Kamala Harris is now ready to receive Donald Trump With the November 5th US presidential election, his fellow Democrats will rekindle an optimism that has been sorely lacking for much of this year. Joe Biden struggled through a bumpy re-election campaign that he eventually dropped.
Since the president stumbled against Trump in a debate in late June and his upset decision to withdraw from the race weeks later, Harris has quickly emerged as the party’s presumptive presidential nominee. Polls have shown her drawing even with Trump and sometimes overtaking Trump in voter support nationally and in a handful of swing states that decide the election.
The vice president has been pressing his offensive with energetic rallies across the country, most recently with Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota whom Harris tapped as his running mate this week. Democratic strategists and activists say Harris has given the party a much-needed reset after months of nervousness over whether Biden’s struggling candidacy was setting the party up for historic doom.
“The enthusiasm is off the charts, probably the most enthusiastic person I’ve seen since the Obama campaign,” said Ben Tribbett, a Democratic strategist in Virginia. “And I think a lot of that has to do with a sense of relief. I think people really felt that we were in a situation that was irreparable and unsustainable.”
Biden narrowly defeated Trump in the 2020 election, but in the following years the former president strengthened his grip on the Republican Party, while his successor in the Democratic Party struggled to retain voter support as the US economy endured its worst bout of inflation since 2020. in the 1980s, and voters were skeptical about the 81-year-old’s ability to do the job.
Trump swept the Republican primaries at the beginning of the year, while Biden began his re-election campaign by arguing that Trump is unfit to serve and threatens democracy and reproductive freedom.
Despite the former president’s conviction in May for felony corporate fraud and three pending criminal charges against him, polls showed Biden never gained a clear advantage over Trump, particularly in six states — Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia. – is expected to decide the election.
Worse for Democrats was the possibility that Biden’s presence in the polls nationally would hurt the party’s chances of regaining the House majority and retaining control of the Senate, especially after he tried to make his case and fend off Trump’s attacks in their debate. .
That nervousness has been assuaged, at least for now, by Biden’s decision to bow out and support Harris, the former California senator who made an unsuccessful bid for the party’s nomination in 2020 and would be the first black female president, as well as the first South Asian if elected.
“It’s kind of like a big sigh of relief,” said Iva King, who heads the group for the progressive Indivisible movement in Athens, Georgia. “Many of us really appreciated President Biden. I think he has done a great job. But like a lot of people around the country, after seeing the conversation, it was like, oh, this doesn’t look good.
Public opinion polls conducted since the launch of Harris’ campaign have shown that the vice president received support that Biden’s campaign did not have.
Several recent national polls show him nationally ahead of Trump, though in swing states they have been less conclusive about which candidate is ahead. Nevertheless, two major prognosticators, the Cook Political Report and the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, announced new ratings this week that shifted swing states where they previously believed Trump had a narrow lead back into their toss-up category.
Amy Walter, managing editor of the Cook Political Report, noted that Trump is polling higher than he did four years ago, but said, “For the first time in a long time, Democrats are united and energized, while Republicans are on their heels. The inevitable mistakes of both Trump and his running mate, JD Vance have shifted the media spotlight from Biden’s age to Trump’s responsibilities.In other words, the presidential race has shifted from Trump losing to a much more competitive race.
The former US president has come to characterize Harris as too liberal and seized on his 2020 campaign and his role in leading Biden’s efforts to stem the flow of migrants from Mexico to the US. Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, questioned Walz’s military service following his election this week.
Dan Moore, a member of Grassroots Menomonee Falls Area, Wisconsin, which is affiliated with Invisible, credited Harris with energizing the Democratic faithful and shifting the age debate from Biden to the 78-year-old Trump. However, he warned against the intensity of the attack on the vice president. “As a California Liberal”.
“I think it has the ability to gain traction, and that’s just something I hear from people” who say, “he’s too liberal for me,” Moore said.
Some have rejected Trump and Vance’s claims. Trump condemned questioning Harris’ identity as an African-American, while Vance is on the defensive after comments about her dismissing Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies” surfaced. Prominent Republican strategist Karl Rove issued a public warning Wednesday in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, which are closely read by conservatives.
“The Trump-Vance ticket will have to become much more disciplined and soon deploy an effective line of attack against Harris-Walz that will win over swing voters and then hold on to it. If it can’t accomplish both of these goals, a race that Mr. Trump was on the verge of winning for three weeks then, can be lost, Rove wrote.
A lot can change in less than three months before Election Day, and Republicans have more avenues of attack, including continued dissatisfaction with inflation, Tribbett said.
But Harris has more opportunities to reintroduce himself to the public, including a Sept. 10 debate against Trump. More central will be his speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later this month, where he will have a chance to reinvigorate the Democratic base that has already rallied around his candidacy.
“I think if he does it right, he’ll come out of the deal bouncing,” he said. “If he’s fully committed to the Democratic base, this bounce will put him in the lead across the board.”
