Democrats Pitch 'Freedom' On Night 3 Of The DNC
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Oprah makes that cat lady reference from J.D. Vance and C-SPAN at a left field just pans to this single woman somewhere in the crowd as if to suggest she's the cat lady that J.D. Vance was talking about. My question is whether she is married, whether she has a cat. Maybe she's a dog person. Maybe she's allergic to cats.

Hello and welcome to this late night reaction edition to night three of the Democratic National Convention on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. I'm Galen Druk. The theme for the third night of the convention was a fight for our freedoms. And of course, the keynote speaker was vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota. But we heard from a

a lot of folks, in particular, a lot of rising stars within the party. We heard about the border. We heard about the conflict in the Middle East. We heard from folks like Bill Clinton. We heard from

Oprah, and many other folks as well. Here with me to talk about all of it as we approach midnight on the East Coast is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich, who is still in Chicago. Welcome, Nathaniel. How's it going? Hey, Galen. It's going well. I didn't get on the floor today, unfortunately, so I am joining you from Media Row, which is kind of the area where they put a

bunch of, like, radio folks off in an atrium off the United Center, but the benefit was it was a lot easier to get here. So I'm glad to be here. Nathaniel, we are glad that you are here. And also here with us is polling editor at The New York Times, Ruth Agelnik. Welcome to the podcast, Ruth. Yes, I am in the East Coast headquarters of the convention, which is also known as my house by myself. Okay.

Okay, so we got a lot to talk about tonight. First and foremost, the theme of the night was a fight for our freedoms. And this is actually a pitch that we have heard recently.

Some parts of the Democratic Party arguing should be the message of the Democratic Party for a couple years now, going back to I think it was 2022 or even earlier. Way to Win, which is a Democratic group, was saying we should frame things like abortion and other parts of the Democratic Party.

platform as about freedom and to try to turn the message of liberty that is often sort of used by Republicans and turn it on its head a little bit. Was this effective in a rhetorical sense and also in a data sense? This feels like a stupid question, but Ruth, why don't you kick us off here? Do Americans like freedom? Yeah.

They're very mixed on the idea of freedom. No, I mean, obviously... What's the polling say? Obviously, Americans care about their freedoms. It's one of the foundational principles of our country. You know, the Democratic Convention sort of

serves two roles and has one primary role. The primary role is really to sort of rally the troops and be this great, exciting moment for Democrats. The secondary role that it doesn't always achieve is reaching out to voters and kind of giving the Democrats message. And so the fight for the freedoms, I think, is a great rallying cry in the Democratic Party. And you saw that really rile people up. If we look at the

polling data on how that sort of pulls outside of the Democratic Party, how people in general feel about that as a rallying cry in this election, it's not that strong, right? Like, things like the economy are still the top issue people care about. Abortion is

And immigration come in about neck and neck second. And they touched on some of that today. And to the extent that they can make the fight for freedoms about those things, I think it's very successful from a sort of polling perspective. But outside of that, this kind of like general idea of freedom arguably isn't the strongest message for Democrats. Well, yeah, I don't know about that, Ruth. We have this conception of issue polling, right, where we ask about freedom.

issues that are much more concrete and less abstract than freedom, right? So I think this is an effort to kind of like what you said,

turn freedom into an issue almost. And they did try to shoehorn a lot of things in there. So like, obviously, like, you know, abortion and reproductive rights, those freedoms came up a lot. But they also said multiple times things like, you know, the freedom to like afford your own home or like be able to, you know, like get a job and stuff like that. So like economic freedom and stuff like that. So they're trying to fit

a lot of these issues that Americans do care about or they say they care about in polls into this box. And so I think that it's about taking issues that we know Americans care about

framing it in a way that is good for Democrats and just kind of generally favorable. I also think that there's an interesting conversation to be had about how much Americans say they care about the economy, but how much is it really a deal breaker for them versus, we've talked on the podcast about maybe an abortion because there's such a stark difference between the parties. Maybe that is more of a deal breaker issue for certain voters. And I

