Kamala Harris DNC speech ratings surge past Trump: Live updates

The primary online fundraising platform for Democratic candidates and causes reported raising more than $100 million during the DNC.

Donors gave $7.2 million to candidates during Harris’s acceptance speech, the platform ActBlueannounced on Friday.

“It is more than clear that Democrats are fired up and ready to win this thing,” ActBlue president and CEO Regina Wallace-Jones said in a statement. “I’ve never seen anything like it — the momentum to elect Vice President Kamala Harris, Governor Tim Walz, and Democrats up and down the ballot is remarkable.”

Republicans’ performative patriotism remained part-and-parcel of the GOP throughout the rise of Donald Trump and his presidency, leading Trump to claim “America First” as an alternative moniker for his “Make America Great Again” movement.

His supporters continued to claim the American flag as their own symbol, even using it to beat police officers as they sought to illegally keep Trump in office on January 6 2021.

But after this year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, it’s clear that Democrats are dead set on making sure those tricks won’t work anymore.

Donald Trump’s campaign has dismissed the rush of support around Kamala Harris in the wake of her Democratic convention speech as a “sugar high” and a “temporary high.”

“They didn’t hit it out of the park. It was fine,” a Trump adviser told NBC News. “We had a good week. Pleased with where things are and are headed.”

“Still expecting a bump” for Democrats, the person continued.

More than 14 million watched her remarks on Thursday night, and the four-day conference helped raise $100 million for Democratic candidates, according to fundraising platform ActBlue. Donors gave $7.2 million during Harris’s acceptance speech.

Dark horse presidential contender and well-known vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Friday that he is suspending his independent bid for the White House and throwing his support to Donald Trump.

“The mainstream of American politics and journalism derided my decision [to run],” Kennedy, 70, insisted during a press conference Friday afternoon, where he railed against chronic disease, “corruption” in health agencies, and the Democratic Party.

“In an honest system, I believe that I would have won the election,” the independent candidate claimed, slamming the media, without evidence, as being “tainted by government propaganda.”

Justin Rohrlich has more:

I had the rare opportunity to watch live as Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for President of the United States As a fellow woman of color, this is meaningful to me — but it’s even more noteworthy because it’s on the fourth anniversary of my dad’s death. My father Armando, a Cuban exile and small-business owner, was a staunch Republican, but I’d like to think he’d be proud of me nevertheless.

In her convention speech, Kamala Harris said she is working to end Israel’s war in Gaza, “such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”

Her remarks echoed words from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the first night of the convention.

But Abbas Alawieh, one of the leaders of the Uncommitted movement, told The Independent he wasn’t fully satisfied with what Harris said.

Eric Garcia reports on what’s next for the pro-Palestinian anti-war movement that gathered thousands of votes and sent three dozen delegates to the DNC.

Voters in 10 states will have a chance to directly weigh in on the future of abortion care this November.

Here’s where, and what’s at stake:

Stars flooded to Chicago for the DNC for the four-day long convention, with performances from the likes of Stevie Wonder, John Legend, Patti LaBelle, Pink, Jason Isbell and The Chicks.

But on Friday, there was a different kind of buzz.

Preliminary ratings for the Democratic National Convention show Kamala Harris’s keynote speech had 22 percent more viewers than Donald Trump’s address at the Republican conference last month.

Some 15 million people tuned into Harris’s 45-minute speech, according to the combined ratings of seven major networks shared by Michael Mulvihill, president of insights and analytics for the Fox Corporation. MSNBC alone averaged 6.8 million viewers during the vice president’s speech.

Katie Hawkinson has more: