Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic party’s nomination for president in front of a cheering crowd of delegates in Chicago on Thursday night with a speech pitched directly at the moderate and undecided voters who will decide November’s election.

While Donald Trump has tried to depict the vice-president as a radical leftist, Harris cast herself as a candidate who is “realistic, practical and has common sense” and could chart a “new way forward” for the US.

Here are the highlights from her primetime address.

Defining herself: ‘Never do anything half-assed’

Although Harris has been vice-president for nearly four years, it was critical for her to reintroduce herself to Americans unfamiliar with her life story.

She started with tales of her upbringing in California as the daughter of immigrants and recalled how her mother, a researcher from India, taught her to “never complain about injustice, but do something about it” and to “never do anything half-assed”.

Harris, who served as a prosecutor in California for the bulk of her career before she became a senator and then Joe Biden’s second-in-command, cast herself as a defender of ordinary Americans. “My entire career, I’ve only had one client: the people,” she said.

Attacking Trump: ‘An unserious man’

Since Harris launched her campaign last month, she has shifted her party’s message against Trump, casting him as a weak, selfish and small-minded candidate rather than a powerful, menacing strongman. On Thursday night, Harris stuck to that tone, describing the former president as an “unserious man”.

But she also warned that a Trump victory would be devastating. “The consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious,” she said. “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails, how he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States not to improve your life, not to strengthen our national security, but to serve the only client he has ever had: himself.”

Harris warned that Trump’s policies would seek to “pull our country back into the past”, setting up one of her campaign’s top slogans: “America, we are not going back.”

Protecting abortion rights: ‘They are out of their minds’

Access to abortion care and reproductive rights have been central messages of the Harris campaign, galvanising the Democratic party base and young and women voters. On Thursday night, Harris once again put the issue front and centre.

“Friends, I believe America cannot truly be prosperous unless Americans are fully able to make their own decisions about their own lives. Especially on matters of heart and home,” she said. “But tonight, too many women in America are not able to make those decisions.”

Harris placed the blame for a rollback of abortion rights across the country squarely on Trump, who nominated three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn the 50-year precedent of Roe vs Wade. She warned that further rights could be stripped away under a second Trump presidency.

“He plans to create a national anti-abortion co-ordinator and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions,” Harris said. “Simply put: they are out of their minds.”

Her economic agenda: ‘The middle class is where I come from’

Harris spent a chunk of her speech talking about the US economy, saying strengthening the middle class would be a “defining goal” for her presidency as part of building what she called an “opportunity economy”.

“This is personal for me. The middle class is where I come from,” Harris said.

She fleshed out that vision during her speech, saying she would seek to cut taxes for middle-class households, end a housing shortage and protect pensions and healthcare for the elderly.

“As president, I will bring together labour and workers, small business owners and entrepreneurs, and American companies to create jobs, grow our economy and lower the cost of everyday needs like healthcare, housing and groceries,” she said.

She also took a jab at Trump, arguing: “He doesn’t actually fight for the middle class. Instead, he fights for himself and his billionaire friends. And he will give them another round of tax breaks that will add up to $5tn to the national debt.”

Foreign policy: ‘I know where the United States belongs’

Harris made some of the most detailed comments on foreign policy of her campaign to date, outlining a muscular projection of US power on the global stage. “As commander-in-chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” she said.

Harris vowed to stand with Ukraine and Nato allies and said she would ensure that “America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century”.

She also tore into Trump for “cosying up to tyrants and dictators like [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Un”, whom Harris said were “rooting” for the former president to win in November.

“They know Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable because he wants to be an autocrat,” Harris said. “In the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny, I know where I stand and I know where the United States belongs.”

Harris also did not shy away from addressing the war in Gaza, the thorniest international issue facing the White House, which has split the Democratic party and triggered protests against her inside and outside the convention hall in Chicago this week.

“Now is the time to get a hostage deal and ceasefire done,” she said, declaring a commitment to both Israel’s defences and to ending the suffering in Gaza.

When she closed out her discussion of the Middle East with a call for the Palestinian people’s right to “dignity, security, freedom and self-determination”, the delegates offered resounding applause.

Vice President Kamala Harris said that “now is the time” for a Gaza ceasefire deal and backed Palestinians’ right to self-determination, as she accepted the Democrats’ nomination for the presidency on the final night of the party’s national convention.

When President Biden ended his presidential campaign on July 21, making Vice President Kamala Harris the presumptive Democratic nominee, he unleashed the biggest wave of small-dollar enthusiasm the race has seen.

More than 1.5 million new donors gave to the Harris campaign in the last 11 days of July, according to estimates from a New York Times analysis of donor data filed with the Federal Election Commission. That figure comprises 40 percent of all donors to the Biden and now Harris campaign, which has been raising money since April 2023.

Mr. Biden’s existing donor base was enthusiastic, as well: About 680,000 people who had previously donated to Mr. Biden — just over one-third of his previous donors — came back to give more to Ms. Harris in those 11 days.

More than half a million people total on July 21, and more than 600,000 on July 22, gave to the Democratic presidential campaign through ActBlue, its official fund-raising platform. Their contributions totaled more than $80 million in the first two days. From July 21 through the end of the month, the newly renamed Harris campaign raised $183 million through ActBlue.

The Times’s analysis also combined the donor records with voter registration records to show that new Harris donors were much younger than Biden donors had been. Just 10 percent of Mr. Biden’s donors in July were under 45 years old, compared with 28 percent of Ms. Harris’s donors.

The share of Ms. Harris’s newly acquired donors who were women under 45 was 17 percent — more than double the share of Mr. Biden’s donors who were younger women. Younger men also made up a greater share of Ms. Harris’s donors.

Across all ages, slightly more than 60 percent of both Mr. Biden’s and Ms. Harris’s donors were women.

In a geographic comparison of Mr. Biden’s donors and Ms. Harris’s, the makeup of both pools was very similar. Harris donors were slightly more likely to come from more educated areas: ZIP codes where more than half of those 25 and over had a bachelor’s degree. Ms. Harris also claimed a slightly higher share of first-time small-dollar donors from ZIP codes where more than 5 percent of the population was Black, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau. And differences between the candidates were minor when it came to their ZIP codes’ median household income.

The Times’s analysis did not look at contributions by large donors who give directly to the campaign, fund-raising committees or super PACs without going through ActBlue.

Large donors had been threatening to flee the party after Mr. Biden’s disappointing debate performance, and while some small donors had rushed to the president’s support, they were far outnumbered by the wave of money that flooded in for former President Donald J. Trump after his felony conviction and the attempt on his life.

Full details on donations by large donors will not become clear until October, when the campaign’s associated fund-raising committees are required to file reports with the Federal Election Commission. But on just the strength of small donors alone, the end of July was the most significant fund-raising moment for the Biden or Harris campaign of the entire cycle thus far, and the biggest week for Democratic fund-raising on ActBlue since the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The Harris campaign in July announced that it had raised over $310 million, more than double what Mr. Trump’s had, on the strength of fund-raising in the last 10 days of the month.