I think freedom, like having freedom and not having freedom is a very stark choice. And maybe they're trying to make that kind of sweep all the stuff that is maybe good for Democrats up into that message. Yeah, I think to the extent that they're doing that, I agree it's successful. Well, and one thing that it does as well is it frustrates partisanship, which we've talked about before on the podcast, is you take a conservative strength and

and you try to use it to your advantage. And so the videos involved in pitching freedom show the windswept planes and American flags and American manufacturing and workers and things like that. It's like if the Republican National Convention said, oh, one of the themes of

our nights is equality. And we're going to talk about how sort of the Democrats push for all of these different, you know, DEI measures is anti-equality. And really, the Republican Party is fighting for equality because we want everybody to be on a level playing field. And we don't want sort of these efforts of equity or something like that. Right. It's taking something that the Democratic Party is known for, which is they're always making pitches about

equality and sort of using it to service a Republican message, if that makes sense. And I will say, because our trusty producers did track down a little bit of polling, that according to the Cato Institute, three quarters of Americans worry that if not careful, Americans could lose the freedoms they have in the country. So there is at least some sense that

freedom is something that's at risk for Americans. Right. Yeah, I found a different poll from Monmouth from last year that found that 55% of Americans were very concerned that their fundamental rights and freedoms were under threat. And there was...

basically agreement across parties. It was 53% of Democrats, 51% of independents, a little bit higher among Republicans, 63%. And I think that goes to your point, Galen, that like traditionally, this is the idea of freedoms being under track has been a Republican idea. And obviously I think the freedoms that Republicans had in mind when they were answering that polling question were different from the ones that Democrats had in mind. But again, by kind of co-opting this message, I think Democrats are being smart.

While we're on the topic of issues, before we get into some of the specific speakers, our producer Shane did a really great job of looking at the 2024 Democratic platform and comparing it to the 2020 platform and looking at which words in particular get a lot more play or less play this time around.

And the platforms are about similar in length, so it serves as a pretty good comparison. And so, number one, one thing that really sticks out is the border gets a lot more play in this platform. It had eight mentions in 2020, 49 mentions this year.

this time around. Not specifically border. The word border specifically. DACA got zero mentions in 2020, got seven mentions in 2024. Yeah.

On the issue, maybe unsurprisingly, Trump is one of the most common words in the platform, both in 2020 and in 2024. 120 mentions four years ago, 150 mentions now. And of course, inflation also got a lot more mentions. Things like working, price gouging, big pharma also got more mentions. Things that got fewer mentions, interestingly enough...

were mentions of systemic racism or structural racism, nine mentions in 2020, zero mentions in 2024. Slavery was mentioned five times in 2020, once in 2024, Jim Crow twice in 2020, zero times this time around.

So some of this is probably happenstance, but some of this probably also gets at where the party is and what kind of message the party is focused on pitching. And I should also say here that this platform is the platform that they were going to adopt when Biden was expected to be the nominee. But is there anything in those numbers that sort of stick out to you or that you see repeated as a theme across what we've seen from the convention so far?

Yeah, I mean, I think the immigration piece is really interesting, just how much Democrats have really embraced immigration. That has really been an issue that Republicans have been ahead on. A lot of these policies that even Trump proposed in 2016 weren't that popular then and are increasingly popular. Things like one.

more border patrol agents, you know, reducing the number of people who can get asylum and even a border wall. They're more popular and Democrats are seeing that they're embracing it. You could see it tonight in the convention that they were really sort of embracing the idea of immigration reform in a way that they obviously hadn't in 2020. And you saw that with the platform differences. Yeah, it's not like they are

Emphasizing immigration, certainly not to the degree that Republicans did when they basically had an entire night devoted to it, kind of roughly speaking. But...

You have seen mentions multiple times of like, we had a bipartisan like border reform bill and Donald Trump killed it because he cares more about, you know, winning elections and kind of political expediency than or like his political chances than actually solving this problem. And I think obviously that is a smart tack for them to take. But I also think they can't empathize.

emphasize it too much because it's still not a good issue for them in the polls. And I also think the idea of strengthening border security isn't going to be the largest applause line in that hall. And you saw that they sort of took their own view on it. They focused on DACA and they had the video of kids who came here and were able to stay under DACA. So it was sort of a democratic view on immigration. Yeah, there was a whole portion where we did, in fact, hear from

somebody who worked in Border Patrol specifically. But to your point, Nathaniel, about, oh, they can't talk about it too much because ultimately it's an issue that advantages Republicans, it does look like in recent polling, Harris has improved on where Biden was standing on the issue. So in ABC News' most recent poll, Trump had a

nine point advantage on the issue of immigration compared to a 14 point advantage when it was Biden. And so in some ways, we've talked about this before, but they are trying to steal the thunder in a way. You know, another issue of freedom that came up a lot was abortion and IVF and fertility treatments more frequently.

