Barack Obama declared that the US was “ready for a new chapter” with Kamala Harris as president in a rousing speech on Tuesday but warned Democrats that they were facing a “tight race” to elect her and defeat Donald Trump in November.

Speaking at the Democratic convention in Chicago, the former president deployed his political star power to try to quash any doubts within the party over Harris’s candidacy, while cautioning the crowd against complacency about the election outcome.

“Make no mistake: it will be a fight,” Obama said. “For all the incredible energy we’ve been able to generate over the past few weeks, for all the rallies and the memes, this will still be a tight race in a closely divided country.”

Although Obama, 63, has now been out of office for nearly eight years, he is among the most popular and influential Democrats, and party leaders hoped his primetime address would help unite and mobilise its supporters behind Harris.

Obama’s return to Chicago, where he began his political career, came as some Democrats tried to draw parallels between his successful 2008 campaign to be elected the first Black US president and Harris’s bid to become the country’s first female president.

As he took the stage, Obama was met with chants of “yes we can”, his own campaign slogan. Later he started a chant of “yes she can”, referring to Harris.

Obama’s speech deployed some of the soaring rhetoric that was a hallmark of his presidency but also mocked Trump as a “whining” self-interested billionaire and conspiracy theorist whose act had gone “pretty stale”.

“The other day, I heard someone compare Trump to the neighbour who keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day,” he said. “We don’t need four more years of bluster and chaos. We’ve seen that movie — and we all know that the sequel’s usually worse.”

Obama endorsed Harris last month, a few days after she launched her campaign following Joe Biden’s decision to drop his re-election bid. But Tuesday’s address was his most forceful statement of support for her.

The former Democratic president spoke just after Michelle Obama, the former first lady, who remains hugely popular within the party. “Something wonderfully magical is in the air,” she told the audience. “America, hope is making a comeback.”

But like her husband, Michelle Obama also used her speech to urge action from fellow Democrats — and to tear into Trump.

“In some states, just a handful of votes in every precinct could decide the winner,” she said. “We need to vote in numbers that erase any doubt. We need to overwhelm any effort to suppress us.”

The former first lady received some of the loudest cheers of the night when she called out Trump for his “limited narrow view of the world” and, referring to her husband and herself, said he had been “threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who also happen to be Black”.

“Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might be one of those ‘Black jobs’?” she added, in a reference to Trump’s suggestions that immigrants are taking jobs from African-Americans.

The Obamas’ speeches were significant for a party trying to paper over splits related to Israel’s war in Gaza and bad blood surrounding the ousting of Biden from the top of the ticket.

Barack Obama had initially defended Biden, with whom he had a complicated relationship in office that was occasionally marked by disagreements, after a disastrous debate against Trump in late June.

But he was conspicuously silent as Democrats piled pressure on the 81-year-old president to quit the race.

On Tuesday, Obama spent a few words honouring Biden’s legacy, saying he had “defended democracy at a moment of great danger”.

As the Obamas spoke, Chicago police clashed with protesters outside the Israeli consulate near the city’s central business district.

Their addresses were preceded by a ceremonial roll call vote that formally nominated Harris as the party’s presidential candidate, a tally that was capped with a roaring endorsement by Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, her home state.

Harris and Tim Walz, her running mate, were not present, instead campaigning in Milwaukee in front of about 15,000 people in the same arena where Trump held the Republican convention last month.

While Democrats have shown new enthusiasm for Harris since she replaced Biden on the ticket just a month ago, she will need to translate the initial burst of excitement for her bid into votes in battleground states.

“We shouldn’t delude ourselves that it’s an automatic victory,” Anita Dunn, a former senior adviser to Biden at the White House, said on the sidelines of the DNC.

Trump on Tuesday travelled to Michigan, another big swing state, to speak about “crime and safety”.

According to a FiveThirtyEight polling average, Harris is leading Trump by almost 3 percentage points nationally and is marginally ahead in most of the swing states.

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BlackRock’s support for shareholder proposals on environmental and social issues has fallen to a fraction of its 2021 peak, it disclosed on Wednesday, even as its support for governance-related questions rose.

In the 12 months to the end of June, BlackRock supported just 20 of the 493 environmental and social proposals put forward by shareholders at annual meetings, or about 4 per cent of the total, according to its annual investment stewardship report.

That compares with a high of 47 per cent in 2021. By last year the figure had fallen to 7 per cent.

The decline in support comes as companies’ efforts to address climate change and inequality — issues that were once bundled together with governance under the ESG umbrella — have become politically fraught.

Conservatives have accused BlackRock and other large asset managers of using their large holdings to pursue “woke capitalism”, while the left has complained that investors have failed to push hard enough for decarbonisation.

But governance-related activities seeking to protect shareholder rights and promote strong boards have escaped similar criticism.

The $10.6tn asset manager said that it had voted on a record 867 shareholder proposals overall, but had found very few of those on environmental and social issues to be in the best interest of its clients.

Many of this year’s proposals were “overly prescriptive, lacking economic merit or asking companies to address material risks they are already managing”, wrote Joud Abdel Majeid, BlackRock’s global head of investment stewardship.

The number of no votes was lifted this year by BlackRock’s uniform opposition to 88 conservative-backed anti-ESG resolutions seeking to prevent companies from addressing such issues.

The world’s largest money manager voted in favour of 79 of the 374 governance proposals it considered, or 21 per cent, up from 11 per cent last year. Among the most common were proposals to introduce simple majority voting, rather than requiring a supermajority.

BlackRock’s lack of enthusiasm for environmental and social proposals contributed to low overall support for such measures at many corporate annual meetings.

The median support for environmental and social shareholder proposals at Russell 3000 companies was 21 per cent and 18 per cent, respectively, this year, according to data from ISS-Corporate. Only two climate-related questions received majority support.

Globally, BlackRock supported 88 per cent of proposals put forward by the companies it invests in, including 82 per cent of those related to pay. It also backed 90 per cent of company-nominated directors, similar to its voting in previous years.

It said its main reasons for opposing directors were lack of independence, membership on too many boards and concerns about executive compensation.

Police are looking for a woman who climbed over a barrier surrounding a tiger enclosure at a zoo in New Jersey, before approaching the big cats and putting a hand through a metal fence, narrowly avoiding being bitten.

Bridgeton Police Department said it wanted to speak to the woman, after video footage emerged of her inside the enclosure at Cohanzick Zoo in Bridgeton. The department released the footage on Tuesday, but it is unclear when the incident took place.

“A female at the Cohanzick Zoo went over the wooden fence at the tiger enclosure and began enticing the tiger almost getting bit by putting her hand through the wire enclosure,” police said in a statement on Facebook. “We are asking if anyone recognizes the female in the video/photo.”

The video shows the woman climbing over a wooden fence designed to keep visitors away from the tigers, before going right up the tall metal fence and placing her hand through a small gap, in an apparent attempt to pet the enormous animal.

The tiger quickly moves its jaws toward her, forcing her to swiftly remove her hand and step away. She then stops and poses, as if someone else is taking a photograph, before back climbing over the wooden enclosure.

Bridgeton police added: “Reminder to the public when visiting the zoo that it is against City Ordinance to climb over any fence.”

Anyone with information is urged to call Ptlm. Cusano at 856-451-0033 ext. 0, or send anonymous tips to BPD.TIPS.

The incident is similar to one at the Bronx Zoo in New York in 2019, when a woman climbed into the lion enclosure and stood feet away from one of them, appearing to taunt it.