The DNC: Missed Opportunities

The 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) was the most-watched in history. The DNC brought in 28.9 million viewers across all TV audiences (networks, cable, C-SPAN). But in addition, DNC 2024 garnered another 21 million across all streaming services, where most people under 40 get their news.

The DNC was so successful that Kamala Harris’s campaign reported she raised $40 million in the first 48 hours after she delivered her acceptance speech which garnered two million more viewers than Donald Trump’s post-assassination attempt speech at the Republican National Convention in July.

It was a mostly riveting and largely exciting DNC which highlighted the Big Tent politics and policies of the Democratic party with a raft of speakers and attendees who looked like America—diverse.

Now that the euphoria is over, time for critiques.

Given how many unnecessary (and repetitive and uninspired) speakers there were among some absolutely inspirational and aspirational speakers like AOC, Jasmine Crockett and yes, Bernie Sanders. Secretary Pete Buttigieg made history as the highest ranking out gay speaker and he proved yet again how adept an interlocutor he is for the administration. His consistent normalizing of gay life in America never gets tiresome.

Still, there were so many more politicians who brought nothing to the discourse but repetition and taking the exact same stance as the speaker before him or her. Too many governors (with none as powerful as Gretchen Whitmer who kept it short, sweet and exciting), far too many senators, and people who were somehow titularly adjacent to Kamala Harris or Tim Walz. If you weren’t a natural orator like Rev. Raphael Warnock or Hakeem Jeffries, you still got way too much time to say what they did, just much less well.

The overloaded schedule pushed Joe Biden and Tim Walz off past 11 p.m. on the East Coast and Harris herself past 10 p.m. Not the way to treat your stars.

Yet with all these many politicians making their faces known and in some cases like Josh Shapiro, and possibly J. B. Pritzker, speaking for their own likely future presidential runs, the DNC schedulers found no space for a single Palestinian American, trans person, medical professional talking about the healthcare crisis that is not about abortion or a person living in or addressing the 16% of Americans living in poverty.

In the midst of such a celebration of Big Tent politics and inclusion, these missed opportunities rankle.

The DNC wasn’t just a time to highlight achievements by Democrats, but also to address what is desperately needed yet still outside our grasp and still critical for Democrats to focus on. One such thing is our shattered healthcare system, which I last wrote about from my hospital bed in the ICU mere weeks ago. Our health care system was the priority at the 2020 virtual DNC as it had been throughout the primary due to the pandemic. Yet only four years later, it was barely noted, despite 21 million Americans battling cancer right now—myself among them—and several million still living with Long COVID, as I have reported extensively for PGN.

And while there has never been a more LGBTQ-friendly administration—as both President Biden and Vice President Harris have been stalwart allies to both queer and trans Americans—to fail to have a single trans speaker when trans youth in particular are under such attacks from the GOP and Donald Trump and JD Vance in specific was an inexcusable decision by the organizers. Just a few days before the DNC began, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled itself in the Bostock decision by gutting Biden’s recent Title IX changes in a case that flew under the media radar, which I reported on last week for PGN.

There were certainly a myriad of voices that the DNC could have called upon, like the administration’s own Dr. Rachel Levine, who is assistant health secretary. Or the New Jersey dentist and delegate, trans woman, Dr. Joeigh Perrella, who was given a voice in the roll call for New Jersey, noting “I’m proud to stand with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz because they stand with the LGBTQ community. It’s time to turn the page on Trump!”

But what better time to showcase a trans teen and their family battling the vicissitudes of the attacks on trans youth and gender-affirming care, which the Biden-Harris administration has fully supported? What better time to highlight how the demonizing of kids has harmed a whole swathe of trans and nonbinary youth, like Nex Benedict who died so tragically and unnecessarily after a bullying attack earlier this year?

Another misstep as protests continued for days outside the convention was the failure to have a single Palestinian-American speaker in the midst of a war against Gaza that the U.S. is funding. Regardless of where one stands on the Israel-Hamas war, and I have written extensively here and elsewhere about the need to end the war for months, how could the DNC not address this pivotal issue that has been the source of so many protests on college campuses and in every major city?

Perhaps the thinking by organizers was that these are issues so top of mind for the GOP and such flashpoints that they were best kept sidelined. Yet the response to Kamala Harris talking about Israel, Gaza and Palestinian autonomy in her acceptance speech made clear that this was an audience that very much wanted and needed to hear all parts of this discussed with clarity and humanity.

And where, in all the talk about the middle class and even raising the minimum wage, which has not changed since 2009 and which is keeping adult women in poverty every day in America, was there a single speaker living that right now and what it means to be a working poor woman in the richest nation on earth? How is that not a massive failure of both parties?

The fact is, we cannot always control what people say in an environment that lauds free speech. But Big Tent politics demand Big Tent risks. Let the speakers address the issues, even if they are flashpoints in a dicey time, even if they don’t say what you want to hear or criticize the administration you only want to tell the good news about, not the bad or incomplete or complicated.

The fact is, the Democrats—and Biden and Harris in particular—are striving to make this a more livable and equitable nation and world for us all. And that means there will be failures. It’s not wrong to own those and even put them on display and say, “Yes, we are trying to do this and no, we have not gotten there yet. But we will go on trying, we promise.” And that could have been a message delivered at an otherwise extraordinary DNC—and should have been.