The second night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago featured former president Barack Obama, former first lady Michelle Obama and second gentleman Doug Emhoff, among others, who made thematic speeches that required little fact-checking. Here’s a roundup of three claims 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.

“Under Project 2025, a family making just $75,000 a year with just two kids would pay 1,800 bucks more in federal taxes.”

— Malcolm Kenyatta, Pennsylvania House representative

This appears accurate. During the convention, Democrats have been highlighting proposals from a Heritage Foundation report called “Mandate for Leadership,” a 922-page manifesto chock full of detailed conservative proposals that is popularly known as Project 2025. It’s not an official campaign document, and former president Trump has distanced himself from it, but a CNN review found that 140 people who worked in the Trump administration contributed to the report.

One of the proposals would replace the current progressive tax system — which has seven tax brackets, at 10 percent, 12 percent, 22 percent, 24 percent, 32 percent, 35 percent and 37 percent — with just two brackets: 15 percent and 30 percent. Everyone making less than $168,000 (about the point when Social Security payroll taxes are no longer collected) would be subject to a 15 percent rate. The proposal also would eliminate most deductions, credits and exclusions.

While this would make the system simpler, it could also raise taxes for many people at lower income levels, as they currently pay federal income taxes at 10 percent and 12 percent. The current rate jumps to 22 percent after $94,300 for married couples.

Brendan Duke, senior director of economic policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, calculated that a family of four making $75,000 would receive a tax increase of $1,800. “My best guess is that the breakeven point — where a family of four goes from a tax increase to a tax cut — is about $170,000 when using the assumptions most favorable to Project 2025,” he wrote on X.

A Heritage representative did not respond to a request for comment.

“Within two months of taking office, our government did respond. We passed the American Rescue Plan, which provided $1,400 for every man, woman and child in the working class. We extended and expanded benefits for the unemployed. We provided emergency assistance for small businesses to stay open.”

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)

This is half the story. Sanders extols the response of President Joe Biden to the pandemic but skips over the fact that Trump — whose response to the crisis was criticized as stumbling — in March 2020 signed into law bills that included stimulus checks of $1,200 and unemployment benefits. Trump also signed into law a bill in December 2020 that provided $600 checks — though complained they should have been $2,000. The bill signed by Biden made up the difference.

“Let me tell you what a radical agenda is. And that is Trump’s Project 2025. … Putting forth budgets to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is radical.”

— Sanders

This is misleading. Sanders slips in a mention of Social Security, but the old-age retirement program is only tangentially referenced in the Project 2025 report, and there is no proposal to do anything with it, let alone “cut” it.

The report contains some Medicare recommendations, mainly to promote Medicare Advantage plans, which are managed by insurance companies with federal funds. Just over half of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in Medicare Advantage, compared with traditional Medicare, which is run by the government and favored by Democrats. The 2025 proposals could have an impact on Medicare, but there is no call to cut funding.

Medicaid provides health care for the poor. Project 2025 does have a number of Medicaid proposals that could reduce spending, such as tighter eligibility standards and new work requirements.

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CHICAGO — Former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama, two of the Democratic Party’s most popular figures, electrified delegates at the party’s convention Tuesday, saying they saw the same sense of excitement and hope that characterized their own rise to the White House now surrounding Kamala Harris.

“I’m feeling hopeful because this convention has always been pretty good to kids with funny names who believe in a country where anything is possible,” Barack Obama said, a reference to his emergence as a political star at the 2004 convention. “Because we have the chance to elect someone who’s spent her whole life trying to give people the same chances America gave her.”

The former president sought to frame the election as a stark choice.

“We don’t need four more years of bluster and chaos. We’ve seen that movie — and we all know that the sequel’s usually worse,” he said. “America is ready for a new chapter. America’s ready for a better story. We are ready for a President Kamala Harris.”

In her remarks, Michelle Obama delivered a similar message. “America, hope is making a comeback,” she declared.

The former first lady — whose appearance was greeted with particular emotion, even prompting some delegates to cry — also took on Republicans who have disparaged Harris as incompetent, calling her “one of the most qualified people ever to seek the office of the presidency.” And she needled Trump over a recent comment that undocumented immigrants are taking “Black jobs.”

“Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?” she said.

In the choreography of the convention, the Obamas played the role of charismatic figures charged with inspiring those at the Democrats’ gathering and beyond to power Harris to victory in the two months remaining before Election Day. Monday featured an emotional tribute to outgoing president Joe Biden, Wednesday will be headlined by vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz, and on Thursday the convention will culminate with Harris’s acceptance speech.

