It may surprise you to learn – it astonished me – that it has only been a month since Joe Biden announced he was withdrawing as the Democratic candidate for president and opened the door for Kamala Harris to run instead.
In these short four weeks, the race has changed beyond recognition. Polls show a drastically different electoral map than Biden faced. Suddenly, it’s the Democrat campaign that has all the energy, excitement and swagger.
Following Biden’s poor performance in the debate against Trump in June, this week’s Democratic convention in Chicago was the cause of, if anything, dread. At best it seemed likely to be a fairly morose grin-and-bear-it affair. Now, it’s likely to end with a riotous coronation.
Harris had her share of sceptics at the start. They pointed to her performance in the 2020 campaign, where she began as a top-tier contender but crashed out before the primaries even began, hamstrung by bad messaging, lacklustre fundraising and even accusations of mistreatment of her staff.
These sceptics said she’d been an uninspiring vice-president with few policy achievements to point to; that she was a centrist who couldn’t inspire the left of the party, while also being somehow still too radical and Californian for blue-collar voters in the Midwest. And in any case, America, they said, simply wasn’t ready to vote for a black woman as president. Those critics are now few and far between, because this time the Harris campaign rollout has been flawless.
The polling jumped almost immediately after the announcement. Biden trailed Trump by about three points nationally; Harris now leads by three, a six-point swing in a month. The news is even better in the swing states: polls have Harris ahead by two points in Wisconsin, which had been on a knife-edge, and by one point in Pennsylvania, possibly the most important state in this year’s race.
Harris and running mate Tim Walz arrive at the convention off the back of a multi-day campaign blitz there, hitting the Pittsburgh suburbs and the Appalachian west, where they believe they can peel away traditional conservative voters tired of Trump and turned off by Vance.
In Arizona, possibly the second-most crucial state, Harris has gained almost 12 points in a month, now leading Trump 48-42. She has gained more than nine in Michigan, where she now leads 49-44. That’s absolutely wild, and it gets wilder still. Her momentum is such that states in which Biden was pretty much uncompetitive are now very much in play.
She has gained 11 points in Georgia, where she now leads Trump 50 to 46. Incredibly, even in Florida, a reliable Trump stronghold, the gap between the two has now shrunk from eight points to just three. The Republicans will now have to go on the defensive in places they had thought safe – which costs money and time for a campaign which can’t spare much of either.
Harris, meanwhile, has not only inherited Biden’s campaign war chest but is also smashing fundraising records. She brought in more than a quarter of a billion dollars in July, including more than $80m in just the first day of her campaign alone, $200m in the first week, and $36m in the 24 hours after announcing Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her vice-presidential pick.
That means that she can capitalise on the opportunities that the changes in polling now present: on August 14 the campaign announced a $90m advertising blitz in battleground states – including Georgia – that the Trump campaign, which raised less than half as much as Harris did in July, is going to struggle to counter.
The fact that she has managed to inspire the left has in turn inspired some bizarre mental gymnastics from some quarters of the commentariat. Possibly the most deranged has been New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who wrote that Harris “needs to adopt positions that will upset progressive activists,” continuing that she “needs to specifically understand that the likelihood a given action or statement will create complaints on the left is a reason to do something, rather than a reason not to.”
Chait is the standard-bearer for the sort of brainwormed centrist hardliners who thought Hillary Clinton was the best candidate in 2016, and luckily the Harris campaign seems to know to ignore them completely. Picking Walz, the popular governor of Minnesota who has passed a spectacular programme of progressive policies despite having a statehouse majority of only one vote, injected huge energy into the activist base which, whatever Chait et al think, will be key to victory in November.
The Chait mistake, really, is thinking there is any such thing as a centrist at all in America right now. He seems to yearn for something perfectly equidistant between the two parties, but the Republicans under Trump have drifted so far to the right that the middle ground is now itself far to the right. The Overton window is now the Overton smoking great hole in the side of the building.
The truth is, Kamala is solidly centrist – she just seems radical compared to the opposition. That she has managed to energise progressives without alienating moderates in the party, columnists notwithstanding, is truly impressive.
The most powerful messaging to come out of the campaign so far actually came from Walz. He’s the one who came up with the attack line, inspired in its simplicity, of calling Trump and his running-mate JD Vance, and in a wider sense the MAGA movement itself, simply “weird.”
Finally, the Democrats seem to have learned that you can’t bring facts to a knife fight; that the game isn’t about who can make the best policy case any more. Suddenly, Trump, who has reigned supreme over this kind of schoolyard politics since 2016, is on the back foot. Also in Pennsylvania on Saturday Trump gave a rambling and incoherent speech, including the frankly embarrassing “I am much better looking than her. I’m a better-looking person than Kamala.”
He is weird. His whole movement is weird, racist, and bizarre: finally calling it out has triggered a release of pressure that feels like it’s been building up for eight years now. It feels… almost like hope.
More, the bait-and-switch of Democratic candidates has entirely wrongfooted the Trump campaign, which had geared itself to make the election all about Biden’s age. It is not known exactly when Biden made the decision – how long he had been, if you’ll allow me, Biden his time.
But I would be willing to bet it was a while before the announcement, so perfectly timed was it to overshadow the Republican convention with speculation and then nuke its media coverage while also robbing him of a chance to use the vice-presidential pick to help pivot to a new opponent.
Not that it seems to have mattered all that much anyway. Trump is suddenly powerless in the face of the newly energised Democrat campaign, so far unable to find any attack lines against Kamala that land. Harris and Walz have out-Trumped Trump simply by saying what everyone was already thinking – who are these weirdos?
The most likely tactic Republicans will eventually land on is to try to paint them as radical leftists, but that’s going to be difficult to pull off. Every time Fox News splashes, for example, on Walz’s policy achievements in Minnesota, such as enshrining abortion rights in law or free school meals, it plays right into the Democrats’ hands.
Apart from anything else, these are immensely popular policies, so Republicans are left having to frame themselves as the ones against giving food to children – which is not exactly a winning look.
And Trump himself, now robbed of Biden to compare himself against, now finds himself suddenly the old, incoherent candidate in the race – something he geared his whole campaign to humiliate. On top of that, Project 2025 – the gameplan drafted by right wing thinktank the Heritage Foundation for a second Trump term, which includes policy proposals like removing LGBT+ protections and banning porn, among a raft of other culture-war issues – has unexpectedly cut through in the public discourse, and polling shows it is wildly unpopular.
There are, it is worth saying, also plenty of reasons to be cautious. The Democrats are still behind where Biden was at this point in 2020, and election day is still 80 days away; anything can happen in that time. Polls show Harris lagging Trump on two key issues – the economy, and immigration – the latter by as much as 10 points.
Trump has the backing of deep-pocketed super-PACs, which had raised around $256m by June, and the presidential debates – the first set for September 10 – could go any direction. As a former prosecutor against a convicted felon Harris is surely the favourite, but the Trump campaign is confident she will prove weaker off-script than on, based on her chaotic 2020 primary performances.
Considerable Gaza protests are also shaping up as the convention gets underway, bringing unwanted attention to a divisive issue for Democrats, one which highlights a potential faultline in the progressive/centre coalition Harris has managed to unite so far. Holding it together until November is crucial – but it won’t be easy, and accusations of antisemitism have become a staple in Trump’s stump speeches.
Though the upside of not having fought a contested primary campaign is that Harris didn’t spend spring in the mud with other contenders, it means she still has to define herself in the eyes of the electorate. But she’s already off to a great start.
Nicky Woolf is a journalist and podcaster covering the intersection of politics and internet subculture. His latest investigative series, Fur & Loathing, is out now
