‘Now We Know We’re Going to Win’: Democratic Delegates Breathe With Relief

CHICAGO — Michelle McFall stood from her seat when Joe Biden took the stage.

Down on the floor to the left of the lectern and a mere five rows from the front, as the president basked in the cheers on Monday on the first of the four nights of the Democratic National Convention, the Pennsylvania delegate had tears well in her eyes.

Aftab Pureval, the mayor of Cincinnati, had sent me a text earlier in the evening predicting “the longest standing ovation in the history of standing ovations.” And if it wasn’t that, it was still plenty long. But the fervor in the hall also felt maybe more poignant than unalloyed joy. There was in the roar of the crowd, a whiff of a sigh of relief.

“A hero’s welcome,” Democratic megadonor John Morgan of Florida told me. And yet, he added, “nobody likes to be cheered after you are pushed out of a window and they cheer you as you are falling.” It was like, he thought, “attending your own funeral.”

In this moment, though, in the section of the delegates of pivotal Pennsylvania, nobody was sitting down, and the cheers were not stopping, and McFall clapped and clapped and wiped her eyes.

I’d met her Monday morning at the Pennsylvania delegates’ breakfast in a ballroom at the Palmer House hotel.

Beyond being a delegate, McFall, 55, from Murrysville, the political director for Malcolm Kenyatta’s campaign for auditor general and the chair of the Democratic Committee of Westmoreland County — a rural county in the western part of the state in which less than 40 percent of the registered voters are Democrats. “I wake up every day where it’s difficult to be a Democrat. We had one of my committee members in 2021 attacked by a Trump supporter,” she said. But now? In the last few weeks? “It’s everything. It’s the way Joe Biden handed the torch,” she said. “We see it in counties like mine — where so many Democratic voters had sort of disengaged for a number of reasons. They’re not disengaged anymore.”

What, then, was she expecting heading into the evening over at the arena and about the sentiment surrounding Biden’s speech?

“Thank you, Joe,” she said.

“For passing the torch?” I said.

“For all of it,” she said.

“Gratitude for what he did as really one of the most transformational presidents,” fellow delegate Dan Muroff told me in the hallway outside the breakfast, “and gratitude for recognizing that it was time to make a change.” He likened Joe Biden to George Washington — for ceding the seat at the center of power in the most powerful country in the world.

“I’m going to be thrilled to see him and,” said Joanna McClinton, the speaker of the Pennsylvania House, saying she’d shed “happy tears” — “because quite frankly,” she continued, “he’s doing what the other side of the aisle should be doing.”

“Which is what?” I asked. “Moving on?”

“Correct,” said McClinton.

“I come with a lot of emotions,” state senator Vincent Hughes of Philadelphia said when I asked him Monday afternoon what he was anticipating to feel Monday night. The 68-year-old has known the president for years. Biden calls him Vince. He calls Biden Joe. “I think he goes on the Rushmore of great presidents. And I think that was cemented by a very courageous decision he made when he chose to step away.”

“We were all coming along with Joe Biden. We all loved him so much,” McFall told me toward the end of the breakfast at the Palmer House. “But for real? We were holding our breath. It didn’t — it was tenuous. It was a tenuous situation.”

“So many Democrats were holding their breath for so long,” I suggested, “that the cheers are …”

“The exhale,” she said.

“There’s joy,” I said, “ and there’s relief?”

“Now we know we’re going to win,” she said. “You can feel it.”

McFall was feeling it on the floor on Monday night. When Biden called Donald Trump “a loser,” she nodded her head yes. When Biden nodded to “the power of women in 2024” — “Watch!” the president said — she pumped in the air her sign saying WE LOVE JOE. When Biden nodded to Kamala Harris as the prospective 47th president, she held high her sign saying THANK YOU JOE. And when he read the lyrics to the song called “American Anthem” — America, America, I gave my best to you — her eyes pooled again and she wiped her face with her hands.

She said she’d been touched by the speech that came just before the presidents’ speech from the president’s daughter. She said she was surprised it had made her think about the fact that it was the sixth anniversary of the death of her mother. And now up on the stage Biden kissed his wife and patted his heart, and down on the floor McFall took some breaths.

“I didn’t think,” she told me, “I was going to shed tears.”