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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