After a tumultuous five-week period unparalleled in American political history, the 2024 presidential campaign, which had been locked for months in a near-statistical standoff, with Democrat incumbent Joe Biden trailing slightly behind GOP former president Donald Trump, is now in a state of rapid flux.
It began with Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate performance, which revealed his severe cognitive challenges, followed by a nearly successful assassination attempt against Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, which set the stage for a highly successful Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, just two days later.
A unified Republican Party and other Americans were inspired by Trump’s courageous reaction after being wounded and rallied around him and his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, as President Joe Biden’s campaign stalled, faced sagging poll numbers, sluggish fundraising, and growing concern by members of both parties about his ability to continue functioning as president for the next four years.
Meanwhile, the national and battleground state polls indicated that Republicans were on their way to a landslide victory in the November election, causing Democrat candidates running in the November election to panic.
On July 21, senior Democrat party leaders forced Biden to give up the nomination in favor of his vice president, Kamala Harris, which led to a rush of Democrat relief and enthusiasm, as indicated by a record $300 million surge in campaign donations which quickly erased most of Trump’s lead in the national polls and the campaign fundraising race.
And so, in rapid order, the campaign for the 2024 presidential election was turned on its head.
Both presidential campaigns are now racing to come up with new strategies to attack each other’s perceived weaknesses to redefine their opponents in the minds of the voters as this historic election contest enters the home stretch.
ADJUSTING TO NEW OPPONENTS AND STRATEGIES
For Democrats, that has meant dropping the Biden campaign’s failed efforts to portray former president Trump and his supporters as a “threat to democracy.” Instead, Democrats are trying to label Trump and Vance, his vice-presidential running mate, as “weird,” for emphasizing the importance of such traditional concepts as promoting stable marriages and parenthood, and instilling our children with patriotic pride in America.
For Republicans, it meant replacing their age-based attacks on Biden’s incompetence to serve another term as president, with attacks on Harris’ lack of qualifications to serve as president. These are based upon her poor performance as vice president, combined with her voting record as the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, and the radical positions she took in support of open borders, Medicare for All, and the Green New Deal during her failed campaign for the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination.
Meanwhile, the long static opinion polls have been oscillating wildly. After Harris was named as Biden’s replacement, the polls rapidly swung back, returning to their pre-debate near-tossup status, with Trump still holding a sharply reduced lead in most of the crucial battleground states.
According to Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, with the replacement of Biden at the top of the ticket with Harris, “The Democratic base is coming home.” The advantage Trump built up in late June and early July, following the debate with Biden, in some of the traditionally Democrat-voting states has been eliminated, and the race “is now contracting back to the original six or seven battleground states.”
Trump and Harris are now in a virtual polling tie, with Trump at 46.8 percent support, slightly behind Harris at 47.0 percent support, according to the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. However, that slight Harris lead may be less significant than it seems because Trump has a history in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections of outperforming the polling predictions by several points.
Trump also still holds a narrow lead over Harris according to the latest polls in six of the seven key battleground states, including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia, with Biden leading only in Michigan. As a result, Trump is still the slight favorite to win the presidency in the Electoral College, even if he loses the popular vote nationwide. That is what happened when he beat Hillary Clinton by narrowly carrying the battleground states in the Rust Belt in the 2016 election.
As Trump campaign pollster John McLaughlin told CNN, “There’s a shift in the race going on right now.” He predicted that eventually Trump “will win on the issues” but told CNN reporters that, “What you want to talk about is different from what we want to talk about, and that’s fine, [because] we’ll let the voters sort it out.”
HOW LONG WILL HARRIS’ HONEYMOON WITH THE VOTERS LAST?
Another Trump campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio had previously predicted in a widely circulated campaign memo that Harris would enjoy an initial “honeymoon phase” in polling over the early days of her abrupt ascension.
“That means we will start to see public polling — particularly national public polls — where Harris is gaining on or even leading President Trump.”
However, Fabrizio remained confident that, “while the public polls may change in the short run and she may consolidate a bit more of the Democrat base, Harris can’t change who she is or what she’s done. Stay tuned…”
Republican New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu also has predicted that in his state, Harris’ poll numbers will hit a “high-water mark around mid-to-late August,” but after that, “if she doesn’t have enough of a buffer they’re going to come back down.”
