The Democrats in Array
How Joe Biden's Exit and the Harris Candidacy Has Altered the 2024 Race
Rarely have we seen a month and a half in a U.S. presidential election with as many game-changing events as the last 45 days. To assess where we are in the 2024 election so far, we have to evaluate all of the events that have gotten us here. In other words, what this race can be is definitely burdened by what has been.
Here’s a quick recap.
A Game-Changing Debate
At the time, I wrote that the June 27th debate between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump would be a game changer. And it certainly was.
Coming into the earliest-held general election debate in history, Biden was down a slight bit to Trump in the polls. His goal, I argued, was to make it clear to swing voters that this election was a choice between him and Trump rather than a referendum on his own presidency. An overarching mission for Biden that night was to quell voters’ real concerns about his mental fitness and capacity to do the job.
Trump was far from flawless, demonstrating many of the weaknesses that have plagued him for years with voters — from out and out lies and incoherent rambling to personal attacks and name-calling (not to mention, comparing golf handicaps?).
But Biden’s performance was abysmal. He not only failed to dissuade voter concerns over his mental capacity and ability to serve another four years, but he exacerbated those fears. And it led to an all-out freakout in Democratic and anti-Trump circles over whether the Biden candidacy was slow marching toward defeat in November.
Democrats in Disarray
The Biden campaign’s response to the debate fueled even more concerns and demoralized many Democratic voters across the country. The president responded slowly to these concerns. He gave very few interviews. And in those interviews, he gave incomprehensible answers and came across largely as defensive rather than on the offensive against Trump. Calls began to grow stronger within his own party for the president to step aside from the race. It was a story that would never go away. And Democrats who were pushing for Biden to step aside made the case that as long as the narrative was defined by concerns over Biden’s age and fitness for another term, Trump would be on a glide path back to the White House.
An Assassination Attempt That Rallied Republicans
On July 13th, Donald Trump was on a relatively easy path to a second term. He had his Republican Party fully behind him. He was days away from formally accepting the GOP nomination at the Republican National Convention. His opponent was flailing and trying to save his own candidacy from a revolt within his own party. Taking in the love of his adoring fans at a rally in Butler, Pa., he seemed ebullient. That was until a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his ear and nearly killed him.
After Secret Service agents rushed to shield the former president, Trump gave what seemed to be the defining image of the campaign — him with blood on his ear, flanked by his protective detail, holding his fist in the air. Trump survived, and he was going to make it clear to his supporters that that was the case. The image he wanted to present melded with the message he had through the campaign: he was strong and Biden was weak. The event seemed to rally an even more unified GOP base behind the former president. There was no question that the enthusiasm gap favored Trump in the election.
Signs of GOP Hubris
On July 15th, on the first day of the RNC, Trump selected Ohio senator J.D. Vance as his running mate. In an election where one candidate was shot and the other candidate was facing calls to step aside, the Vance V.P. pick might seem less than newsworthy. Instead, it seemed to be a key game-changer in terms of shifting Democrats’ fortunes (more on this later).
At the RNC, there was little talk of abortion and election denialism, two issues that cost the GOP in the 2022 and 2023 elections. This time, the message seemed to be: “We are behind Donald Trump, who is a strong leader. And he will bring the country together after nearly losing his life.”
Then, on the final night, Donald Trump quickly departed from his prepared remarks and rambled for over an hour in his acceptance speech. He was, dare I say, boring. He looked old. And he failed to offer the nation any sense of a vision of a future they could rally behind. I remarked to some of my friends after the speech that Trump was beatable by someone who could prosecute a strong case against him — that a younger and effective Democratic candidate could make Trump look like a past we need to leave behind.
The problem for Democrats was that Joe Biden was not that candidate any more.
Biden’s Exit Revives Democrats’ Chances
In a month where nothing seemed to go right for Democrats, they got an epic reprieve. On the afternoon of July 21st, President Biden announced that he would no longer run for re-election. Just an hour later, Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the person to take on the party’s mantle into the election. There were real doubts about Harris’ strengths as a candidate, given her failed run for the Democratic presidential nomination. But, in the two days after Biden dropped out, Harris showed an aggressiveness to unify the party delegates and voters around her. And her candidacy announcement gave Democrats a feeling they had not had for a while: hope that they actually had a shot in this race.