Before the Obamas spoke, the delegates held a roll-call vote for Harris on the convention floor — a colorful, if ceremonial, ritual that reaffirmed Harris’s official nomination, which had taken place in a virtual vote earlier this month.

Harris was then beamed in to greet the Chicago delegates from a rally she was holding in Milwaukee, as she addressed cheering crowds in both cities at once.

“I thank everyone there and here,” Harris said. “This is a people-powered campaign, and together we will chart a new way forward.”

She added, “I’ll see you in two days, Chicago.”

In his remarks, Obama also saluted Biden’s tenure and his accomplishments. The two men have a complicated relationship, one that evolved from a marriage of political convenience in 2008 to a bond shaped by political triumphs and the loss of Biden’s son Beau. “History will remember Joe Biden as a president who defended democracy at a moment of great danger,” Obama said. “I am proud to call him my president, but even prouder to call him my friend.”

Obama selected Biden as his running mate because of his foreign policy expertise and Washington experience, offsetting Obama’s perceived political weaknesses. In the process, he elevated the longtime senator to a new political stature, setting the stage for Biden’s own presidential run in 2020.

Biden and his closest aides, however, have long been frustrated by Obama’s skepticism of Biden’s political prospects, a dispute that dates to the end of Obama’s presidency and that resurfaced in dramatic fashion in recent weeks.

When Biden considered entering the 2016 presidential race, Obama made clear to aides that he believed Hillary Clinton should be the Democratic nominee instead. Obama even dispatched David Plouffe, one of his top political strategists, to reiterate for Biden the long odds he faced if he decided to run. (Plouffe has since joined the Harris campaign as a senior adviser.)

More recently, in the aftermath of Biden’s politically disastrous debate against Trump on June 27, when the president sometimes struggled to complete his thoughts and finish sentences, Obama told allies that Biden needed to seriously consider the viability of his candidacy, irking some of Biden’s closest aides, who thought Obama should have been more supportive — publicly and privately.

While the Obamas were clearly Tuesday’s emotional high point for many delegates, several other speakers also rallied the party. In his remarks, Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman, shared details of his upbringing and his courtship with Harris. Filling a role often ascribed to spouses of political candidates, Emhoff also sought to share a more personal side of Harris and to humanize her.

He talked about the love that Harris, his second wife, has shown to his children and the way the two of them have worked to care for their blended family.

“She comes to synagogue with me for High Holiday services, and I go to church with her for Easter,” he said. “I get to enjoy her mom’s chile relleno recipe every Christmas, and she makes a mean brisket for Passover that brings me right back to my grandmother’s apartment in Brooklyn.”

Emhoff has been elevated to a novel role as potentially the first male spouse of a president. He has also become a leading advocate against antisemitism at a time when attacks on Jews, as well as Muslims, have been rising amid the war in Gaza.

“Kamala has fought against antisemitism and all forms of hate her whole career,” he said. “And she encouraged me, as second gentleman, to take up that fight — which is so personal to me.”

While the convention was underway Tuesday, Harris and Walz were about 90 miles north in Milwaukee for their rally at the Fiserv Forum, the same arena where Republicans gathered last month for their own convention. It was during that rally that the delegates in Chicago held their ceremonial roll call, complete with a DJ and special effects. It began with Delaware — a tribute to Biden — and concluded with California, Harris’s home.

Convention organizers also brought several Republican officials onstage as part of an effort to highlight how Trump’s third campaign continues to splinter his party.

Stephanie Grisham, who worked in the Trump White House before resigning on Jan. 6, 2021, also spoke Tuesday night. Grisham said she had been more than “just a Trump supporter”; she was “a true believer” and “one of his closest advisers.”

“When I was press secretary, I got skewered for never holding a White House briefing,” she said. “It’s because, unlike my boss, I never wanted to stand at that podium and lie. Now, here I am: behind a podium, advocating for a Democrat. Because I love my country more than my party. Kamala Harris tells the truth. She respects the American people. And she has my vote.”

In his remarks, John Giles, the Republican mayor of Mesa, Ariz., assailed Trump and urged Americans “in the political middle” to support Harris.

“Our Grand Old Party has been kidnapped by extremists and devolved into a cult,” he said. “The cult of Donald Trump. Trump doesn’t know the first thing about public service. Like a child, he acts purely out of self-interest.”