broadly. And I think, you know, also on night two as well. And I think if you had told folks a couple of years ago that IVF was going to play a starring role in a political convention, they might have been confused. But, you know, Ruth, what do we know about, I guess, how Americans feel about

IVF. And like, is that is that a message that's really resonating? Yes, it is a message that is resonating. And Democrats are smart to seize on that. It is both something that is growing in the ranks of, you know, most important issue. The economy has always been number one, but slowly but surely, the share of Americans who say abortion is the most important issue is inching up. And it's also a place where

Harris has opened up an even wider lead on abortion than Biden had. I think that Biden was up by something like 15 or 20 points in our poll in May. And then when we looked back again at swing states, she opened up to a 30, 35 percentage point lead. So I think Democrats are smart to seize on that as an opportunity to really both draw in voters who care about this issue, but also energize their base. And for their base, this is a huge issue. Yeah.

It's not just abortion too, right? It's the IVF stuff, which they've really been pushing. You know, even Tim Walz kind of, you know, mentioned like struggles with fertility. And IVF is obviously like extremely popular. And that's like pushing the idea that Republicans could take that away is, I think, particularly strong for them. So according to a civics poll from earlier this year, 80% of Americans think that IVF should be legal. Only 6% think it should be illegal. So it's basically like

as close to unanimous as you're going to get. All right. As you mentioned, one of the people who mentioned fertility treatments in their speech was Tim Walz, who was meant to be the star of the show tonight. I don't know. Maybe it was Oprah. Maybe it was somebody else. Actually, I'm curious, who was the star of the show tonight? Do you have a take on that? Yeah, I mean, I think...

I think it was Tim Walls. I think he will get the most play long term and that was the goal. But I think there will be some little scene stealers in there. Oprah screaming joy. Yeah, there will certainly be those clips that go viral like C-SPAN lady. Yes, there will always be C-SPAN panning to just a random woman when Oprah mentioned J.D. Vance's single cat ladies quip.

Yeah, right. But yes, Walls generally was the star. And I think this is the speech that will get a lot of attention. And frankly, he did his job quite well. He introduced himself to the public. He sold both his vision and Harris's vision for the country.

That's always the vice president's job in these types of convention slots, and I think he did a... He made a very compelling case. Yeah, the speech really sort of tried to get at the theme, and his introduction in particular, at the theme of Tim Walz being an American everyman from the heartland. And we...

we have an interesting dynamic where the Trump campaign is trying to do the same thing with J.D. Vance, who, of course, is also from a Midwestern state. And we do we do have some polling from Axios that maybe suggests that Walls has been more effective at convincing the

the American public that he is that American everyman. So Walt outperformed Vance on the question of has an authentic connection to everyday Americans, has an eight-point advantage there, understands the challenges in your community, has a six-point advantage there.

understands the issues affecting rural and small town America has a six point advantage there, which is interesting because you would assume that Republicans would have the de facto advantage on that. For what it's worth, I think it's a little bit early to do that kind of polling about VP candidates because they're just not very well known. And particularly Tim Walz, every poll

On Walls' favorability and Vance's favorability, you see that there's still a large chunk of Americans that don't know who Walls is. So are we rating that a bad use of polling? No, not a bad use of polling. Just a little early. Do it again later. No, but I think the same point is made by the overall favorable and unfavorable numbers, right? So J.D. Vance is at negative 10.5.

points underwater in terms of his net favorability, which is historically bad for a VP candidate, as I wrote last week. And Tim Walz is at plus five points of net favorability, which makes him the only one of the four candidates who are running for president or vice president who has a positive net favorability rating, according to our averages. Like I said last night, I wouldn't be surprised if Kamala Harris enters that territory soon, but it is notable. And yeah, I think to Ruth's point, like

Walt just kind of did his shtick that he's been doing and introduced himself to the people who haven't met him yet. So maybe those kind of unknowns go down. They did a lot on him being a coach. Ruth, I don't know if you're a football fan. This is not a very pro football podcast, but...

