Can Kamala Harris save America?

The vice-president is the Democrats’ last best hope of beating Donald Trump.

Photo by Jeffrey Phelps / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock

While it is not factually true that July 2024 was the longest month in US history, it certainly feels like it was. On 27 June, President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump squared off for a debate that was so catastrophic for Biden that it raised serious questions about his age and cognitive abilities, immediately incited broad panic among Democratic voters and spurred calls for Biden to step down from his re-election campaign.

By the first week of July, Democratic politicians were calling on the president to drop out of the race. On 13 July, a 20-year-old man with incoherent politics and an AR-15-style weapon climbed on to a roof in Pennsylvania and took several shots at Trump during a campaign rally, grazing his target’s ear with a bullet before being shot and killed by Secret Service. On 15 July, as the Republican National Convention kicked off in Wisconsin, Trump announced Ohio senator and Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance as his running mate. On 17 July, Biden announced he had tested positive for Covid. On 18 July, Trump formally accepted the Republican nomination, and, bandage over his ear, gave a bizarre and meandering 93-minute speech – the longest in convention history – that raised questions about his age and cognitive function. And on 21 July, Biden announced he would exit the race and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris to take his place. By 22 July, Harris had enough delegates behind her to win the nomination (voting takes place in early August) and had raised $81m.

All of this, and we are entering the last 100 days before the election.

The Trump team is now scrambling to square off against an unanticipated, younger and more dynamic opponent, and a former prosecutor at that.

At time of writing, Harris is not guaranteed to be the Democratic nominee, and a handful of donors are pushing for an open nomination process that would pit interested candidates against one another. But it’s difficult to see who would run against her. The most obvious challengers have already endorsed her. And having her name on the Biden/Harris campaign fundraising documents makes it legally and administratively easier for the money raised before Biden’s exit to stay with Harris. As detractors pushed Biden to drop out, a top concern for others in the party was “Dems in disarray”: the idea that the candidate leaving would create a political maelstrom as the left and centre (not to mention the donor class and party powers that be) duked it out over competing visions for the party, wasting time and money, and coming across to the public as a bunch of squabbling headless chickens.

But as it turns out, influential Democrats didn’t just – to quote Harris – fall from a coconut tree. The party’s turmoil was mostly confined to those few July weeks after Biden’s debate disaster, as Democrats across the left spectrum called for him to make his exit while a shrinking band of loyalists – including, curiously, left-wing firebrands such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – insisted they were “ridin’ with Biden”. As soon as he dropped out, though, Democrats largely got on the Harris train.

Perhaps more importantly, they got excited. A race between two elderly men felt more like a slow death march, even after Trump picked the millennial reactionary JD Vance as his running mate. Voting for Biden was framed as a necessary deed, like eating your vegetables – you might not be thrilled by the prospect, but it’s better than getting scurvy. The days following Biden’s endorsement of Harris were, by contrast, a flurry of enthusiastic endorsements, generous donations (including many from first-time donors), admiring memes and who-will-be-her-VP buzz. After Harris was injected into the mix, the 2024 race felt vibrant for the first time.

This is not good news for the Trump/Vance campaign. The Republican Party spent much of its convention mocking Biden’s age and assailing his record, only to learn three days later that they had been running against the wrong candidate. The former president is notoriously triggered by powerful and ambitious women, and particularly by women who challenge or threaten him. He seems unable to refrain from making sexist remarks when confronted with one. This worked in his favour in 2016, when his brand of loutish vulgarity was still new and shocking, and when there was a widespread assumption that Hillary Clinton would trounce him. He was awful, but she felt inevitable.

This time around, no one is taking victory for granted. Trump’s various grotesque comments have lost the novelty that made them headline-grabbing shockers; eight years on, they sound more like the rantings of a bitter old man than a provocateur outsider taking on the Deep State. With the overturning of Roe vs Wade and the demise of the constitutional right to abortion, Trumpian sexism is a lot less funny.

Trump has long held near-hypnotic powers over his Maga base, but they do not represent a majority of Americans. So he has campaigned to that majority by pretending to move to the centre, trying not to talk about abortion rights and arguing that Biden is too old and infirm to lead. Now, Trump is the old man in the race, and instead of facing an opponent who can’t even bring himself to say the word “abortion”, he’s likely to be competing against a woman who has been an advocate for reproductive rights for the entirety of her public life. All this in an election year when voters are livid about Republican encroachments on the right to choose – a right taken away by Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices.

