“I launched my campaign for the President of the United States a mere two weeks ago,” Vice President Kamala Harris noted at the start of her campaign rally speech in Philadelphia Tuesday night. “It’s been a bit of a whirlwind.”
Take a minute to think where we were just a few weeks ago. Joe Biden had been trounced by Donald Trump in their debate in late June, seeming unfocused, hesitant, and sometimes unable to complete sentences. A little more than a week later, the New York Times/Siena poll showed Trump with a six-point lead over Biden. A poll by the Wall Street Journal at the same time produced the same result. Biden had fared poorly in polls by both newspapers earlier in the campaign cycle. This time, the Journal poll found that 80 percent of its respondents thought Biden was too old for a second term as president.
What transpired next was three weeks of hell for Democrats. Biden loyalists insisted that he could beat Trump in November. If we heard “it’s only one debate” once, we heard it a hundred times over those three weeks. But what little gas there had been in the Biden campaign tank was nearing empty with each lackluster clean-up interview. Trump, ascendant, was ebullient. He could taste the first Diet Coke he would tell an orderly to get for him as he settled once again into his chair behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880. On the eve of the inauguration Trump would begin signing multiple executive orders his campaign bragged had already been written, overturning every significant act Biden took while in office and adding on more that would reflect. “Dictator on day one” Trump proclaimed his intention.
Despair settled over the Democratic Party and Biden campaign as Trump — miraculously buoyed by surviving an assassination attempt — got ready for his coronation at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Biden made a few desultory campaign speeches here and there. His crowds were strong, and Democrats appeared to be behind him. But it was obvious that something was deeply wrong with the Biden campaign and Democrats in general. There was no energy behind Biden, while every time Trump appeared at a rally, he was triumphant and seemingly on his way to victory in November.
And then, over a single weekend late last month, everything changed.
Joe Biden announced on social media on Sunday, July 21st — days after the end of the Republican National Convention and little more than one week after Donald Trump was injured by a gunman in Butler, Pennsylvania — that he was suspending his campaign. Twenty minutes later, he endorsed Vice President Harris, who had been told of his decision early that morning. Harris immediately assembled her innermost staff at her residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington D.C. and began the process of calling Democratic Party leaders and major donors. She would make more than 100 calls that Sunday. That evening, more than 44,000 Black women organized a Zoom call in support of Harris, kicking off days of record-breaking digital fundraising. By the next morning, the heads of every state Democratic Party had announced their support. That afternoon, Harris appeared before campaign staffers in Delaware and gave a rousing speech promising to continue Biden’s legacy and “finish what Joe started.” Within the short space of 32 hours, Harris had enough commitments from Democratic delegates to cinch in the nomination.
The next day, appearing as the party’s presumptive nominee, she was in Milwaukee, the same city that had just hosted Trump’s convention, at a fired-up rally with a rapturous, adoring crowd that cheered nearly every line of her forceful, energetic speech. The words “energy” and “enthusiasm” began appearing in stories about Democrats in the press. Insta-polls started showing Harris pulling abreast of Trump, and just nine days after Biden dropped out of the race, a poll by Bloomberg/Morning Consult said Harris had “wiped out Donald Trump’s lead across seven battleground states, as the vice president rides a wave of enthusiasm among young, Black and Hispanic voters.”
Democrats had a new candidate and a new race. Donald Trump reacted the way he always does to bad news – with confusion, anger, and appeals to racism, misogyny and xenophobia.
At a rally on Saturday in Atlanta, Trump reverted completely to type, praising Vladimir Putin for the “good deal” he had gotten from the Biden administration in prisoner negotiations. Only two months before, Trump had been telling crowds that he was the only person who could get the prisoners back, which he promised he would bring about even before he was inaugurated. Trump hit all his recent “high points” at the Atlanta rally, taunting the press over “the great” Hannibal Lecter, a fictional bad guy to whom Trump seemed to compare himself before his MAGA crowds, who ate it up.
On Monday, more bad news lay in store for the panicked Trump campaign. A new poll conducted by Gary Segura, who specializes in the Latino vote, found Harris ahead of Trump by 55 percent to 37 percent among Latinos in the battleground states of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. The poll was conducted July 23-26, just after Harris took the reins as the apparent Democratic Party nominee.
Also on Monday, Axios reported a new push by the Harris campaign that would broaden the field of states that are usually contested by Democrats in presidential races. Axios stated that the Harris campaign was prepared to spend “piles of cash” and put into the field “an army of enthused volunteers” that “could put Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina back in play, forcing Trump to spend in states he considered safe.”
By late Monday, Harris was declared the Democratic Party nominee, an official poll of the convention delegates having produced the virtual votes of 99 percent of them.
On Tuesday morning, Harris picked her running mate, Tim Walz, the progressive Governor of Minnesota, and announced that the two would leave after a Tuesday rally in Philadelphia on a five-day, seven-state barnstorming tour of the battleground states.
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What a difference two weeks makes, huh?
All those polls are just polls, of course, and elections are decided by voters, not pollsters. But there is the scent of victory in the air among Democrats for the first time in this presidential campaign. Republican nominee for vice president, JD Vance, plans to follow Harris and her running mate on the first three days of their campaign swing. That sounds like as good a metaphor as any for the state of the Trump campaign with the Democratic Party National Convention just two weeks away. Trump and Vance are following Harris in the polls, and now they will be following the Democrats’ momentum as the campaign heads for Labor Day, the traditional start of the fall campaign.
Think about it: two weeks later and the momentum in the race is running in pants suits, heels and, as former high school coach Tim Walz noted on Tuesday, “a sense of joy.”
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