Ten days after President Joe Biden dropped his reelection bid and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 presidential race looks different.
What once seemed like a slow march toward almost inevitable defeat for Biden is now much more dynamic and uncertain, with Harris’s honeymoon possibly extending to her running mate announcement, formal roll call nomination, and all the way to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago beginning on Aug. 19.
Former President Donald Trump has, with a few small hiccups, led in national and battleground state polling for months after never taking the lead in 2020. Now, Harris is suddenly gaining on him, and according to at least one swing-state poll, she may have narrowly overtaken him.
Harris has long been seen as a flawed candidate. She has never won a single delegate before Biden withdrew, much less a caucus or primary, and her own campaign is playing up her record as a prosecutor in California much more than anything she did as vice president.
But Harris’s ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket has infused her party and the whole race with new energy. With the 81-year-old president out of the picture, Harris has proven to be a much more effective Democratic messenger. And now Republicans have the old presidential nominee.
“I’m very worried, and one of the things I said coming out of the Republican convention is that I’m concerned that Republicans are overconfident,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told the Washington Examiner. “In Milwaukee, there was an air of celebration. In my view, the time for celebrating is after Election Day. Now’s the time for work.”
The convention came as Republicans rallied around Trump, who had beaten Biden in a debate on June 27 and survived an assassination attempt just days before. Biden was still resisting Democratic entreaties to bow out of the race in the face of internal polling that showed Republicans possibly romping in November.
Republicans were united, and Democrats, as the saying goes, were in disarray.
“It’s almost like a different era,” a Republican strategist said.
The Atlantic published a piece drawn heavily from interviews with top Trump campaign officials that expressed supreme confidence mixed with nervousness about whether Biden would remain the Democratic candidate.
“Donald Trump was well on his way to a 320-electoral-vote win,” Chris LaCivita, a Trump campaign senior adviser, told the outlet’s Tim Alberta. “That’s pre-debate.”
LaCivita, along with fellow Trump campaign senior adviser Susie Wiles, are the Republican operatives who form the two-headed monster atop the generally well-run 2024 Trump campaign.
Trump still leads Harris by 2 points in the national RealClearPolitics polling average, which has him topping 48% of the popular vote — better than he did in either 2016, when he won the presidency, or 2020, when he lost. A Wall Street Journal poll found that 51% of people now approve of the job Trump did in office, which exceeds his best first-term approval rating.
But Harris now brings in packed crowds. She has at least partially made up the gap with Trump in the polls. Bloomberg and Morning Consult found her surging in the top battleground states, including an improbable double-digit lead in Michigan, and moving back into contention in the Sunbelt, where Biden seemed to have no realistic chance.
This is before Harris announces her running mate, who is quite likely to be a governor or senator from the Rust Belt or Sunbelt.
Most jarring has been the shift in the media environment. In the weeks following Biden’s debate disaster, Trump for the first time in his nearly decade-long national political career was getting better (not just more) coverage than his Democratic opponent. When Biden was replaced with Harris, that promptly fell apart.
Harris is now being covered as effusively as former President Barack Obama was circa 2008. Media outlets are retroactively revising stories about her that support likely Republican lines of attack. Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), by contrast, finds himself under unrelenting assault.
And that was before Trump’s contentious panel at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago on Wednesday which will undoubtedly result in negative news coverage.
“We are in the midst of what is going to be a multibillion-dollar PR campaign by the corporate media to paint Kamala Harris as a combination of Mother Teresa, Oprah, and Gandhi,” said Cruz, who is himself up for reelection this year. “And I think we underestimate that at our peril.”
Trump is still better positioned than any GOP presidential nominee in the past 20 years and any non-incumbent Republican in nearly a quarter-century, though as a recent former president, he is an unusual non-incumbent. But he is now facing a society-wide mass mobilization rather than a doddering old man.
Some Republicans always knew this would be no cakewalk.
“We have the more difficult task,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told the Washington Examiner earlier this year. “Democrats have the big blue cities.”
Panic is as big of a problem as overconfidence, GOP operatives told the Washington Examiner.
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“Kamala has shown time and again that she will buckle in the spotlight,” Republican pollster Brent Buchanan wrote in a memo. “Combine this with the fact that polling shifts are only young progressives ‘returning home,’ and it’s not worth overreacting to. Once voters meet the real Kamala, the polls will take care of themselves.”
Yet the Trump campaign and its allies will have to define her, as they once did Biden, on an abbreviated schedule. What was starting to look deceptively easy now appears, to most everyone, significantly harder.