HARRIS PUTTING MORE BATTLEGROUND STATES INTO PLAY
As former Obama senior political advisor David Axelrod noted on CNN, “There’s a lot of irrational exuberance on the Democratic side of the aisle right now because there was despair for some time about what November was going to look like [if Biden had remained their candidate].
“Now [Democrats] feel like there’s a chance. But it is absolutely Trump’s race to lose right now. He is ahead in most of the battleground states [but] they are close, [and] they can be won by either candidate
. . . in the next 90 days.”
In a separate interview, Axelrod said that Harris “has appeal to some constituencies within the party that were lagging with Biden,” including younger voters and Black and Hispanic voters. “That puts into play some of those Sun Belt states [including Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina] that have seemed out of reach. They’re still a stretch but they’re not nearly the stretch they were.”
Axelrod added that while there is now a good deal more energy and optimism for Democrats, “I think it’s [still] a wide-open race, but Trump has the advantage right now and. . . everybody should be sober about that on the Democratic side.”
DEMOCRATS LABEL TRADITIONAL REPUBLICAN FAMILY VALUES AS “WEIRD”
Under Harris’ leadership, the Democrats are no longer on the defensive over Biden’s cognitive problems. Instead, they have gone onto the offensive, ridiculing Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, as “weird,” based upon a provocative remark he made three years ago in 2021 while he was running for the Senate during an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News.
In commenting on the decline in traditional American family values, Vance complained about the growing influence on contemporary American society of “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”
Democrats have characterized the “childless cat lady” remark as indicative of Vance’s alleged disrespect for the Democrats’ liberal, single, college-educated women voters. In fact, Vance has been an outspoken, pro-life advocate for increased government support for women in their traditional roles as mothers and homemakers, and encouraging the creation of more stable two-parent family households as the foundation of a healthy American society.
Trump has stood up for his running mate in the face of his critics, arguing that Vance was not criticizing women who make other life choices. As one Republican political consultant close to the Trump campaign explained it, Democrats dug deep into their opposition research on Vance to find that “cat lady” quote, in an effort to discredit him as a viable candidate as quickly as possible. But Vance has already proven himself to be an effective spokesman, quite capable of defending his conservative beliefs in front of hostile audiences, and he has already started taking the fight to Harris, with his recent high-profile visit to the U.S.-Mexico border.
TRUMP PICKED VANCE AS HIS POLITICAL HEIR-APPARENT
It is important to remember that Trump chose Vance as his vice president when his opponent was still a weakened Joe Biden. Trump was not looking at that time for help from Vance in winning the battleground states, or to appeal to a particular voter segment, such as Senator Tim Scott, who would have appealed as a vice-presidential candidate to black voters, or Senator Marco Rubio who would have appealed to Hispanic voters.
Trump picked Vance to serve as his running mate and political heir apparently in the belief that he would be a strong and effective advocate on the campaign trail promoting Trump’s “MAGA” brand of populist conservatism and strong family values. Vance is also expected to help lead the attack on Harris, based upon her support for Biden’s failed policies, particularly as “border czar,” as well as her liberal record as a U.S. Senator and failed candidate for the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination.
WHY HARRIS CAN’T ESCAPE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE BORDER CRISIS
The Trump campaign has also launched a $12 million ad campaign in the battleground states which holds Harris responsible as Biden’s border czar for his administration’s open border policies. According to Byron York, the chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner, the border issue is a special problem for Harris for two reasons.
First, when Harris ran for the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination, she was in favor of sanctuary cities. She supported the expansion of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and “deportation relief” to millions of people who entered the United States illegally when they were children. Harris also opposed virtually everything then-President Trump did to secure the border, from building a border wall to the “Remain in Mexico” program to the detention and expulsion of people caught crossing the border illegally.
Second, when Harris as vice president accepted the assignment from Biden to oversee the southern border, both of them clearly understood that it was to oversee the open border policy that they both supported. According to York, when the open border policy then did result in a crisis at the border, “Biden put her in charge of dealing with the ‘root causes’ of the crisis he had caused, he, she, and everyone else understood that it was a way of appearing to deal with the problem without dealing with the problem. She took a few perfunctory actions, [and as a result] more than 10 million illegal crossers came into the U.S.
