The Democratic National Committee Land Acknowledgement wishes to acknowledge that we gather to state our values on lands that have been stewarded through many centuries by the ancestors and descendants of Tribal Nations who have been here since immemorial. We honor the communities native to this continent and recognize that our country was built on Indigenous homelands. We pay our respects to the millions of Indigenous people throughout history who have protected our lands, waters, and animals.
While we meet in Chicago, we also recognize and honor the traditional homelands of the Anishinaabe, also known as the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations.
We acknowledge the many other tribes who consider this area their traditional homeland, including the Myaamia, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac and Fox, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Wea, Kickapoo, and Mascouten.
Democrats continue to support tribes as they advocate for the United States to uphold treaty and trust responsibilities. We applaud that in 2024, under the Biden-Harris Administration, the Prairie Band of the Potawatomi Nation became the first federally recognized Tribal Nation in Illinois in 175 years, when the U.S. Department of the Interior placed 130 acres of the Shab-eh-nay reservation in nearby DeKalb County into trust.
- Our nation is at an inflection point.
- What kind of America will we be?
- A land of more freedom, or less freedom?
- More rights or fewer?
- An economy rigged for the rich and powerful, or where everyone has a fair shot at getting ahead?
- Will we lower the temperature in our politics and come together, or treat each other as enemies instead?
- The stakes in this election are enormously high.
President Biden and Vice President Harris took office during a global pandemic, record job loss, and record crime. These past four years, Democrats proved once again that democracy can deliver, and made tremendous progress in turning the country around. President Biden and Vice President Harris turned a setback into a great American comeback for working families.
We've created nearly 16 million jobs, a record number of small businesses are being started, and factories are coming home. We lowered families' health insurance premiums, and we stood up to Big Pharma to lower prescription drug prices. We're helping students catch up on learning loss, and we're forgiving millions of crushing student loans. We passed the first significant gun safety law in decades and made record investments in public safety, putting more police officers on the beat; today, violent crime is at its lowest in 50 years. We're fighting climate change, reducing pollution, and fueling a clean energy boom. We're rebuilding our nation's roads, bridges, highways, ports, airports, water systems, and more. We're seizing record amounts of fentanyl and securing our border in the face of Republican inaction.
We're closing the racial wealth gap and the gender pay gap. We've expanded benefits and services for toxic-exposed veterans; we're strengthening NATO and restoring American leadership in the world.
There is so much more to do. Democrats will fix the tax system so everyone has a fair shot. We will restore the right to choose. We will continue to bring down costs for families. We will continue to reject political violence of all forms and give hate no safe harbor.
Donald Trump has a very different vision – one focused not on opportunity and optimism, but on revenge and retribution; not on the American people, but on himself. He and his extreme MAGA allies are ripping away our bedrock personal freedoms, dictating what healthcare decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love. They're rigging our economy for their rich friends and big corporations, pushing more trickle-down tax cuts for the wealthy and powerful, and a new national sales tax that will cost every working family an average of $2,500 a year. They'll cut the Social Security benefits that folks have paid into for their whole lives; and gut Medicare, Medicaid, health care, and prescription drug coverage. They are eroding our democracy with lies and threats, have refused to denounce political violence, and are making it harder to vote. And given the chance, they'll keep stacking our courts, locking in their extreme agenda for decades. We cannot let that happen.
President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Democrats are running to finish the job. We need to grow our economy from the middle out and bottom up, not the top down. To reward work, not wealth. To lower costs. To tackle the climate crisis, lower energy costs, and secure energy independence. To protect communities and tackle the scourge of gun violence. To secure the border and fix the broken immigration system. To advance the President's Unity Agenda. To strengthen American leadership worldwide.
History has shown that nothing about democracy is guaranteed. Every generation has to protect it, preserve it, choose it. We must stand together to choose what we want America to be.
This election is a choice between two very different economic visions for America: Donald Trump, who sees the world from his country club at Mar-a-Lago; and Joe Biden, who sees it from kitchen tables in Scranton like the one he grew up around. His economic agenda is about Main Street, not Wall Street. It's about ending the days of trickle-down economics and investing in America – in all Americans – and delivering for communities too long left behind.
While Democrats keep fighting to lower costs for working families, Trump is rigging our economy for his Mar-a-Lago friends and billionaire donors, who like him, are only in it for themselves.
As president, Trump doubled down on the trickle-down policies of the past, cutting investment in infrastructure and education, and rewarding big corporations that ship jobs and profits overseas. He vowed to bring new factories to communities across America but left nothing behind but a string of broken promises.
Democrats have a different record. We're delivering on President Biden's pledge to rebuild our economy from the middle out and bottom-up, not the top down. We're investing in America – in our infrastructure, our industry, our people, and our future. While Trump left office with historic budget deficits and the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover since President Biden took office, this country has come back from the brink, the deficit has fallen by over $1 trillion, and we have the best jobs record since John F. Kennedy.
We're powering the strongest economic recovery in the world.
At the start of the Biden-Harris Administration, amid the worst economic crisis in 100 years, experts feared a stagnating recovery and even worried about a new recession. However, Democrats chose to put workers first, and instead of a recession, America saw remarkable strength and resilience. Our economy grew by 3.1 percent last year – the fastest rate of any major global economy.
We've added nearly 16 million jobs – not only recovering all the positions lost during Trump's botched handling of COVID but also adding 6.3 million more than existed before the pandemic – surpassing pre-pandemic projections for the labor market. During this Administration, 30 states from Mississippi to Pennsylvania have seen record-low unemployment; and the run of low unemployment nationwide hasn't been this long in over 50 years. Wages are up across the board, and rising fastest for lower-income workers, Black workers, Latinos, and women. Today's recovery is the fairest on record; in just four years, we've erased 40 percent of the wage inequality gap that took four decades to build. A record 18 million small business applications have been filed since President Biden took office, each one of them an act of hope.
While too many families still feel the pain of inflation at the grocery store, or around the kitchen table when they sit down to pay their bills, we're making progress. Wages are rising faster than prices, and inflation today is down nearly two-thirds from its peak. We have to finish the job. Democrats will keep fighting to prevent the kind of supply chain shocks and corporate greed that have done so much to raise prices. And we'll keep investing in American workers, American jobs, and American families, bringing factories home to win the race for the future. Democrats know the story of the middle class isn't separate from the state of the economy – it's at its heart. And we'll never quit fighting to make sure that everyone is in on the deal.
We can't have the best economy in the world if we don't have the best infrastructure. And for generations, American infrastructure was the envy of the world. But over the years, we stopped investing in it, and we fell to thirteenth in infrastructure rankings. The Trump Administration declared it "Infrastructure Week" every week for four years and never built a thing. But under President Biden, we're finally rebuilding our roads, bridges, ports, airports, water systems, electric grids, broadband, and more, paving the way for a great American "Infrastructure Decade" that will create hundreds of thousands of good-paying union jobs.
