Few Americans can make a more emotional case for the impact of gun violence than Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman who was shot in the head while greeting constituents outside a supermarket in 2011 in Tucson, Ariz.
Nine years later, Ms. Giffords appeared on video gingerly playing “America (My Country ’Tis of Thee)” on a French horn as footage played showing her slow recovery from her brain injury, which caused paralysis and aphasia, limiting her ability to speak.
She is shown in the hospital with a scar across her forehead, walking with a supermarket cart wearing a helmet during physical therapy, waving on the House floor and, finally, rehearsing lines of a political speech: “Join us in this fight.”
After footage of Ms. Giffords with Joseph R. Biden Jr., she is shown slowly approaching a lectern with an American flag behind her. She proceeds to deliver her longest speech since being shot.
“Words once came easily, but today I struggle to speak. But I have not lost my voice,” she says. “America needs all of us to speak out, even when you have to fight to find the words. We are at a crossroads. We can let the shooting continue, or we can act. We can protect our families, our future. We can vote.”
Ms. Giffords’s organization has emerged as one of the biggest players in gun control politics, alongside Everytown for Gun Safety, which is largely funded by former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York. In 2018, the two groups for the first time combined to spend more money on political campaigns than the National Rifle Association.
Ms. Giffords’s organization has pledged to spend at least $7.5 million helping elect Democrats to office this year.
Not seen in the video is Ms. Giffords’s husband, the former astronaut Mark Kelly, who is the Democratic nominee for Senate in Arizona. Mr. Kelly ran the Giffords gun control group until be began his Senate campaign.
While Everytown spends far more money than does Ms. Giffords’s group, her appearance packs an emotional punch no amount of money can buy.
“My recovery is a daily fight, but fighting makes me stronger,” she said in the video.
She completed her remarks with a call to vote for Mr. Biden. “He was there for me, he’ll be there for you too,” she said.
Emma González, a survivor of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting who has become a prominent advocate for stricter gun laws, narrated a video that played during the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday.
“People affected by everyday gun violence have to walk by the street corner where their best friend, their brother, their mother, their nephew, where they themselves were shot,” Ms. González says in the video, her voice breaking, “and life goes on and on as if we all haven’t just watched a loved one die and get put in the grave.”
She continues, “Until one of us or all of us stand up and say, ‘I can’t do this anymore, I can’t sit by and watch the news treat these shootings like acts of God’ — gun violence isn’t just going to stop until there’s a force fighting harder against it, and I’m going to do something to prevent it.”
The video aired as part of a segment that also included DeAndra Dycus, whose son was paralyzed by a stray bullet in Indianapolis at age 13.
Though it has been overshadowed this year by the coronavirus, the economy and the national uprising over police violence and systemic racism, gun violence has become a motivating issue for many Democratic voters, especially young ones — and Parkland survivors like Ms. González have been at the forefront of the movement through March for Our Lives, the group they started in 2018.
The party’s presidential field, including its eventual nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., embraced a long list of gun control policies during the primary, including buybacks of assault weapons, so-called red flag laws and civil liability for gun manufacturers when their weapons are used in crimes.
Senator Kamala Harris of California, who will accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for vice president in a speech later on Wednesday, made a surprise appearance in the opening minutes of Wednesday’s convention.
“Hey everybody, it’s me, Kamala,” Ms. Harris introduced herself from backstage.
She delivered a brief message on “the importance of voting” and asked everyone to make a “plan” — something political scientists have said increases the chance people will ultimately vote.
She also swiped at Republicans for putting up “obstacles and misinformation” about voting.
“I think we need to ask ourselves, why don’t they want us to vote,” Ms. Harris said. She provided the answer, too: “The answer is because when we vote, things change. When we vote, things get better.”
For the third consecutive night, the Democratic Party asked a prominent woman of color — on Wednesday it is the actress Kerry Washington — to serve as the M.C. of the virtual convention, showcasing the party’s diversity not just among its politicians but also among its supporters.
Ms. Washington, who is known for her role as Olivia Pope on the television show “Scandal,” comes after the actresses Tracee Ellis Ross on Tuesday and Eva Longoria on Monday.
Ms. Washington introduced what is expected to be a long line of prominent women speakers on Wednesday: Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee; Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker; and Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Ms. Harris will be the final speaker of the night on Wednesday, pitching a Democratic vision where “all are welcome, no matter what we look like, where we come from, or who we love,” according to excerpts released in advance.
She will both make the anti-Trump and pro-Biden case.
“We’re at an inflection point,” she will say. “The constant chaos leaves us adrift. The incompetence makes us feel afraid. The callousness makes us feel alone.”
It’s been a rough few months for Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin.
Never a politician with a tough-guy persona, he’s found his executive authority neutered by Wisconsin’s Republican leaders in the state legislature and the conservative-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court. They blocked his attempt to delay the April 7 state elections, forced him to end the Wisconsin’s stay-at-home order and are now litigating to overturn a statewide mask mandate.