“The flood of illegal crossers has put enormous burdens on cities across the country struggling to house and support immigrants. Harris [helped Biden to] turn the border problem into a national crisis,” York concludes. “And now she owns it.”
But on the campaign trail, York notes, Harris now has the chutzpah to claim “that she is much, much tougher on border security than Trump. . . [and that] I will proudly put my record against his any day of the week, including, for example, on the issue of immigration.”
To excuse their sorry record on immigration over the past three and a half years, both Biden and Harris have tried to shift the blame for the immigration problem onto former president Trump for torpedoing support by Republicans in Congress earlier this year for a bipartisan border reform bill. But even if that is true, York asks, why did Harris, acting with President Biden’s authority, “encourage and allow three years of record illegal border crossings, 10 million illegal immigrants, and enormous damage to the country before coming up with a doomed bill that would allegedly address the problem?”
York also notes that after the bipartisan border bill failed, Biden, who had been claiming that he needed the legislation to be passed to bring the border under control, reduced the flow of illegal immigrants using his executive authority alone, because it had become a political problem for his re-election campaign. This exposed his and Harris’ hypocrisy on the border issue.
HOW TRUMP WAS TRAPPED WHILE SPEAKING TO BLACK JOURNALISTS
Meanwhile, Trump has continued to try to bring his political message to groups of voters who have traditionally voted for Democrat candidates, such as his unlikely May rallies in the heart of the South Bronx of New York City and on the Jersey Shore. Trump also appeared at the Black Conservative Federation Gala in South Carolina and took part in a panel discussion at a black congregation in Detroit. His latest foray into hostile territory was last week when he accepted an invitation to a panel discussion at the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention in Chicago, at which he was told that Kamala Harris was expected to appear.
The event turned out to be a political trap. The discussion was delayed by more than half an hour due to “technical difficulties.” Trump was also angered to learn that Harris would not be there after all and that his responses to questions would be subjected to fact-checking in real time, implying to the audience that he could not be trusted to tell the truth.
The discussion opened with an openly hostile question by ABC news reporter Rachel Scott, in which she cited Trump’s history of allegedly racist remarks and then asked him why black voters should vote for him. Trump responded by angrily complaining about Scott’s “very rude introduction.” When Scott then asked Trump whether he would ask his fellow Republicans to stop referring to Harris as a “DEI” hire, due to her black and Indian racial heritage, Trump responded by noting that Harris, when she first came to Washington, D.C., promoted herself as the first U.S. Senator of Asian-Indian heritage before she began identifying on her father’s Black heritage.
HARRIS’ SHIFTING RACIAL IDENTITY
“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said. I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black.”
Harris’s mother was a biologist who was born in India, and her father was a professor of economics who was born in Jamaica. Both immigrated to the U.S. where they met and married, and where their daughter, Kamala, was born in 1964. While she attended Howard University, a historically black college, she first drew national attention when she became the first Indian-American to be elected to the Senate in 2016.
During his appearance before the audience of black journalists, Trump also boasted about the benefits to members of the black community from his economic policies when he was president. He also pointed out that the millions of illegal immigrants that the Biden-Harris administration has admitted into the United States are now competing with black workers for entry-level and unskilled jobs.
AGAINST BIDEN, TRUMP GAINED SUPPORT FROM BLACK AND LATINO VOTERS
Since the beginning of this presidential campaign, Trump has been making impressive inroads with working-class black and Latino voters, especially among men, who have in the past historically voted overwhelmingly for Democrat candidates. Trump gained their support by showing them that he is more dedicated to their economic best interests than today’s elitist Democrats have been. Nevertheless, some of Trump’s supporters and even some of his campaign staffers were surprised when he announced his decision to appear before the black journalists in Chicago, even though Harris, his new opponent, was actively courting the black vote by portraying herself as America’s first black woman presidential candidate.
