When it comes right down to it, national political conventions are television shows, nothing more and nothing less. Sure, there are 20,000 people in the hall, and the balloon drop is always a blast, but every one of the delegates and other grandees are already voting for Kamala Harris, so entertaining them only matters to the extent it makes the week of nightly broadcasts in primetime more riveting, highly rated, and successful in accomplishing other goals that are more tangible and measurable: reaching a bunch of people who don’t normally pay attention to politics, raking in campaign contributions, and recruiting new foot soldiers to the cause. And it’s in terms of these quotidian metrics that the Democratic convocation in Chicago last week was truly killer.

To give you a sense of how the political operative class assesses a convention, consider this: When I sat down late Thursday night after Harris’s speech with Patrick Gaspard—Barack Obama’s former political director and ambassador to South Africa and now C.E.O. of the Center for American Progress Action Fund—to tape the most recent episode of the Impolitic podcast, the first words out of his mouth had to do with volunteers. When Joe Biden was the party’s nominee, he noted, the campaign had thousands of them; now it has hundreds of thousands. As Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon laid it out in an “interested parties” memo a few days later: “Headed into the convention, our campaign hosted a weekend of action, and volunteers completed 10,000 shifts and contacted over 1 million voters. The convention itself helped build on that momentum, generating nearly 200,000 new volunteer shifts.”