Between me and Galen, at least. I'm sorry, Galen. I forgot they are a huge NFL fan. No, but, like, it was... They just, like... It's, like, the signs said Coach Walls. They had the teammates, or not teammates, but, like, charges, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, with wearing their jerseys. And, yeah, just, like, really leaning into that. And, obviously, like...

this podcast, these two thirds of this podcast aside, Americans are really into football. Uh, there was a St. Bonaventure, Siena research survey that found that 72% of Americans claim to be football fans. So like, that's obviously like leaning into that is, is obvious.

is obviously good politics. And he just came across as very normal and likable. And, uh, that is, and exactly. And then through being a normal and likable and relatable messenger, uh,

his praise of Kamala Harris and then their plans comes off as more credible. We are really coming to play today with the data, even a poll on what percentage of Americans consider themselves football fans. I love it. Okay, let's move on because we heard from plenty of other folks as well. And Nathaniel, and as we were logging on,

you said that what stuck out to you is that it was, well, both of you said that what stuck out to you is that it was rising folks in the party roof. I think you said, what was this? The 2032. 2032 primary. Democratic presidential primary. Who won that primary? If in fact it was.

I think perfectly subjectively, I would say Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland. I thought he gave a good speech about the collapse of the Key Bridge in Baltimore, which of course was kind of the defining moment.

moment of his governorship so far. So there was a personal element for him and a bit of a biographical detail, but he used it as a lens to be like Kamala Harris was so helpful. And so it both, I think, introduced people to who he was and his story while also being helpful to the party, which I think is sometimes a tricky line to walk.

He also, if I recall correctly, had the later speaking slot, which I think is more valuable and more people probably saw him than Josh Shapiro, though actually maybe Buttigieg came after him. Buttigieg came after him and so did Amy Klobuchar. Right, yes. Klobuchar was more of like an intro to wall situation, but Buttigieg's speech was also quite good. Josh Shapiro was good as well, but I thought that his themes were a little more generic. Who was bad, Nathaniel? I want to hear the dirt. Well, I'll

Of the rising stars, I don't think anybody was, unless you want to count Klobuchar, in which case I don't think she was bad. I think she just kind of was what she was. But there's a reason these people are rising stars, right? They have political talent and they have good stories to tell. You know who was not a rising star and whose speech really fell flat? Former President of the United States, William Clinton. I mean, it was truly one of those parodies where it's like,

It sounds like he's about to take the final rhetorical turn of his speech, but oh no, he has 20 rhetorical turns left to make. And it was truly, thank you, Bill Clinton, for the fact that we are recording this podcast at half past midnight.

instead of half past 11 when we were supposed to be recording. But like, is anybody surprised? This is like literally his shtick. He always does this every four years and like we act surprised. So like he, I'm not surprised, but I'm disappointed. Fair enough. But like Bill Clinton, very famously, uh,

In 1988, which was kind of one of his, well, he's had so many political lives, but he had a star turn at the 1988 DNC where he was allotted 15 minutes to speak, but he ended up going 35 minutes. And that was the famous speech, or at least famous among us political nerds, where he ended up by saying, and in closing, and the whole convention hall was like, yes, in closing, woo!

And there were very much those vibes tonight. But like, this is what Bill Clinton is going to do. Apparently, I was not seated in a place where I could see the teleprompter. But apparently, like for the last like 10 minutes of the speech, he was just not reading the script at all. And he had like physical notes in front of him. So I think clearly he had like, you know, they had submitted one version of the speech a couple of days ago for the teleprompter people. And then he like basically just like kept on writing and was referring to the notes on the speech. But and I also think actually his 20,

I believe it was DNC speech was really quite like legendary. And he just like really had people kind of like, like wound up around every word. Um, but I think, you know, since then, obviously he is also getting old. Uh, and as he pointed out, he is like, he is a little bit younger than Donald Trump, but like literally by like two months. Uh, so, you know, there, he, he, and fun fact, he and, uh,

Trump and George W. Bush were all born within a few weeks of each other, all in the summer of 1946. The literal baby boomers. But, you know, yeah, he's lost his fastball a little bit. To your point about that 2012 convention speech, it was 2012. We had a little bit of a producer watch party at my apartment. Cameron Chertavian and Jayla Everett both came over, and I found myself...

in the position of, like, old man telling stories about past Democratic conventions. And I was like, do you remember when Bill Clinton was speaking at the 2012 Democratic convention? And, like, I was like, it's hard to remember now, but Democrats were very pessimistic about their sort of lot in the election that summer. And he came and gave, honestly...

certain parts of the speech were practically lifted. He does this every time he speaks where he adds up like every job ever created under a Democratic president and compares it to every job ever created under a Republican president and says like, the Democrats are the job creators. And that's kind of what the speech was in 2012, but he still had more of his fastball and...

