Democrats turn to Barack Obama in hopes of overcoming lingering divisions

Barack Obama will seek to unite Democrats behind Kamala Harris on Tuesday as the former president deploys his political star power on the centre-left to overcome any divisions over her candidacy against Donald Trump.

The party has tried to paper over divisions on Middle East policy and bad blood surrounding the ousting of President Joe Biden from the top of the ticket in recent weeks, but Democratic leaders remain concerned about simmering frictions that remain just under the surface.

Although Obama, 63, has now been out of office for nearly eight years, he is among the party’s most popular and influential figures, and convention organisers hope his primetime address on Tuesday can help bring embittered activists back into the fold.

Obama will be the main speaker on the second night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Harris will be crowned the party’s nominee for the White House this week. Biden left town following his valedictory address to delegates on Monday night.

Obama’s appearance in his hometown comes as some Democrats try to draw parallels between his winning 2008 campaign, when he was elected the first Black US president, and Harris’s bid to become the country’s first female president.

According to one person familiar with Obama’s speech, he will “lay out the task in front of Democrats over the next 11 weeks, and bring into focus the values at stake in this election and at the heart of our politics”.

The political ties between Obama and Harris go back two decades. She attended the Democratic convention in 2004 when the aspiring Illinois senator delivered a speech that propelled his White House prospects. Four years later during his 2008 campaign, Harris was one of his earliest supporters.

Michelle Obama, the former first lady who also remains hugely popular within the party, will tell the DNC crowd that Harris will “turn the page on fear and division”, the person added.

Other primetime speakers on Tuesday night include Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband, and Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s top Democrat. “As the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in American history, I want my grandkids — and all grandkids — to never face discrimination because of who they are,” Schumer will say, according to prepared remarks. “But Donald Trump . . . this is a guy who peddles antisemitic stereotypes.”

While Democrats have shown new enthusiasm for Harris since she replaced Biden on the ticket just a month ago, she will need to translate the initial burst of excitement for her bid into votes in battleground states.

“It’s a very close race, and we shouldn’t delude ourselves that it’s an automatic victory,” Anita Dunn, a former senior adviser to Biden at the White House, said on the sidelines of the DNC. “It’s a very divided country.”

Harris is still facing resistance from some on the left due to dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s handling of the war in Gaza, and she remains under pressure to persuade middle-class Americans that her economic policies will be better than Trump’s.

But Harris advisers have been buoyed by a polling surge in recent weeks that put her ahead of Trump in some national surveys and in some of the pivotal swing states that will decide the election.

“Kamala Harris is reaching people, she’s communicating with them in a way that clearly they are finding to be effective, and Donald Trump’s not,” David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the Harris campaign who managed Obama’s 2008 bid, said at a different event in Chicago on Tuesday.

Plouffe also took a swipe at Trump, who is 78, for having a “really lazy schedule” in his campaign for a second term this year, compared with his levels of activity in 2016 and 2020.

Trump on Tuesday travelled to Michigan, another big swing state, to speak about “crime and safety”, as he ramped up his campaigning. On social media, he blasted Biden’s “angry and ranting speech full of lies” before falsely claiming that the jobs created under Biden and Harris “were almost 100 per cent from Illegal Aliens pouring into our Country”.

Harris and Tim Walz, her running mate, will campaign in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Tuesday night before Obama speaks, travelling to the same city where Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination last month.

Like Michigan, Wisconsin is one of three states in the Great Lakes region known as the “Blue Wall”, which are the most important battlegrounds in the election. But Plouffe said Harris was doing better than Biden against Trump in several sunbelt states as well, making them competitive again.

“A month ago, I think it would have been hard for Democrats to compete in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia or North Carolina to win,” he said. “I think those are all back as credible states Kamala Harris could win.”

According to the FiveThirtyEight polling average, Harris is leading Trump by 2.9 percentage points nationally and is marginally ahead in most of the swing states.

Additional reporting by Lauren Fedor in Chicago