That was all before Milwaukee’s long-awaited Democratic National Convention became an event hosted in Wisconsin in name only. To add insult to injury, when Mr. Evers’s lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes, took his turn during Tuesday’s roll call of states, he was inside a generic TV studio, not showcasing Milwaukee’s iconic art museum or any of the state’s treasures. Also, Mr. Barnes flubbed Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s name. And on Tuesday the top-ranked Milwaukee Bucks lost their first game of the N.B.A. playoffs while the Milwaukee Brewers were nearly no-hit by the Minnesota Twins.
Making his own convention debut, Mr. Evers, standing in a TV studio inside Milwaukee’s downtown convention center, performed the perfunctory duties of welcoming delegates and viewers to the virtual convention.
“We were really looking forward to having you here in America’s Dairyland,” he said, referring to the state’s motto. “Unfortunately, the pandemic means we can’t do that this year.”
Then it was time to pass the baton to children reciting the pledge of allegience and to Senator Kamala Harris, who kicked off the night with a pledge to vote. The Milwaukee portion of Milwaukee’s convention was complete for the night.
Kamala Harris stands before the Democratic Party as the bridge between a moderate generation of leaders and younger liberals on the rise, balancing the obligations of promoting Joseph R. Biden Jr. while offering herself to someday lead the party into a post-Biden era.
Pressures, hopes, aspirations — this will be the burden on Ms. Harris at the Democratic convention on Wednesday, as she seeks to introduce herself to a nation and a party that really barely knows her. But this is also the burden that will be on her for the next four years if she and Mr. Biden win in November.
Rarely has a vice-presidential candidate served under a presidential nominee who well may not seek a second term. As a result, Ms. Harris carries an extraordinary weight of expectations from her party to rise to the demands of leadership.
“That’s a lot to put on the shoulders of a person,” said Tim Kaine, the Virginia senator who was the vice-presidential candidate for Hillary Clinton in 2016. In the tumultuous tent that is the ever-changing Democratic Party, he said, there was no one person Mr. Biden could have chosen who would appeal to everyone, even as he spoke enthusiastically about Ms. Harris.
If anything, the first two days of the convention were about the party trying to paper over any kinds of disagreements, aiming to present a united front of moderates and progressives, as well as some Republicans and democratic socialists. With elaborate videos and stage-managed speeches, Democrats showcased diversity — racial, gender, age — while nominating a 77-year-old white grandfather from Delaware as their standard-bearer. Party leaders gave small slots to liberals, though barely gave a platform to their policy goals like “Medicare for all.”
For the time being, the party’s desire to beat President Trump overrides all over factors. But if the Democrats succeed, Mr. Trump will be gone, and the challenge of satisfying the many constituent parts of the Democratic Party will become only more difficult for Ms. Harris, the figure who is supposed to be that bridge for generations and the face of the party’s future.
Former President Barack Obama plans to rip into President Trump with a ferocity few presidents — outside of Mr. Trump — have ever used to describe a peer, accusing his successor of running a “reality show” White House to benefit “himself and his friends,” according to advance excerpts of his Wednesday convention speech.
Mr. Obama, who has cast aside his initial reticence to engage with a successor who has leveled insults, taunts and false accusations, will speak from Philadelphia — the city of his landmark address on race in 2008.
“I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care,” Mr. Obama plans to say.
“But he never did. He’s shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves. Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t.”
The purpose of Mr. Obama’s unvarnished assessment of Mr. Trump, people close to him maintain, is not defending his own legacy or extracting revenge. It is to draw a contrast between the incumbent and his buddy Mr. Biden.
“Twelve years ago, when I began my search for a vice president, I didn’t know I’d end up finding a brother,” he will say, according to the excerpts.
Shortly before the 2016 election, Mr. Obama told supporters that he would consider it “a personal insult” if America chose a bombastic reality television star who trafficked in racist conspiracy theories and stood against everything that he had spent eight years building.
America did it anyway. “This stings,” Mr. Obama confessed afterward.
Four years later, Mr. Obama returns to the national stage on Wednesday night seeking vindication — a second chance to redeem his legacy and prove to history that Mr. Trump’s election was an anomaly, not a permanent repudiation.
The story line that Mr. Obama and his allies promoted for years was that his election as the first Black president and a leader of a new generation demonstrated a fundamental change in the country. Instead, he left behind a nation that, on some level at least, embraced his polar opposite.
“Each president kind of begets the next guy,” William M. Daley, who served as Mr. Obama’s White House chief of staff, said in an interview before Mr. Obama’s convention speech, to be delivered in front of the Museum of the American Revolution. “He’s got to clarify what about him didn’t beget this guy. Why did the eight years not change the country when we thought in ’08 things were different?”
Hillary Clinton will return to the Democratic National Convention tonight not as an incumbent seeking a second term, as many Democrats had once hoped and expected, but as a voice warning voters to take nothing for granted if they want to turn President Trump out of office.