The Harris campaign set fundraising records for a first day of a campaign. Volunteer sign-ups have dramatically increased. Harris seemed to develop a crisp message that uses her biography to make the case against Trump but in a happy warrior way that Biden lacked. Her message frame was simple: prosecutor versus the felon; future versus the past.
And most importantly, Biden dropping out and Harris becoming the Democratic nominee suddenly flipped the age and mental fitness issue on its head. Now, Donald Trump became the oldest party nominee in American history. While many voters certainly had concerns about Trump’s age and mental fitness before the debate, those worries paled in comparison to their concerns about Biden on that front. The 59-year-old vice president makes the 78-year-old former president look like a relic of the past.
Harris has garnered much more cachet among a younger and more diverse electorate than Biden ever had. I learned of this, at least anecdotally, from a gathering of friends of mine in their late 20s, soon after Kamala became the candidate. I was hearing them express an interest in the election I had rarely seen before. They were talking about the social media buzz Harris was receiving. I heard about the “Kamala is brat” trend. I admittedly had to look that up to understand it, but seeing youth engagement in the election for a candidate has been key to Democratic victories since the rise of Barack Obama in 2008. Harris is receiving overwhelmingly positive messaging on TikTok, the dominant social media app for younger generations today.
This plays into the latest polling in the race, which has seen a crazy turnaround for Democrats and a reversal of fortunes for Trump. Prior to Biden dropping out, Trump had about a three to four-point lead nationally and similar leads in the critical battleground states. There was talk of reliably blue states like Virginia and Minnesota being in play for Trump. Biden had the narrowest of paths to 270 electoral votes. He had to keep the blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and the 2nd Congressional District of Nebraska to get exactly 270. And that was an uphill battle as Trump led Biden in WI, MI, and PA. If any of those fell to Trump, Biden would lose.
A look at the latest polling average from FiveThirtyEight three weeks after the launch of the Harris candidacy shows Harris slightly leading the former president nationally and erasing Trump’s leads in the battleground states. Sunbelt states that Biden won in 2020 that seemed lost — Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada — are suddenly very tight and in real play for Harris. The latest New York Times/Siena College poll that came out this past weekend showed the vice president leading the former president 50 percent to 46 percent in PA, WI, and MI. Not an apples-to-apples comparison, but the same polling outlet had Biden down six percent to Trump nationally soon after the debate. If PA, MI, and WI are, expectedly, bellwethers of the national mood, then that is an absolutely stunning shift.
The polls reflect the big crowds Harris and her running mate MN Gov. Tim Walz got this past week in these battleground states. Crowd size is not everything, but it’s also not nothing to sneeze at if the polls also reflect this enthusiasm. Polls a month ago showed an absolute chasm between Republicans and Democrats in favor of the GOP. That has virtually been erased.
A big reason for the polling change could be this narrowing of the enthusiasm gap, but another explanation could be that voters disaffected with Trump and Biden are becoming less of a thing. Trump’s favorable numbers have barely budged in a while, and he’s even seen better favorable ratings than he’s had in a long time. But Harris’ favorability ratings have risen dramatically and are even or better than Trump’s now. Many of the disaffected voters who were begrudgingly supporting Biden or who were picking third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are seemingly content with the change at the top of the Democratic ticket. Democrats who were hesitant to turn out for Biden are enthused by the Harris candidacy.
Trump has always had a pretty high floor and low ceiling of support in his presidential runs. He basically got 46-47 percent in his last two runs and was not really hitting 50 percent in the polls even after Biden was flailing after the debate. It’s just that Biden’s numbers were so low, and there were third-party candidates eating into small but decisive parts of Biden’s 2020 coalition. Harris has seemingly been able to stitch that coalition back mostly together, at least at the moment. Improvements with younger voters and Black and Hispanic voters have turned GA, NC, and AZ into competitive races and pulled her into an edge over Trump in PA, WI, and MI. Improvements with moderate and independent voters have helped her in all these states. This is likely where a lot of the “double haters” of Biden and Trump were parked.
