Black Voters and the Fight for Democracy is a multipart series that explores the stakes of the 2024 election for our communities. This project was produced as part of the Advancing Democracy Fellowship.
Jovita Lee wasn’t old enough to vote in 2008, when Barack Obama was at the top of the Democratic Party ticket. But she remembers that contest very clearly: It was the last one that her grandmother, who had an eighth grade education and hailed from a family of sharecroppers, participated in.
“She went through segregation and the Civil Rights Movement, and had the chance to cast her final ballot for a Black man — that’s an incredible journey,” Lee, the policy director of Advance Carolina, a Black-led grassroots organization, told Capital B. “Then to see her watching the results come in. To see the tears.”
Obama was a political sensation. The charismatic U.S. senator from Illinois was able to pull off his historic victory by assembling a wide coalition of voters who were at the time the most diverse electorate ever, attracting nonwhite and younger voters in droves.
More than 15 years on, as the Democratic National Convention kicks off in Chicago, where Obama will once again take the stage, we could see a repeat of that momentum — a recreation of that wide coalition — with a Black woman as the party’s standard-bearer.
Harris has attracted funding from novel sources and received support from organizations and people typically reluctant to issue endorsements, or issue them to Democrats. Each suggests that her base of voters is increasingly diverse.
“Much of that same energy is present — that hope that people had in 2008 and again in 2012, that sense that there’s something to look forward to and someone to rally behind,” Lee said.
She added that, before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July, “things were getting darker and darker, to be honest.”
One manifestation of this enthusiasm? The many Zoom calls that have cropped up in recent weeks to mobilize different voting groups. The first of these virtual meetings, hosted by Win With Black Women, raised more than $1.5 million for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign for the White House. It was soon followed by calls targeting other affinity groups: Black men, Black queer men, young people, Latinos, white women, “white dudes.”
Notably, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization in the U.S., has endorsed a political candidate — Harris — for the first time since its founding in 1929. The vice president also has secured endorsements from dozens of Republicans, including lawmakers, mayors, and former governors.
Some have painted the virtual gatherings as a kind of “racial balkanization” — and as a squandered opportunity to preach a message of universalism. But these critiques overlook, among other things, the fact that if a Democratic nominee wants to win the White House, they and their allies must activate the party’s diverse base.
This is what Obama’s team did in 2008 (and in 2012), when it turned out racial and ethnic minorities, younger people, women, and others in record numbers, and made the U.S. senator the first Democratic nominee since former President Jimmy Carter to seize victory with a popular-vote majority.
Carter, who’s 99 years old and has been in hospice care for more than a year, said that he’s “trying to make it” so that he can cast his ballot for Harris, according to his grandson, Jason Carter.
The younger Carter is expected to speak at the convention on behalf of his grandfather.
In 2008, for the first time in the country’s history, Black turnout surpassed white turnout: 69.1% to 65.2%. Yet, Obama’s appeal was broad. He was seen by many as an embodiment of hope — as an opportunity to fight for reforms, such as expanded health care coverage, that might help marginalized communities. As a result, his White House bid reshaped the voting landscape.
“I grew up in the Obama school of organizing,” Kimeka Campbell, the co-founder of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, chapter of the Young Professionals of Color collective, told Capital B. “That meant knocking doors, making phone calls, meeting people in their neighborhoods. Rinse and repeat, over and over again, until you change hearts and minds. Whether you hate or love Obama, that organizing outfit was one of the strongest in at least a generation.”
In addition to building a strong presence in populous areas — major cities, college campuses — the Obama camp micro-targeted a range of demographic and identity groups, creating pockets of support. This approach allowed the campaign to fashion a different outcome than if it had ignored these constituencies.
“I absolutely think that, since [the Obama years], Democrats haven’t really organized well. I don’t know why,” explained Campell, who worked on both Obama campaigns. “And I see it so clearly when I talk with candidates who make excuses for why they’re not meeting with voters face to face or talking with them on the phone or virtually. It’s always a battle for hearts and minds.”
So far, Harris and her champions seem to be waging that battle effectively, directing appeals at specific slices of the electorate to unify voters around a single candidate.
A new Marquette Law School poll found that 52% of registered voters want Harris to be president, while 48% want former president Donald Trump. Additionally, the vice president leads Trump in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona — key swing states — per a new Cook Political Report survey of seven battleground states. No Democratic nominee has won North Carolina since Obama’s run in 2008 (he narrowly lost the state to his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, four years later).
