Democrats Are Building Their Blue Wall on More Than Just Good Vibes: “We Can’t F–k Around”

When it crumbled in 2016, they lost to Donald Trump. When they built it back up in 2020, they sent Joe Biden to the White House. The Midwest’s “blue wall” has been absolutely crucial for Democrats—and at their convention in Chicago, which Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker described in his Tuesday speech as that wall’s “cornerstone,” the party sought to shore it up ahead of November.

“We can’t fuck around,” Michigan representative Haley Stevens told me. “And we haven’t been fucking around.”

Just a month ago, the party seemed in danger of losing the key Midwest swing states on which the 2024 election will hinge: Biden was already lagging behind Trump in polls, and went into a tailspin after a disastrous debate performance in June. Before he dropped his candidacy, polls had him trailing Trump in five battleground states—including the blue-wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

But the rise of Vice President Kamala Harris seems to have reversed Democrats’ fortunes: She herself has rebounded in the polls—even looking like the frontrunner in some—and revitalized the party in the swing states where it was once in peril, as my colleague Chris Smith reported recently. Now, she and the Democrats have new momentum—and they want to keep it going well-beyond the Democratic National Convention. “I’m just excited,” said Ohio representative Shontel Brown. While the party will “have to work twice as hard, twice as fast” in this abbreviated campaign, she said, Democrats will “take the bump” from the convention: “I would caution everyone to look out where they’re stepping because the glass ceiling is being shattered everywhere.”

Harris’s historic candidacy is a big part of that energy, of course. But some of it seems to be rooted in a shift in party positioning—from democracy’s doomsayers to “happy warriors”—which has been reinforced by running mate Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota. “They may have crappy sports teams in Minnesota,” Wisconsin representative Mark Pocan told me on the concourse of the United Center, referring to the rivalry between the neighboring states’ football teams. Still, he added, the two have “similar values.”

Of course, good vibes and folksy appeal may not be enough on their own to win an election. The key for Democrats to buttress their blue wall could come down to their ability to speak to the “core kitchen-table issues,” as Pocan put it, “that are really important to the Midwest.”

And Democrats have a “very clear lane” to do that, Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow told me: Trump and JD Vance tap into real economic fears and disillusionment, said the Democrat, but offer only culture-war bile in lieu of real solutions. Harris, she said, is putting forth a program that will actually improve Americans’ lives; the task before Democrats right now is to sell them on it.

“We can have a lot of fun while we do important work,” McMorrow told me, noting Democratic successes in Michigan under Governor Gretchen Whitmer and the narrowly-held Democratic majorities in both state chambers.

McMorrow, a rising star in the party, got a prominent billing in the DNC programming—appearing onstage in an early slot Monday to deliver some of the party’s opening arguments against Project 2025, the MAGA-governing blueprint Trump could rely on if he returns to power in November. “It was a lot to take in,” McMorrow told me. But her role was “an acknowledgment [by the Harris campaign] of how important Michigan is.”