Trump, meanwhile, continued his pattern of holding a campaign event every day of the Democratic convention with remarks at a sheriff’s office in Howell, Mich. He falsely accused Harris of orchestrating a “vicious, violent overthrow” by replacing Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

Trump went on to defend those who assaulted the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, wrongly claiming that “nobody was killed.” Four people died in the attack, three from medical problems and one who was shot by a police officer. One officer who fought the mob died of a stroke the next day, and four more officers died by suicide in the days and months that followed.

In Chicago, where Democrats have largely been united since Biden dropped out of the race, a rare mention of one of the biggest fissures in the party — the war in Gaza — came from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), though only briefly.

“We must summon the courage to stand up to wealth and power and deliver justice for people at home and abroad,” Sanders said in his remarks from the stage. “We must end this horrific war in Gaza, bring home the hostages and demand an immediate cease-fire.”

But in the end, it was a night highlighted by a one-two punch from the Obamas, who both delivered blistering takedowns of Trump, defining the election as a fight over the essence of America.

“That’s the America Kamala Harris and Tim Walz believe in — an America where ‘we the people’ means everyone,” Barack Obama said.

And Michelle Obama concluded: “No one has a monopoly on what it means to be an American. No one.”

She added, “Kamala has shown her allegiance to this nation — not by spewing anger and bitterness, but by devoting her life to service.”

Kamala Harris’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee raised three times as much as Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee in July, and ended the month with a cash advantage that positions the newly minted Democratic presidential nominee to air more ads and maintain a larger payroll than her Republican opponent in the final months of the race for the White House.

Those results, which are based on federal filings released Tuesday and Wednesday, do not capture the full fundraising picture because several committees that support the candidates will not report their quarterly tallies until October.

But the Harris campaign and her allied committees said they raised more than $300 million last month in total and had $377 million on hand heading into August. Much of that money came in during the days after July 21, when President Joe Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed Harris to succeed him at the top of the ticket, her aides have said.

The Trump campaign and his allied committees said they raised nearly $139 million in July and had $327 million in cash on hand heading into August. That four-week fundraising total was less than the $200 million that the Harris campaign said it raised during the first week after Biden ended his reelection bid. Because the parties’ allied committees won’t report until October, The Washington Post was unable to independently verify either effort’s claimed fundraising totals.

Harris’s main committee and the DNC entered August with a $286 million war chest that exceeds the $250 million bankroll Trump’s committee and the RNC reported, according to Tuesday’s filings.

Harris’s huge haul reestablishes a fundraising lead that Democrats had held before Trump’s May 30 conviction on 34 felony charges in New York led to a surge in online donations to the Republican’s campaign. By the end of May, Trump had essentially erased the cash advantage that Biden and the DNC had held over Trump and the RNC for much of this year. But Democrats’ swift embrace of Harris, who reversed Biden’s downward trajectory in key swing-state polls, upended that equation, re-energizing the party’s donors.

During the early months of this year, Biden and Harris’s cash advantage allowed them to build an extensive campaign operation with more than 280 offices and more than 1,600 aides, and to make plans to scale up to 2,000 staff members by Election Day. The Trump campaign, which has declined to share the size of its staff, has made the unusual and electorally risky decision to outsource much of its voter turnout operation to third-party groups such as America First Works, America PAC and Turning Point Action.

Harris campaign officials have said that two-thirds of the people who have given to her campaign since she became a presidential candidate are new donors. The campaign has said it has booked $370 million in ads for the period after Labor Day — with $200 million of that spending devoted to digital advertising.

But the super PACs aligned with Trump remain well funded. Make America Great Again Inc., a super PAC that has aired tens of millions of dollars in ads on behalf of Trump, raised $54 million in July, driven by a $50 million gift from reclusive billionaire Timothy Mellon. The largest donor to MAGA Inc. has been Mellon, who has given $126.5 million since late 2022, including a staggering $100 million over the past three months.

Both the Future Forward super PAC, which has aired ads supporting Biden and Harris, and MAGA Inc. reported about $124 in cash on hand at the end of July. Future Forward raised less than MAGA Inc. It brought in $29.7 million during the period, driven by a $20 million donation from its affiliated nonprofit, Future Forward USA Action, which is not required to disclose donors.

Future Forward plans to spend at least $250 million on television and digital advertising in a major push between Labor Day and Election Day in November, Chauncey McLean, the group’s president, said at a forum hosted by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics this week.