It’s about an eight-hour drive from McKeesport to Chicago. For Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Austin Davis, the journey from a working-class childhood in an old steel town to the national stage of politics took a little longer: 34 years. But in politics, where one can spend decades rising through the ranks, that is a rapid pace.
And there Davis was on the first night of the Democratic National Convention — a night where the keynote speaker would be outgoing President Joe Biden himself — addressing delegates from around the country gathered in the United Center.
“It was really humbling to think about growing up in McKeesport and being here to speak at the convention,” Davis said. “I hope folks who watched it, and who are familiar with my story, realize that truly anyone can live the American Dream.”
The DNC had asked him a little more than a week before the convention to speak on “infrastructure and the future,” Davis said. And party leaders made few changes to the speech he and his team drafted. The result celebrated Biden’s once-in-a-generation investment in infrastructure, and it did so in generational terms.
As the child of a union bus driver, Davis told delegates, he could recall how “every day my dad would come home and tell me about how our roads and bridges were in disrepair.” And while President Trump promised to make those investments during his term of office, “He really didn’t care … and it never happened.”
But Biden and Harris, he told the crowd, convinced Congress to make multibillion-dollar investments in roads, lead-pipe replacement and other public needs. And he predicted that those investments would be among the administration’s longest-lived accomplishments.
“When I think about the future, I think about my daughter Harper and all of America's children,” he said. “Investing in them means investing in our infrastructure. … It means providing clean air, clean water, safe roads and bridges not just for us, but for generations to come. That's the legacy that President Biden is leaving our children.”
Davis singled out the rapid replacement of Pittsburgh’s collapsed Fern Hollow Bridge and emergency repairs to I-95 in Philadelphia, as an example of the administration’s ability to make repairs quickly while investing in the long term.
“We're repairing roads and bridges across Pennsylvania, including in Pittsburgh, the city of bridges,” he said.
Afterwards, Davis acknowledged that he was “super nervous” prior to the speech, in part because there appeared to be problems with the teleprompter “and I was worried it was going to blank out.”
But luckily for him, Pennsylvania is a crucial swing state, which in the tradition of political conventions means that its delegates get the good seats. “The Pennsylvania delegation was right up front, and they were really encouraging me,” he said.
The broader context of Davis’ speech was notable as well. He spoke alongside a number of other state and local officials a little after 8:30 p.m. on a night in which the spotlight was on a legacy of Black leadership that paved the way for Kamala Harris to be the first Black woman to be a major party’s presidential nominee. Not long before Davis spoke, longtime civil-rights leader Jesse Jackson appeared in a wheelchair on stage, where delegates cheered his decades-long career.
For Davis, who had been an aide to former Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald and then a state House member before running alongside Governor Josh Shaprio in 2022, the experience of seeing such luminaries on stage was “amazing. People like Jesse Jackson and Maxine Waters fought battles and couldn’t even dream that we would be serving in these positions, or be nominees for president. But they really paved the way for a Kamala Harris or an Austin Davis to exist.”
When off the floor, Davis has been keeping busy doing party activities like attending delegate breakfasts, in which party leaders spend their mornings on a circuit of area hotels, visiting with delegates from other states. And he said he’ll be there to support fellow Pennsylvanians Senator Bob Casey and Shapiro, Davis’ senior partner in state government, when they make their addresses to the convention later this week.
But with the pressure of his own speech off, Davis said, “I’m gonna have a good time the next couple days.”
