Chicago — The first thing I encountered at the protest outside the DNC was a giant caricature of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden with blood dripping down their fangs. Apparently, “Killer Kamala” and “Genocide Joe” are responsible for Palestinian deaths in Gaza because of the Biden administration’s continued support for Israel in its military campaign against Hamas. Tens of thousands of Michigan primary voters made clear they too believe this when they cast “uncommitted” protest votes against Biden. 

Next to Harris and Biden was a similar caricature of Bongbong Marcos, the president of the Philippines, because why not? This protest wasn’t limited to Israel or Harris or Biden, this was about oppression everywhere, including in Chicago, the “police torture capital of the world,” according to one protester. 

I’ll give them this: The protesters were crazy, loud, generally unproductive members of society, but they at least didn’t try to pretend otherwise.

Inside the DNC, delegates might not have shouted terrorist-approved chants or set the American flag on fire, but it too was a jumbled mess of a wannabe communist revolution, featuring several of the most unpleasant people Michigan has to offer. There was Attorney General Dana Nessel, who seems to have convinced herself that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wants to steal her wedding ring; Sen. Gary Peters, who few people recognized; and a new name I very much wish a national audience did not have to know: state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who needs to lay off the Adderall. 

Michigan’s Democrats did their best to ignore the protesters outside, even though the movement to dump Biden, and now Harris, has gained the most traction in the critical swing state, where the race is bound to be close. Just a couple of weeks ago, at one of Harris’s first campaign rallies, anti-Israel activists interrupted her in Detroit, yelling that they “won’t vote for genocide.” This is a problem for her. Biden won Michigan in 2020 by about 150,000 votes. Earlier this year, more than 100,000 Democratic primary voters cast “uncommitted” protest votes against him. If Harris can’t get this group back, Michigan is Trump’s to win.

But despite Democrats’ efforts to keep a distance between themselves and the protesters, the groups share two things in common: They have a total lack of new ideas to address the issues that Michiganders care about most and an ideology repulsive to anyone without blue hair and an N-95 mask. 

The protesters, at least, were willing to offer some sort of vision for the country. It just happened to include insane policies, such as defunding the military, abolishing private healthcare, and granting immediate citizenship to any illegal immigrant who wants it. 

Inside the convention, the best Democrats could offer voters was a lame appeal to joy and a joke from Barack Obama about Trump’s genitals. 

McMorrow, for example, used her speaking time not to lay out the Democratic Party’s agenda for Michigan voters to weigh and consider, but to rail against a conservative agenda called Project 2025 that Trump explicitly has denounced. “I have no idea who is behind it,” he said last month. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

But when have the facts ever stopped Democrats? On Monday, holding a massive book titled, “Project 2025,” McMorrow said, “Now, over the next four nights, you are going to hear a lot about what’s in this 900-page document. Why? Because this is the Republican blueprint for a second Trump term.”

Indeed, Democrats spent more time talking about Trump than anything else. The first night of the convention, they mentioned him 147 times in their speeches. The economy came up just 27 times, the border eight times, and inflation three times.

This is deliberate. It’s not that Democrats don’t have policies in mind if Harris is elected in November, it’s that their policies are so obviously bad that Democrats know Michiganders and other swing-state voters will run for the hills if they get a good look at them. For instance, one of the only economic policies Harris’s campaign has released—a sweeping ban on so-called price gouging that would have made Stalin proud—was received so poorly that even the leftist media took a break from singing Harris’s praises to call her a moron.

The fact is the Democratic Party’s official platform for this election cycle includes policies not far off from those championed by the leftist protesters outside. They want to raise the corporate tax rate to 28%, as well as raise taxes on oil and gas, which will of course drive gas prices even higher. They want to start taxing real-estate sales, which will worsen the housing supply crisis because no one will want to sell their homes. They want to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, repeal the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal tax dollars from being used to subsidize abortions, and spend billions more on climate change. And these are just the policies they’ve admitted to.

For those Michiganders unsure of how these policies might affect their day-to-day lives, just know there’s a reason this agenda only came up once during the convention, and that was when delegates had to vote to approve it. Other than that, it was all joy, hope, progress, joy, Trump, and did I mention joy?

At least the lunatics outside were honest.

Kaylee McGhee White is the Restoring America editor for the Washington Examiner, a Tony Blankley fellow for the Steamboat Institute, and a senior fellow for the Independent Women’s Forum. She grew up in Detroit and graduated from Hillsdale College. Follow her on X @KayleeDMcGhee.