On Monday, Donald J. Trump sent out an urgent campaign memo. ‘Joe Biden just dropped out of the race, and now, his replacement has just been announced,’ it said. ‘It’s me!’
How typically Donald. If Trump were worried about the sudden replacement of Biden with Kamala Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket, he’d never show it. He’s already busy pointing towards polls that suggest ‘Lyin’ Kamala’ is the least popular vice president in history. He’s calling her ‘Dumb as a rock’ and emphasising her abysmal performance as Biden’s ‘border tsar’. Trump’s campaign staff, meanwhile, are insisting that they knew all along Harris would at some point be the Democratic nominee and their attack lines are well-rehearsed.
Behind closed doors, Team Trump will not be quite so sanguine. Biden’s withdrawal has stripped the Republican party of its most powerful argument: that the Democratic Commander-in-Chief is far too decrepit to be given another four years in office. Harris is 19 years younger than Trump and we now see Democrats portraying Trump as the feeble old codger in the race.
The truth is, for three weeks after that now infamous debate which proved just how weak Biden had become, almost nothing went right for the Democrats. The unstoppable force of the Justice Department’s legal campaign against Trump ran into the immovable object of the Supreme Court. Trump was already ahead in the polls in all battleground states when an assassin’s bullet burst through his ear in Butler, Pennsylvania. His defiant reaction to being shot made him look heroic. Then came a triumphant Republican Convention in Milwaukee and serious analysts started talking about a possible Trump landslide. Republicans boasted that their man could win in normally unassailable states such as Minnesota and Virginia.
Suddenly, however, Harris is the presumptive nominee and riding high on an avalanche of positive publicity. The latest polls already suggest she’s nudging ahead.
Susie Wiles, one of the Trump campaign’s most senior advisers, was recently asked what she feared most about the Biden campaign. ‘Institutional Democrats,’ she replied. What she meant is that, though the Democratic leadership is hugely flawed, the party is still a formidable machine.
Everyone knows that Harris is a long way from being the ideal candidate, but she has shaken up the contest and the speed with which congressional Democrats lined up behind her suggests the party is not as divided as the experts thought. The mega-donors, who had been abandoning Biden, are swarming back with their billions.
As next month’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago approaches, we’ll see a very well-funded operation go into overdrive. Democratic spokesmen will keep trotting out the already familiar talking points: Trump is a sexist; he can’t handle a smart female opponent. Trump is a criminal; he can’t handle Harris’s legal brain.
But Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 and anyone who has seen Harris speak knows that her abilities are limited and any criticism isn’t necessarily racist or sexist. Trump still has a slight advantage over Harris among white women, according to polls.
Another Democratic argument is that Harris’s elevation has undermined Trump’s newly appointed vice-presidential nominee: J.D. Vance, the very conservative senator from Ohio. Harris is now widely expected to offset Vance’s ‘rust-belt’ appeal by picking a white governor from a swing state.
Overall, however, Republicans remain confident. They know that Harris’s record of playing identity politics doesn’t go down well with blue-collar voters. The Trump campaign will respond to the Democratic attacks by casting Harris as a darling of the ultra-rich ‘oligarchy’ against Trump, the people’s champion.
As Trump said, sitting in a golf cart the week before he was shot, Harris would be ‘better’ for his chances. ‘She’s so bad,’ he said. ‘She’s so pathetic.’ The Democrats hope that such arrogance will lead to his undoing. That could be their own hubris, however.
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