Those who went on summer vacation on the day of the previous presidential election debate may not believe their eyes when they see the next one.
Tuesday’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is the culmination of 75 days of utter and unprecedented campaign chaos — and the start of a 55-day race to Election Day in equally uncharted waters.
“It’s like running a 5K after riding a Tilt-A-Whirl: the world is spinning and you have to quickly figure out which end is over,” said Democratic strategist Jared Leopold.
In the two and a half months since Trump faced off against President Joe Biden in late June, some fundamental aspects of the race have been turned upside down, with one candidate replaced and the other nearly assassinated.
The parties made new national numbers for a pair of vice presidential candidates: Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Trump’s criminal trials, which are expected to dominate the campaign, are out of the picture thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling the week of July 4.
The top-polling third-party candidate in a generation, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saw his numbers plummet and is out of the race and backing Trump.
The two sides even banned debate rules, with the Harris campaign (unsuccessfully) calling for open mics throughout the debate, while Biden’s team favored turning off the candidates’ mics when it’s not their turn.
Craig Snyder, a Philadelphia-based political activist and author of the new presidential campaign novel “Guile,” said fiction writers couldn’t escape anything as unexpected as the reality of this year’s election.
“The facts of the 2024 campaign so far would probably not be fiction. It just wouldn’t seem plausible that so many unprecedented events could happen one after the other,” said Snyder, a Republican who heads Haley Voters for Harris, a Nikki Haley-backed Harris group. “But for all the improbable plot twists, here’s a day that could very well rank among the most significant political debates in American history — perhaps the second most recent — and yet it’s a race that’s back to where it started. than a year ago — tied!”
And now, in the prime of the campaign, after the conventions and with early voting beginning in some states, the real campaign between the two candidates actually facing each other in the general election finally begins in earnest — raising the stakes Tuesday for the first time. and possibly just a conversation between two people who have never met in person.
“What happens on these nights lives on. Just ask Joe Biden,” Republican strategist Matt Gorman said. “Kamala wants to come out here with a rallying cry. Expect the Harris campaign to add something to the campaign or start a story they hope will continue for weeks.”
Now, Democrats now have a younger candidate with a fundraising advantage and big crowds — a stark reversal from a few months ago — while Trump has remained Trump, even as some allies claimed he was a changed man in the days immediately following his bid. of his life at the mid-July protests in Pennsylvania.
“This debate is basically a hilarious mirror image of the first debate: Trump is still the same, but now that Harris is running against him, he looks significantly older, sounds more incoherent and seems dramatically out of touch,” said. Caitlin Legacki, Democratic strategist.
And Legacki said Harris can now talk about abortion — a top issue for Democrats — more effectively than Biden ever could, given his personal discomfort with the issue.
With the incumbent gone, the former president and current vice president are each ostensible incumbents trying to act as agents of change while maintaining their achievements in the White House.
This dynamic has muddled the political agenda of both candidates, failing to provide information on critical policy areas and issuing contradictory or, at the very least, unclear statements on old positions.
At times, Trump appears to be reeling from his opponent’s switch, as he initially demanded (hoped?) that Biden would return to making occasional Freudian slips by referring to his opponent as Biden.
Meanwhile, Democrats have woken up from their Biden-era angst — but they’ve had their own growing pains under new leadership.
After nearly a month of despair as Biden’s poll numbers plummeted following his disastrous June 27 debate, Biden announced on social media that he was stepping aside and giving Harris his support and the $96 million his campaign had in the bank.
The news, released as Biden recovered from Covid-19 at his beach house, brought ecstasy and “good vibes” to Harris in July and August as he clinched the nomination, picked Walz and assembled the party at its national convention. But there is some evidence that the pace of debate has begun to slow as he faces growing criticism for avoiding reporters and offering scant details about his political agenda.
Harris’ campaign didn’t put the policy page on its website until Monday. And the platform his party adopted at its convention last month was written before Biden withdrew and was left unedited to avoid reopening messy issues like Israel’s war in Gaza.
Despite the sentiment and improved numbers, Harris tells supporters he remains the “underdog” against Trump, with polls generally showing results within the margin of error and all signs pointing to a very close election.
“Any way you look at this race, it’s a dud,” pollster Richard Czuba, founder of the Lansing-based Glengariff Group, said recently of a Detroit News-WDIV-TV poll of Michigan voters that echoes what nearly every other pollster has said. in almost every second survey.
Having survived the last 75 days of chaos, America now faces 55 days of unpredictability with little precedent in modern history.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