The ABC reporter had clearly been trying to bait Trump into a harsh reaction that could be used against him, and she got exactly what she wanted. Trump had been far more disciplined in recent months in staying on message during campaign events. But he refused to permit the ABC reporter to humiliate him in that way. Instead, Trump responded in character by hitting back hard at the woke ethnic identity claims that Harris and other Democrat liberals, such as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, have shamelessly used to advance their professional and political careers.
According to people close to Trump, even before his appearance at the black journalists’ convention in Chicago, he felt that Harris was being inconsistent and opportunistic concerning how she presented her mixed racial identity. Harris also has a political history of flip-flopping on such issues as her support for open borders and her opposition to fracking for the production of fossil fuels, when she was running for president in 2020, both of which she has now abandoned.
Even though the pro-Democrat mainstream media ridiculed Trump for challenging Harris’ self-serving Black racial identity claims, he did not back off from his criticism.
Some mainstream media analysts argued that by taking the bait and challenging Harris’ Black identity last week, Trump was reverting to the kind of offensive behavior that many believe cost him the 2020 election. But one could also argue that Trump deliberately courted the media attacks because they enabled him to make headlines once again, after a week during which Biden’s decision to step down and endorse Harris as the new Democrat candidate, re-energized the party and dominated the national news coverage.
THE POLITICAL LOGIC BEHIND TRUMP’S “BAD BEHAVIOR”
What many political analysts still don’t understand is that Trump’s “bad behavior,” in which he often seems to go out of his way to violate the accepted rules of political behavior, is a deliberate and essential element of his unique appeal to tens of millions of frustrated voters who no longer trust “normal” politicians who, unlike Trump, do obey those rules, but don’t keep their campaign promises.
In another gesture of defiance against his new opponent, Kamala Harris, and her mainstream media defenders, Trump posted an old press photo of Harris posing with her family in traditional Indian attire on his social media account. Also, at a Trump campaign rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a few hours after his controversial remarks to the black journalists in Chicago, a giant video screen above the stage displayed the headline of an old Business Insider article that declared Harris to be the “first Indian-American U.S. senator.”
Trump’s campaign advisers claim that they had always anticipated the possibility that Biden might be forced to step aside before the election in favor of a younger and more vigorous Democratic candidate, and cited an internal memo that was circulated back in May which laid out the possible scenarios. Trump’s senior advisors also claim that they had already done their opposition research on Harris, as Trump’s most likely replacement opponent, and decided that the best strategy would be to hold her responsible for supporting Biden’s failed policies on inflation, open borders, and crime, and to define her politically as a product of the radical San Francisco liberal Democrat machine.
TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN STILL SHIFTING ITS STRATEGY FOR A NEW OPPONENT
However, Trump’s presidential campaign spent the past two years and tens of millions of dollars designing an effective political playbook designed specifically to defeat an aging and unpopular incumbent president, Joe Biden. Now, the race has been turned upside down by Biden’s sudden replacement. As a result, Trump’s decisive post-debate advantages in polling and fundraising have been erased, leaving his campaign struggling to change direction and execute a new strategy against his new opponent.
Trump is still trying out various lines of attack to find the most effective one to use against Harris. He said at a campaign rally in Atlanta last week that, “We have to work hard to define her. . .I just want to say who she is. She’s a horror show. She’ll destroy our country.”
Trump then went on to describe Harris as a “radical” and a “lunatic” with a “low IQ,” and her difficulties in speaking coherently without a prepared script.
HARRIS IS RUNNING AWAY FROM HER OWN POLITICAL RECORD
Meanwhile, Harris is trying to play up her early political career in California as an allegedly tough-on-crime San Francisco district attorney and state attorney general, while downplaying her sympathy for the “defund the police” movement following the 2020 death of George Floyd, and her appeal at that time for public support of a fund that bailed out violent protesters who had been taken into police custody.
During her failed 2020 bid for the presidential nomination, Harris, at first, supported Senator Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal, which would have shifted the American healthcare system from private and employer-based insurance to an entirely government-run program, before later abandoning the proposal.
The Trump campaign has collected archived video news clips of Harris talking up her liberal views throughout her political career to use in attack ads portraying her as “dangerously liberal” and questioning Harris’ preparedness for the presidency.