That was sort of the memorable turnaround where, you know, obviously there was some rivalry between the Clintons and the Obamas, but the Clintons really came through for the Obamas, both in the 2008 convention and 2012 convention, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, call me the old man in all of this recounting my war stories. All right, old man.

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Ruth, we didn't hear from you. Who won the primary? My rising star. Yeah. So I will say if the goal so there's lots of different goals, right? If the goal is to get under Republican skin and in particular get under Donald Trump's skin, I think that Josh Shapiro won that primary and partially because I just saw that Donald Trump said,

tweeted like a number of angry tweets about Shapiro, one of which starting with the highly overrated Jewish governor. So if you are hoping to run for office in 2032, and part of your goal is to really challenge Republicans, I think Josh Shapiro showed that tonight.

Yeah. I mean, you mentioned Nathaniel P. Buttigieg choosing a better politics. That was one of the themes of his speech. And it was also one of the themes of Obama's speech the prior night, as we talked about on the podcast yesterday. But you hear quite a bit of this at this convention that...

People should be less partisan. People should be less polarized and almost imploring Democrats themselves to be less polarized, less partisan and be open to neighbors who may have differing views from them. And I think bipartisanship polls very, very well. But I don't know if this is a tactic that's meant to sort of

lure voters or more if it's just a heartfelt thing that we have we also heard it from Bill Clinton a heartfelt thing of like American politics feel like they're on the brink and people want to address it and try to try to cool people down

So I think this goes hand in hand with the joy thing too, right? So according to ABC's Allie Hutzler, who is counting up the number of times the word joy was used, it was 35 times throughout the night, kind of exemplified by Oprah, who I thought actually probably gave, she wasn't the star. She won the 2032 primary. Yeah, I think her speech was the best. But yeah, the joy thing, that was like kind of new. I felt like I hadn't really heard that before, but I think it makes sense. And I think it,

with the new mood of the Democratic Party, given like, you know, they were going in with Biden, obviously, and like nobody was really happy about it, but they were like, this is our duty, da, da, da, da, da. But like there's a new like joy in the party because an exuberance for Kamala Harris. And like also think like it fits with her personality, right? Like she seems like just like a little bit more like playful and joyful. And so I think they are leaning into that. And I think there's probably that

that's smart given that like, you know, I think a lot of the Trump stuff, the American carnage stuff is very pessimistic about the country. And in a way this is harking back to the Obama, like positive message stuff that we heard last night. And obviously that we heard in 2008 and 2012 to great effect for Democrats. So that was interesting. And I will keep an eye again, like much like the generically freedom. I haven't seen a poll about freedom, but I imagine it pulls well, I think joy probably also pulls well. Um, but I haven't like seen an analysis of it. Never guess. Yeah.

Joy, underwater by 30 points for the American public. But they mean joy from inside out, the movie, not joy. We did have, I will say, we had both joy and disgust tonight because Mindy Kaling was the celebrity host. Oh, true, yeah. Well, we actually do have some polling on this because we asked a question in February and again right after Biden dropped out about...

people giving us one word about how they feel about the election. And we saw joy increase, but we also saw anxiety increase. And right, it was also this particular moment after Biden dropped out, after the assassination attempt against Trump, like there was a lot going on in people's psyche, but joy was rising in particularly among Democrats.

at the same time anxiety was rising. And I think you kind of saw that in the convention, right? There's a lot of talk of joy, but there's also a lot of talk about Trump and the existential threat and all of that. And that kind of brings in the kind of stress and anxiety. And Fox had some national polling a week or two ago where they asked the kind of standard question, are you voting for Harris or against Trump? Are you voting for Trump or against Harris? And Democrats are sort of correctly reading the room. Republicans are all voting for Trump.

But a lot of Democrats, it's like split voting against Trump versus for Harris. And so they're kind of reading the room and saying we need some of this negative messaging is going to help because people want to get rid of Trump. And the joy helps with with, you know, half of the group. But you really need to address the people who are voting against Trump and not necessarily for Harris. Yeah.

And we did actually, in fairness, see that today. There was a segment on January 6th that wasn't during primetime, but they played a video that was honestly like very hard to watch of some of the footage from that day. And they really hammered home the Trump is a danger to democracy stuff, which we have heard a lot on the stump, especially from Biden. But I don't recall hearing at the DNC, at least they didn't hammer it this heavily until that segment.

All right. It is getting late now and we've still got another one of these late night podcasts to do. So we are going to end things there. Thank you, Ruth and Nathaniel. Thanks, Galen. Thanks, Galen.

My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Tretavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.