme embraced by several speakers over the course of the convention — aiming to belittle Trump rather than cast him as a larger-than-life threat to the nation. Former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were among several party leaders who used their speeches to mock Trump as a self-centered politician who is mostly concerned about his own well-being.

“In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man,” she said. “But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.”

Trump responded in real time to Harris, using his Truth Social platform to offer his thoughts on her acceptance speech.

“Kamala’s biography won’t lower prices at the Grocery Store, or at the Pump!” he wrote, focusing on inflation as she talked about her background.

Trump also repeatedly pointed to the fact Harris is already in office. “ALL TALK, NO ACTION — Why didn’t she do it three and a half years ago?” he wrote.

Harris slammed Trump over his legal judgments, economic policies and his role in appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade’s right to an abortion. She said a second Trump term would be more dangerous after another Supreme Court ruling, which found that presidents had immunity from certain prosecutions.

“Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States,” Harris said. “Not to improve your life. Not to strengthen our national security, but to serve the only client he has ever had: himself.”

In laying out the contours of her journey to the nomination, Harris highlighted parts of her biography that dovetail with the themes of her campaigns, including her career as a prosecutor who took on fraudsters, transnational gangs and sexual predators.

During her campaign for president, Harris has repeatedly cited her prosecutorial background, asserting that she is well positioned to go toe-to-toe with Trump, who was convicted in Manhattan earlier this year of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to an adult-film actress.

“I know Donald Trump’s type,” Harris frequently says at her campaign events.

Harris also used her speech to lean into the idea of patriotism, calling out Trump for often disparaging the country and for inspiring the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The convention organizers continued to lean into patriotism on Thursday night, passing out American flags to delegates and “USA” signs as Democrats seek to reclaim the message and imagery from the Republican Party and Trump, who has literally tried embracing the American flag.

When Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a who served as a U.S. Marine, spoke, he was joined onstage by more than two dozen other federal, state and local lawmakers who also served in the military.

“Politicians like Donald Trump don’t stand with us,” Gallego said.

Another veteran, former congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who broke with Trump over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, gave Democrats a boost in their effort to challenge Republicans on patriotism.

“I want to let my fellow Republicans in on a secret: The Democrats are as patriotic as us,” he said. “They love this country as much as we do.”

The crowd broke out into chants of “U-S-A!”

Harris has oriented much of her campaign around the idea of “freedom” — often coming onstage to the soundtrack of Beyoncé’s 2016 hit “Freedom” — and has used the term to refer to reproductive rights, voting rights, civil rights and economic opportunity.

Harris’s detractors say she has spoken largely in platitudes and failed to outline a specific policy agenda or answer questions about how she would use the powers of the presidency if elected. Republicans have sought to fill in the gaps by casting her as a radical liberal, pointing to her California background and to some of the policies she backed during a short-lived run for the presidency in 2019.

“She became the Nominee without receiving one Vote, stealing the Nomination from Crooked Joe Biden who earned it by getting 14 Million Votes,” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social, promising to “expose all of her Radicalism, the horrible job she did at the Border, Crime, and Foreign Relations, and her Weaponization against her Political Opponent.”

Unlike five years ago, Harris has not had to face grueling primary contests, debates or town halls with voters forcing her to state where she stands on key matters of policy. Her campaign has disavowed some of her more liberal positions from 2019, saying she no longer supports a ban on fracking, a Medicare-for-all policy, mandatory gun buyback initiatives or removing penalties for those who cross the border illegally.

As both Democrats and Republicans offer competing versions of Harris to the country, her speech Thursday offered her an unfiltered opportunity to make her own case to the country for her candidacy. Before she spoke, several Democratic leaders offered their full-throated endorsements.

“You know what I love best about Kamala Harris? Kamala Harris can’t be bought,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), in an apparent reference to the 1972 campaign slogan of Shirley Chisolm, the first woman to run for president. “And she can’t be bossed around.”

Speakers used their remarks Thursday to discuss themes of gun violence, military service, the environment and patriotism on the final night of the convention. During one particularly emotional moment, several Americans impacted by mass shootings gave testimonials about their harrowing experiences and the pain of their losses.

“We will organize, we will advocate, we will run for office,” said Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.), who ran for Congress after her son was shot and killed. “And we will join with Americans from small towns and big cities to keep our communities safe.”

Harris’s comments on Gaza were notable. Ahead of Harris’s speech, thousands of protesters — led by young people, liberal voters and Arab Americans whose votes Democrats typically rely on in close races — complained about the Biden administration’s handling of the war and criticized party officials for not allowing a Palestinian to speak during the convention. The protests were less disruptive than many Democrats expected, in part because Harris’s ascension to the top of the party upended original plans to protest Biden over his support for Israel’s military campaign. Harris has expressed support for Israel’s right to defend itself but has spoken more forcefully about the plight of innocent Palestinians killed by Israeli bombs.

During the convention, party leaders have also faced questions over their treatment of “uncommitted” delegates who represent voters who withheld votes from Biden during the Democratic primaries because of his handling of the war in Gaza.

Negotiations were ongoing throughout the event over whether to allow a Palestinian American to address the convention from the stage — something that ultimately did not happen.

The discussions were fraught in part because Democrats have sought to project a sense of unity during their convention, realizing that millions of people would be tuning in and learning about Harris for the first time.