Even before Biden dropped out, Trump was making a concerted move to the middle – or, more accurately, he was trying to appear as though he had moved to the middle, at least on some issues. At rallies, he kept up his greatest hits – immigration, crime, the economy – proposing loose policies that ranged from the utterly insane (starting a trade war with China) to the cruelly malevolent, such as rounding up undocumented immigrants and sending them to camps before deporting them. But he appeared increasingly (and perhaps ironically) concerned that Republican extremism was weighing him down.

It was Trump who got the GOP to downplay its staunch opposition to abortion and to claim to support IVF and contraception, even as Republican politicians pushed laws that would ban both technologies and as Republicans in Congress refused to protect either. He claimed to know nothing about Project 2025, the blueprint for a Trump administration produced by right-wing organisations led by activist think tank The Heritage Foundation, even though many of the same people who put together the document are his long-time allies and widely expected to work for a Trump White House.

Now that he no longer has Biden as an opponent, Trump needs a more compelling argument than “the other guy is old and doddering”. The problem is he doesn’t have much else to offer. His attempts at centrism are cynical and transparent. It is true that he doesn’t really care about policy details. But it’s also true that the few policies he wants to implement – such as using the Department of Justice to go after political opponents – are extreme, legally questionable and morally indefensible.

To get those policies enacted, he will need people around him who are not only willing to do the questionable and morally indefensible, but who know how to manipulate the various gears of law and governance to push those policies through. And if Trump learned one thing from his four years in office, it’s that the people who are willing to bend the law and compromise American democracy to suit a wannabe autocrat’s desires are not moderate, respected Republicans, some of whom refused to go along with his attempted election coup. (By contrast, many of the pro-Trump ideologues who did what Trump wanted are now in jail or facing other legal trouble.)

Trump, who was brand new to politics in 2016, is clear in 2024 that he will not be trusting mainstream Republicans to carry out his wishes. Instead, he’ll rely on loyalists: the same far-right think tankers and activists who developed Project 2025.

These are the people Trump will surround himself with should he return to the Oval Office. And once he’s there, he will be a one-term president in the company of extremists. He will have no incentive to stick with his purported moderation.

Meanwhile, those around him will have every reason to push their own agendas, not just on Trump’s favourite issues, but on their own. And why would Trump refuse them? He, in theory, won’t be running for re-election, and he has shown no interest in appointing a successor or strengthening the Republican Party.

He has instead turned the GOP into a cult of personality. Trump has been very clear that he’s moved away from the traditional Republican position on abortion not because of his own preferences, but because he has an election to win.

Once he is in power, what does he care if his team’s policies anger more moderate voters? Those aren’t the people coming to his rallies, storming the Capitol on his behalf or swearing their allegiance to him. Donald Trump is loyal only to Donald Trump. And he likes adoring, rabid fans. When he no longer needs the electorate, he’ll stop catering to what he thinks they want.

And yet, as obviously insincere as Trump’s self-styled moderation is, since Biden dropped out Trump has remained ahead in the polls. Democrats are counting on Kamala Harris to change that, and so far have made a concerted, party-wide effort to avoid undermining her, although she is not everyone’s number one pick. Yet she polls better than Biden, and many voters seem desperate for youth and vigour. Biden’s approval rating was stagnant, and Trump is not exactly a fresh prospect. By contrast, there is room for Harris’s numbers to grow.

American presidents typically give great thought to their first 100 days. This is the window, the theory goes, in which a new president has the greatest momentum behind them, and when voters and reporters alike are watching to see what they prioritise and how they govern.

The 100 days preceding this unprecedented election are just as significant. In this period the new candidate must reintroduce herself to the public, officially win her party’s nomination, and best an opponent who has been unofficially running for the White House since his electoral defeat four years ago. And Trump must pivot fully, faced as he is by a challenger who is radically different from the ageing man he was confident he’d beat.

One hundred days is a small window. With Democrats scrambling to make up for lost time and Donald Trump surprised by a new opponent, the rest of this election cycle may very well be as feverish as July was. After a bruising few weeks, the Democrats seem intent on proving they can handle it. Will they, or the Republicans, melt down?