VANCE’S ACTIVE ROLE IN THE NATIONAL TRUMP CAMPAIGN
The Trump campaign told CNN that it is planning to use Vance as Trump’s messenger to working-class voters, by having him tour the battleground states across the country to make tightly focused attacks on Harris’ record, as well as by attending fundraisers, sitting for media interviews with hostile reporters, which has been one of Vance’s political specialties, and by reaching out to younger voters who are closer to him in age on social media and in podcasts.
Reportedly, one of the main reasons that Trump chose Vance as his running mate is because of their broad range of shared political views and Vance’s proven ability to convey those views effectively to voters from a broad range of backgrounds.
Vance demonstrated that ability in Arizona last week when a CNN reporter asked him about Trump’s criticism of the way that Harris has portrayed her mixed racial identity.
VANCE CALLS HARRIS A POLITICAL “CHAMELEON”
“Look, all he said is that Kamala Harris is a chameleon,” Vance responded in defense of Trump’s comment. “She is everything to everybody, and she pretends to be somebody different depending on which audience she is in front of,” he said, citing as an example Harris’ use of a “fake Southern accent” when speaking at a campaign event in Atlanta.
“I think it’s totally reasonable for the president to call that out, and that’s all he did,” Vance declared.
Vance also remains unfazed by the Democrats and their media allies who have tried to label both him and Trump “weird” for promoting their conservative political and moral beliefs.
“We can handle the made-up attacks by Democrats and by the media,” Vance said, “because we’re used to it by now.”
DEMOCRATS ADOPT A WEIRD-BASED POLITICAL ATTACK PLAN
That label was first used against Trump and Vance last month by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz during an interview with MSNBC in which he called the top of the GOP ticket “just weird.”
The Harris campaign then picked up the word for use in a press release commenting on Trump’s appearance on Fox News, declaring that, “Trump is old and quite weird,” as well as in two comments calling J.D, Vance’s pro-life views “weird,” as well as Vance’s “out-of-touch, weird ideas.”
Inevitably, Harris herself used the word at her presidential campaign’s first fundraising event in Massachusetts, in a complaint that Trump’s “wild lies about my record and some of what he and his running mate are saying — it is just plain weird.”
David Karpf, a professor of strategic political communication at George Washington University, told Salon, the liberal magazine, that the Democrat rhetorical strategy of labeling the conservative ideas of Trump and Vance as “weird” is “good, effective and fun” because it focuses on “style” instead of their actual content, and “allows the Democrats to talk about this in ways that are actually fun and shareable. . . [by] pointing and laughing at these people [Republicans] who want to do awful things.”
But Trump himself turned the tables on the Democrats by writing in an ironic response to their criticism, “You know what’s really weird? Soft on crime politicians like Kamala allowing illegal aliens out of prison so they can violently assault Americans.”
HOW LONG WILL THE HARRIS’ HONEYMOON WITH THE MEDIA LAST?
So far Harris has benefitted greatly from the media’s willingness to overlook the obvious faults and inconsistencies in her political record, the undemocratic way in which her candidacy was imposed upon the Democrats by the party’s elites, and her refusal to agree to an unscripted interview or press conference since Biden stepped aside. But given the mainstream media’s embarrassment over the way it covered up for Biden’s cognitive failures, Harris’ current honeymoon with reporters seems unlikely to last all the way to Election Day.
Harris has said that she is eager to participate in the second September 10 nationally televised debate hosted by ABC News that Biden had set up with Trump back in May at the same time that the president dictated the ground rules for his disastrous June 27 first debate appearance. But after Trump decisively won that debate, ultimately forcing Biden to drop out of the race, the former president now argues that he is no longer bound by that agreement. He is now demanding instead a new date and set of rules for his second debate against Harris, to be hosted by the more Trump-friendly Fox News network, in front of a live studio audience, and to take place on September 4, or, Trump threatened, “I won’t see her at all.”
But Harris, responding on social media, has refused to meet Trump’s terms, and is instead demanding that Trump live up to the original arrangements that strongly favored Biden, even though the president is no longer running as Trump’s opponent.
“I’ll be there on September 10, like he agreed to. I hope to see him there,” Harris said, setting up a first direct test of political wills between her and Trump that will define the terms of the final segment of their unprecedented presidential election contest.