“For four years, people have said to me, ‘I didn’t realize how dangerous he was,’ ‘I wish I could go back and do it over,’ or worst, ‘I should have voted,’ ” Mrs. Clinton will say, according to a copy of her prepared remarks. “Well, this can’t be another woulda coulda shoulda election.”
Mrs. Clinton’s loss to Mr. Trump four years ago, in which she steadily led in the polls during the campaign and won the popular vote by nearly three million votes but lost in the Electoral College, still haunts the party faithful. So Mrs. Clinton, who knows perhaps better than anyone how a series of small events can change the outcome of an election, will urge listeners to vote.
“If you vote by mail, request your ballot now, and send it back as soon as you can,” she plans to say. “If you vote in person, do it early. Bring a friend and wear a mask. Become a poll worker. Most of all, no matter what, vote. Vote like our lives and livelihoods are on the line, because they are.”
And she will say that Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has been both a rival and an ally in the past, “knows how to heal, unify, and lead.”
“I wish Donald Trump had been a better president,” she will say. “But, sadly, he is who he is. America needs a president who shows the same compassion, determination, and leadership in the White House that we see in our communities. Throughout this crisis, Americans have kept going — checking on neighbors, showing up to jobs as first responders and in hospitals, grocery stores, and nursing homes. Because it still takes a village.”
For all of the speakers and images showcasing diversity, and the remarks emphasizing progressive goals, another reality is clear at this midway point in the four-day Democratic convention: This is a party dominated by a 77-year-old white male and leaders from the past with whom he is comfortable, holding to a platform and a campaign that is more centrist and establishment-heavy than left-wing.
Of the eight political figures who got the most speaking time Tuesday, only Sally Q. Yates, the 59-year-old former acting attorney general, is younger than 69 years old. Only Colin Powell, 83, isn’t white, and Ms. Yates was the only woman who didn’t appear in a capacity as a political spouse.
That will shift somewhat tonight, when Senator Elizabeth Warren and Speaker Nancy Pelosi speak, and major roles go to Kamala Harris, the vice-presidential nominee, and former President Barack Obama. But it won’t feel like the future-oriented convention of 2008, when a 47-year-old Mr. Obama minted a new image and new coalition for the Democratic Party.
On the first two nights of the convention, the energy embodied by the party’s progressive movement was shoehorned into two speakers: Senator Bernie Sanders, who on Monday urged his followers to swallow their disappointment and back Joseph R. Biden Jr., and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who in her 90-second Tuesday slot made a pitch for “a movement striving to recognize and repair the wounds of racial injustice, colonization, misogyny and homophobia.”
By keeping Ms. Ocasio-Cortez from a prime speaking slot — and dividing the keynote address between 17 young-but-moderate officials — the Biden campaign focused its convention on the political middle, avoiding obvious land mines for the Trump campaign to exploit.
Even Mr. Biden’s selection of Ms. Harris as his running mate was an exercise in tapping a successor who can shepherd the party’s next generation without moving it too far left. Ms. Harris, though she briefly endorsed Mr. Sanders’s single-payer health care plans, has a long history as a pragmatist.
Democrats certainly hope the combination of Ms. Harris on the ticket and the prime speaking slots given to Barack and Michelle Obama — beloved figures, but also leaders from the past — spurs Black turnout that sagged in battleground states in 2016. But the key to victory may be holding onto gains in the suburbs, where many women and longtime Republican voters are watching the Democratic Party’s older, moderate leaders and envisioning a return to a less chaotic time.
Rosalind Wyman has been a delegate at every Democratic National Convention since 1952, save the one in 1968. And, at age 89, she was certain that this year would be no different.
Until a pandemic ruined her streak.
This week, Ms. Wyman has been hibernating in her Los Angeles home, relegated to watching the spectacle on TV in her den.
“It feels so lonesome when you don’t have all the crowds and the excitement of the convention,” Ms. Wyman said.
In her house, the convention is blaring from television sets in four rooms. “I have it so that I won’t miss anything,” she said.
She cheers from her chair, upholstered in blue, the color of Democrats.
“For hard-core operatives, the convention is the Christmas of politics every four years; it’s the quinceañera for political parties,” said Guillermo Meneses, a former Democratic National Committee staff member. “The fact it’s not happening is a huge disappointment for them.”
Ms. Wyman is the longest-serving member of the Democratic National Committee and the longest-serving member of the California Democratic Party. Had the in-person gathering in Milwaukee not been scrapped, she would have been one of the oldest delegates in attendance.
After the second night of this week’s convention, Ms. Wyman was starting to believe that an online convention might work.
“They did a first-class job with this Zooming stuff,” she said.
But Ms. Wyman said she was not ready to do away with the boisterous intimacy of an in-person event.
“Bringing all these people together, it has a value for the party and to those who look at it,” she said. “It’s human beings sharing with each other, touching each other, talking to each other, even if arguing.”