Vance Flops And Exposes GOP Extremism
J.D. Vance has had an awful vice presidential candidate rollout. His favorability ratings are the worst at this stage of the rollout of any candidate in the modern era. Vance was a base-moving candidate for Trump when Trump was on an easy path to a win. Vance underperformed every Ohio Republican candidate in his 2022 Senate victory. Now that the election has turned into a competitive race, it now may be a liability for Trump that Vance is his running mate, especially if Trump’s age becomes more of an issue for voters.
Vance made negative headlines with his “childless cat ladies” comments, which has motivated women voters in combination with the Kamala candidacy. He has had stilted appearances on the stump. His statements on abortion have resurfaced, elevating a poisonous issue Trump has tried to sidestep at a time when his younger female Democratic opponent has made it a centerpiece of her messaging. There’s a reason that Tim Walz’s attacks on the Trump-Vance ticket as a pair of weirdos have broken through. Vance signifies the extremism elixir that turns off swing voters I talked about last year.
Harris Hits a Happy Message While Trump Flails
A month ago, Trump’s campaign messaging successfully portrayed Trump as a strong leader and Biden as a weak and old relic in a Trump-Biden matchup. But the Harris candidacy has reshaped the narrative. The weakness vs. strength message frame only worked against Joe Biden, the oldest-ever U.S. president. It doesn’t work against a 59-year-old Kamala Harris. And that change in the narrative has left the Trump campaign flat-footed and chaotic in its response.
Harris’ campaign is tapping into themes that have long been powerful in politics—hope, a fresh start, joy. While history is replete with “happy warriors” who have failed—Hubert Humphrey comes to mind—a message focused on the future and draped in optimism has helped deliver the White House to candidates like Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.
With Trump and Vance skirting to the right, the middle has opened up more to the Harris-Walz ticket. Harris has not shied away from tackling the issue of immigration, an issue where she is vulnerable. She has emphasized her record as California Attorney General in going after transnational gangs and crime syndicates. She has gone on offense on the issue by championing the strict border security bill that failed to get to President Biden’s desk because Donald Trump convinced Republicans in Congress to kill it to help keep the issue afloat. She has had more compelling and less defensive messaging on inflation. She hasn’t tried as much to defend the Biden record but has focused on what she will do to lower prices. Her messaging is much more bread and butter economics-focused rather than just focused on anti-Trump bromides.
And Harris is a much more effective messenger on the issue of abortion than Biden. She has wrapped the issue into an effective reframing of freedom that I alluded to in my piece last year where Democrats can be seen as the party defending freedom to choose, freedom from book bans, freedom to vote, and freedom from gun violence. Walz has remarked in his stump speech that the GOP ticket represents a party opposed to a basic rule of “mind your own damn business.”
Trump has flailed in his response to the Harris phenomenon, resorting to old racialized and personality-driven attacks that voters have seen before. This further reminds swing voters of why they don’t like him and only adds credibility to the Harris narrative that Trump is a past we want to leave behind. He has also a ramped-down campaign schedule in the battleground states. Trump has failed to focus on a singular message to attack Harris on key issues but has instead tried to compare his crowd sizes to those of the late Martin Luther King, Jr. Trump is clearly rattled by Harris’ rise and the “heat” she is drawing, as J.V. Last wrote in The Bulwark.
The Race Has Changed
The 2024 race for the White House has dramatically changed. The Democrats have gone from a state of utter despair to a state of hope in what the vice president has done for their chances. A once confident Trump campaign has devolved into an undisciplined and flailing operation. The age issue that crippled Joe Biden’s campaign and buoyed Trump’s chances has now turned on its head and exposed Trump’s own age-related issues.
Will this continue? Time will tell. But it is a stunning reversal of fortune in a campaign jolted by stunning events.
Buckle up. Things are just getting started.