However, a growing number of congressmen, senators and influential Democratic supporters called on Biden to withdraw from the election – and finally, on July 21, Biden announced that he was withdrawing his bid for re-election, while also naming Kamala Harris as his preferred Democratic candidate in the upcoming election. Harris officially became the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate at the convention in Chicago – she accepted the nomination on August 22. Harris’s vice presidential candidate was Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota.
Harris’s rival will be Donald Trump, the former president (2017-2021), who lost to Biden in the previous election. In the primaries organized by the Republican Party, Trump clearly outpaced all his rivals, including the popular Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and Nikki Haley, the former US ambassador to the UN, who had been competing with Trump for the presidential nomination for the longest time.
Before Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential election, Trump was beginning to gain a clear lead over the incumbent US president. After Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, polls began to show that she and Trump had similar support, with Harris slightly favored (nationally), although a recent poll published by the New York Times showed Trump with a slight lead.
Average US Presidential Poll Results
PAP
Donald Trump enters the election as the first former US president in history to be found guilty in a criminal case – in May, a court found him guilty of falsifying financial records in connection with an attempt to conceal a payment of money to Stormy Daniels, a former pornographic film actress who Trump, through his lawyer, was supposed to pay to keep quiet about their affair. The court was supposed to issue a verdict in the case (Trump faced up to four years in prison) before the election, but the judge ultimately postponed the decision until after the election to avoid accusations of political motivation.