“I’ve been fascinated by the mobilization not just because it’s been huge and raised all of this money, but also because it’s been a moment when the idea of diversity, which the GOP has been attacking forever, has been seen as a good thing,” Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, a national organization focusing on political engagement, told Capital B. “We’ve had these different identity and affinity groups saying, ‘We’re for this version of America, and we’re going to align across our identities to move it forward.’”
“We’re witnessing Harris walk that path”
The fact that Harris would be the country’s first Black woman president certainly has lots of Americans fired up. But the excitement she’s enjoying — and specifically from a coalition that mirrors Obama’s — also springs from something else: Voters hope that they can influence her policy agenda, since people have a relatively shallow and amorphous understanding of her record, and don’t really know her.
The convention offers Harris a chance to define her story in a compelling way — before her Republican rivals can concretize their own narrative — and make the case for why she ought to lead our multiracial society.
“There are tangible things that people want to see happen: boosting job access through contracting mechanisms at the federal level, cleaning up the environment, combating police violence, securing women’s reproductive rights, pushing for the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act,” Khalil Thompson, the founder and executive director of Win With Black Men, which raised more than $1.3 million for Harris’ campaign, told Capital B.
He added: “These are all issues we want to take to the vice president and say, ‘This is our platform. How are you going to enact it?’”
At a stop in Raleigh, North Carolina, Harris sketched out her economic message. She zoomed in on the necessity of scaling back the cost of living for lower-income and middle-class families, and touted stances popular among Black voters, including ending price-gouging, developing more affordable housing, and expanding the child tax credit.
Harris is maybe best known for her position on abortion rights. At the start of the year, she embarked on a “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour, traveling across the U.S. to stress the importance of protecting the right to abortion. It’s the issue that 1 in 8 voters — largely women, young, and Black — say is the most critical this election cycle, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll released in March.
Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, most Americans embrace abortion access. This overwhelming support has forced Republican leaders, including Trump, to try to distance themselves from or soft-pedal their anti-abortion views, captured in the conservative manifesto known as Project 2025.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, has proved to be a powerful partner when it comes to advocating for reproductive justice. On the campaign trail, he’s connected with crowds by telling the story of how the birth of his daughter, Hope, was only possible because of in vitro fertilization treatments. IVF has become a target in several Republican-led states, even though about 6 in 10 Americans want to safeguard access to IVF, a June AP-NORC poll found, and Black women are confronted with infertility at especially high rates.
On other issues, Harris’ team has demonstrated that it’s responsive to the will of different wings of the party. The vice president drew criticism for appearing to snap at pro-Palestinian protesters who interrupted her rally in Detroit. By the time protesters interrupted Harris at a stop in Glendale, Arizona, about a day later, her tone had changed — dramatically.
“We’re here to fight for our democracy, which includes respecting the voices that I think we’re hearing from,” Harris said. “I have been clear: Now is the time to get a ceasefire deal and get the hostage deal done. Now is the time. And the president and I are working around the clock every day to get that ceasefire deal done and bring the hostages home.”
Given that Biden never meaningfully budged on the issue, Harris’ rapid adjustment to the backlash was almost disorienting. It could prove to be the kind of engagement that pulls some younger voters, who tend to be more outraged by the staggering death toll in Gaza, back into the party’s orbit.
This tension comes as Democratic leaders attempt to figure out how to resonate with younger voters, and in particular younger Black voters, who are less attached to the party’s legacy of civil rights activism.
“There’s a lot of Black and brown solidarity with Palestinians,” Kenya Cummings, a resident of Charleston, South Carolina, told Capital B, adding that this conflict has exposed a new generation of voters to questions of mass death and complicity.
As Thompson sees it, part of the allure of having Harris at the top of the ticket is that Black voters feel as if they have a fresh opportunity to nudge the party, to determine which direction it goes in.
“I say often when I’m talking with folks that this is a job application. Candidates are really applying to be our elected officials. We have the right and responsibility when we vote to do a performance review,” he explained. “I want to hire Harris to be the next president of the United States, and I believe that we can come up with a performance plan that’s going to be the best thing for our communities.”
Lee, at Advance Carolina, shared similar sentiments.
She underscored that the Obama-era energy of the past couple of weeks has made her think about everything that her forebears — people such as her grandmother — endured to try to forge a better, more politically inclusive future for Black voters.
“I was watching the Shirley Chisholm movie with my family recently, and it was just this powerful moment. It was like, ‘This is what we mean when we say that our ancestors paved the way,’” Lee recalled. “Now, we’re witnessing Harris walk that path. It’s a feeling that’s hard to articulate.”