“The convention itself is an opportunity not just to speak to people in the hall but to speak to everyone in the country,” said O’Malley Dillon. “That’s been a big part of what we’re doing every day here.”

Isaac Arnsdorf, Hannah Knowles and Yasmeen Abutaleb contributed to this report.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech on the final night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago featured high rhetoric but not many facts easily checked. Here are five claims made by Harris that caught our attention, in the order in which they were made.

As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios for a roundup of statements made during convention events.

“We are not going back to when Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

This is mostly false. We have awarded the Harris-Walz campaign Three Pinocchios for a version of this claim, but that hasn’t stopped Democrats from asserting this all week.

On Medicare, virtually all anticipated savings sought by Trump would have been wrung from health providers, not Medicare beneficiaries, as a way of holding down costs and improving the solvency of the old-age health program. Trump, in fact, borrowed many proposals from Barack Obama, who had failed to get them through Congress.

Marc Goldwein, senior vice president at the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which seeks to lower the budget deficit, closely studied the Trump proposals each year.

“The basic argument here is quite ridiculous,” he said of a Harris-Walz campaign tweet that made a similar claim. Goldwein noted that the Inflation Reduction Act, for which Harris cast the tiebreaking vote to secure passage, also reduced health-care costs for Medicare, such as through inflation caps. “By the same logic, you could say Joe Biden cut Medicare.”

As for Social Security, Trump kept his promise not to touch retirement benefits, bucking longtime efforts by Republicans to raise the retirement age. But Trump did seek, without success, to reduce spending for Social Security Disability Insurance as well as Supplemental Security Income, which is administered by the Social Security Administration.

Trump has insisted he will not cut benefits for Medicare or Social Security if he is elected president again.

“He doesn’t actually fight for the middle class. Instead, he fights for himself and his billionaire friends, and he will give them another round of tax breaks that will add up to $5 trillion to the national debt.”

The numbers don’t tell the whole story. Harris’s $5 trillion figure reflects the cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts. (The Congressional Budget Office estimated $4.6 trillion.) Because of the way the law was written, the tax cuts expire in 2027 and, unless Congress acts, Americans would face a steep tax increase.

But Harris, like President Joe Biden, has said she would keep in place the tax cuts for people making less than $400,000, which is about 98 percent of taxpayers. To fulfill this pledge without additional taxes appears to add between $1.5 trillion and $2.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years. The Biden White House said it would help pay some of the cost with higher taxes on the rich, but never fully explained how it would be done.

By wanting to extend some of the tax cuts, Harris is acknowledging that a good chunk — as much as half — of Trump’s tax cuts benefited the middle class.

“He intends to enact what, in effect, is a national sales tax. Call it a Trump tax that would raise prices on middle class families by almost $4,000 a year.”

This is a high estimate. Trump suggested he wants to impose a 10 percent tax on every imported good entering the United States and a 60 percent tax on every imported good from China. The Peterson Institute for International Economics has estimated that this would cost a typical U.S. household in the middle of the income distribution about $1,700 in after-tax income. That’s because tariffs are typically passed on to consumers by importers — a standard economic concept that Trump rejects.

But in recent campaign rallies, Trump has mused that he would impose a 20 percent tariff. Peterson redid the numbers and estimated this would cost that household more than $2,600 a year.

But Harris is relying on an estimate from the left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund, which calculates the cost would be $3,900.

“As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

Biden proposed spending reductions. Harris, having suddenly become the Democratic nominee, has not put out detailed policy papers yet, but it’s worth noting that Biden repeatedly proposed budgets that have failed to keep military spending ahead of inflation.

“He encouraged [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to invade our allies, said Russia could, quote, do whatever the hell they want.”

This needs context. Harris carefully uses the word “encouraged” in this passage. Trump did not issue an invitation to Russia to invade U.S. allies, but (in his telling) was informing the leader of a NATO member country that he would not defend that country from a Russian attack if Trump deemed the nation was delinquent on payments to the military alliance.

In a February rally, Trump said “one of the presidents of a big country” at one point asked him whether the United States would still defend the country if they were invaded by Russia even if they “don’t pay.”

“No, I would not protect you,” Trump claimed he told that leader. “In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”

One problem with Trump’s story is that throughout the 2016 campaign, his presidency and now this 2024 campaign, Trump has demonstrated that he has little notion of how NATO is funded and operates. He repeatedly claimed that other members of the alliance “owed” money to the United States and that they were delinquent in their payments. Then he claimed credit for the money “pouring in” as a result of his jawboning, even though much of the increase in those countries’ contributions had been set under guidelines arranged during the Obama administration.

Since 2006, NATO guidelines have asked each member country to spend at least 2 percent of its gross domestic product on defense. In 2014, NATO decided to increase its spending in response to Russia’s seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea region, with a commitment of reaching 2 percent in each country by 2024. This money does not end up in NATO’s coffers, as Trump often asserts. (Direct funding, for military-related operations, maintenance and headquarters activity, is based on gross national income — the total domestic and foreign output claimed by residents of a country — and is adjusted regularly.)

NATO figures show that the defense expenditures for NATO countries other than the United States have been going up — in a consistent slope — since 2014. As we noted, that’s when NATO decided to boost spending in response to Russia’s seizure of Crimea.

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