With Kamala Harris now set to face Donald Trump in the November 5 presidential election in the U.S., her fellow Democrats are enjoying a revival of optimism that had been lacking for much of this year, as Joe Biden faced a difficult reelection campaign which he ultimately abandoned.
Since the president’s disappointing performance in his debate against Trump at the end of June and his shocking decision to withdraw from the race weeks later, Harris has quickly risen to become the party’s presidential candidate. Polls have shown her either tying with or sometimes surpassing Trump in national voter support and in several key battleground states that will decide the election.
Harris has pushed back her campaign by holding energetic rallies across the country, most recently with Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, whom Harris this week chose as her vice-presidential running mate. Democratic strategists and activists say Harris has given the party a much-needed reset after months of concerns that Biden’s difficult candidacy was setting the party up for a historic loss, The Guardian writes, as reported by Gazeta Express.
“Among the base, enthusiasm is off the charts, perhaps the most excited people I’ve seen since the Obama campaign,” said Ben Tribbett, a Democratic strategist in Virginia. “And I think a lot of this has to do with a sense of relief. I think people really felt like we were in a situation that was irreparable and unstable.”
Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election, but in the years since, the former president has solidified his control over the Republican Party, while his Democratic successor struggled to maintain voter support as the American economy faced its worst inflation period since 1980, and voters became skeptical about the 81-year-old’s ability to carry out the job.
Trump dominated the early Republican primaries, while Biden launched a reelection campaign arguing that Trump was unfit to serve and posed a threat to democracy and reproductive freedom.
But despite Trump’s conviction in May on business fraud charges and three pending criminal cases against him, polls showed Biden never had a clear advantage over Trump, especially in the six states – Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia – that are expected to decide the election.
Worse for Democrats was the possibility that Biden’s presence on the ballots nationwide would hurt the party’s chances of regaining a majority in the House of Representatives and maintaining control of the Senate, especially as he struggled to articulate his points and counter Trump’s attacks in their debate.
This anxiety, at least for now, has been alleviated by Biden’s decision to withdraw and support Harris, a former California senator who had an unsuccessful bid for the party’s nomination in 2020, and who would be the first African-American woman, as well as the first person of South Asian descent, to be president if elected.
“It’s sort of like a big sigh of relief,” said Iva King, who co-leads a progressive group in Georgia. “Many of us really appreciated President Biden. I think he’s done a great job. But, like many people across the country, after seeing the debate, it was like, oh, this didn’t look good.”
Public opinion polls taken since Harris launched her campaign have shown the vice president a level of support that Biden’s campaign never had.
A series of recent national polls show her with an edge over Trump nationally, although in swing states, the polls have been less definitive about which candidate is ahead. However, two leading forecasters, Cook Political Report and the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, reported new ratings this week that shifted states where they previously believed Trump had an advantage.
While noting that Trump has stronger poll numbers than he had at this point four years ago, Cook Political Report’s editor Amy Walter said: “For the first time in a long time, Democrats are united and energized, while Republicans remain on their heels. Mistakes by both Trump and his vice-presidential candidate JD Vance have shifted media focus from Biden’s age to Trump’s liabilities. In other words, the presidential race has gone from being Trump’s to lose to a much more competitive contest.”
The former U.S. president has begun to characterize Harris as excessively liberal and has seized on the stances she took during her 2020 campaign and her role, under Biden, in attempting to curb the flow of migrants crossing into the U.S. from Mexico. Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, questioned Walz’s military service following his selection this week.
Dan Moore, a member of the Menomonee Falls Grassroots area in Wisconsin, who is affiliated with Indivisible, credited Harris with energizing Democratic supporters and shifting the age debate from Biden to Trump, who is 78.
“I think this has the potential to pull some in and it’s something I’m hearing from people,” Moore said. “They’re saying, ‘She’s too liberal for me.’”
Some of Trump and Vance’s arguments have failed. Trump walked back his attack on Harris’s African-American identity, while Vance is on the defensive after comments resurfaced where he dismissed Democrats as “a bunch of cat ladies without kids.” On Wednesday, prominent Republican strategist Karl Rove issued a public warning in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, which are closely read by conservatives.
“The Trump-Vance duo needs to become much more disciplined and quickly settle into an effective attack line against Harris-Walz that resonates with swing voters and then stick to it. If they fail to do both, a race that Mr. Trump was on the verge of winning three weeks ago could be lost,” wrote Rove.
Much can change in the less than three months remaining before Election Day, and Republicans have additional avenues of attack, including ongoing dissatisfaction with inflation, Tribbett said.
But Harris will have more opportunities to go public, including her debate on September 10 against Trump. Most importantly will be her speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later this month, where she will have the chance to further energize a Democratic base already ignited by her candidacy.
“I think if she does it right, I think she’ll come out of the convention with a bounce,” he said. “If she’s fully engaged with the Democratic base, that bounce will put her ahead everywhere.”
