And a historic night for Kamala Harris as she became the first black woman and person of South Asian descent to accept a major party's presidential nomination.

And she would become the first female president if elected.

During her speech, she called on all to reject political division and get behind her to chart a new way forward not as members of one party or another, but as Americans.

The former prosecutor saying, My entire career, I've only had one client, the people calling out former president Trump by saying the only crime he has ever had himself.

New Jersey taking center stage once again, but a more somber moment.

The brother of fallen U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick Craig stood before the delegates with his mother, Gladys, an emotional tribute to his fallen brother, reminding them of that President Trump led insurrection on January six that took the life of his brother, calling him a hero who died defending our country.

HARRIS Also touching on those lost on January 6th and invoking her prosecutors background when she referred to Trump's explicit intent to free those who assaulted law enforcement officers at the Capitol, saying Consider what he intends to do if we give him power again.

Harris pulled no punches, also taking on the Middle East conflict head on, pledging to always stand up for Israel's right to defend itself.

But acknowledging the plight of the Palestinian people, saying what has happened in Gaza in the past ten months is devastating.

So many innocent lives lost.

Harris said desperate, hungry people fleeing to safety over and over again.

The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.

Polls out prior to the convention show Harris tied or with a slight lead over former President Trump.

But a new after new poll out today focusing on gender and race shows Vice President Harris's lead grows substantially.

Dan Cassino, professor of government and politics and executive director for the poll, joins me now.

Dan, thanks for joining me.

Always a pleasure.

Dan, so we are just coming off the DNC.

Vice president Kamala Harris feeling a lot of momentum.

We know this could be a tight race, but your poll found that the vice president has an edge over Donald Trump in some areas.

Tell me what the poll found specifically.

Right.

So our overall number shows that Vice President Harris is up by seven points over former President Trump.

But the really interesting part of this is what's driving those figures.

So we have two different sets of results.

And the first, we actually took a look at masculinity, and there's been a lot of talk about masculinity race with Donald Trump, who projects this very kind of traditional old model of masculinity.

And with vice presidential nominee on the Democrat side, Tim Walz, who is very much doing this different sort of softer masculinity.

So we want to take a look at exactly how masculine is playing into this race as we did.

And we've run these questions a lot of times the past is we asked men and women to talk about their gender identity, talk about the commercials, masculine and feminine, or how that's going to help them than they are.

And we found is that Trump's support is almost entirely among the men who say that they are completely masculine.

So on the masculine and feminine chart, they're as far on the mask inside you can possibly get.

So those men support Trump 64 to 30 over here.

So a huge margin.

All other men, that's about half of men in the U.S. who say they're completely masculine, that traditional masculinity, the other half of men support Harris by 20 point margin, 55 to 35.

Interestingly, those men those other men are no different than women in their views.

All of them support Harris by between about 18 to 20 points.

And just to clarify, this poll was conducted before this week's Democratic convention.

It was actually conducted before and slightly during the Democratic convention.

Now, that does mean that we expect there's going to be a little bit of an extra bump for Harris during a convention after at the convention.

Partisans of the president or whoever just had the convention are more likely to pick up the phone.

So you tend to get more of them.

We actually didn't see too much of a problem with that.

Republicans and Democrats both seemed very willing to answer our questions and pick up the phone.

And generally, since former President Trump has been on the ballot, we haven't had too much of a trouble getting Republicans to pick up the phone.

There really is no such thing as a shy Trump voters who don't want a bigger problem.

Right.

Right.

Dan, prior to this election and actually less than a month ago, the race was between two white men.

Was any of this even part of the conversation?

Oh, I think it absolutely was.

I think actually one of the big problems faced by President Biden is that he does not project masculinity.

We think of masculinity that's about being assertive.

It's about being strong.

And really, the one of the big knocks against President Biden is that he doesn't look strong.

He looks weak.

So we talked about masculinity.

Contest is not just contest between men and women.

It's contest with men and men.

You might remember in the 2020 election when former President Trump and now President Biden seem to have an argument about a pushup contest where they talk about violence because he's going to take Trump behind the shadow with them.

I mean, we still have these masculine contests regardless with men versus women or men versus men.

But now we have a woman of color.

So will she have the advantage moving forward?

So what's real interesting is we actually we really want to take a look at the difference between race and gender on this.

And we actually did a primary experiment on here in this sort of survey where we asked people about what issues were important to them.

And for about a third of the respondents, we included the race of the candidates in there.

And we include the race, the candidates in there.

This goes from being a relatively close election to being a blowout for Harris, where she's up by 14 points.

When we asked about race before, we asked about who you're going to vote for.

And what that's telling us is that identity really does matter.

You know, we have all sorts of pundits and strategists say, don't talk about gender, don't talk about identity.

But when we talk about and what that tends to do is actually brings black and brown voters back to the Democratic Party.

Right now, about 20 to 30% are supporting Trump.

When we actually talk about identity, talk about racial identity, that goes down to almost nothing.

Okay.

Then 70 days.

70 days.

What can each candidate do?

Right now, what former President Trump has to do is he has to solidify his base and he has to expand it.

So he's doing very well among those MAGA voters.

He has to start winning over moderates.

And the challenge for him is how do you keep the American people on our side while getting moderates out?

Vice President Harris What she really has to do is prove herself.

She still is relatively unknown.

She has to get moderates and independents comfortable with her.

All right.

We will have to see what happens.

Dan, thank you so much for joining me.

My pleasure.